I’m writing this with a heavy heart because I don’t know where else to turn. I’m posting this from a throwaway account because I’m terrified of further retaliation against my livelihood.

We are a small service business. We started five years ago with nothing but a commitment to doing good work. We never ran ads. We never did aggressive marketing. We built our entire company on word-of-mouth and the trust of the Reddit community dedicated to our industry. Over the last half-decade, we have served over 2,000 customers, many of whom came from this site. We have put food on the table for our families by treating people right.

A few months ago, our world was turned upside down.

Without warning, without a single customer complaint, and without any prior issues, we were banned from the subreddit that has been our home for years. The moderators—volunteers who hold the keys to our entire market presence – accused us of having “fake reviews.”

This accusation crushed me. I know every single one of those reviews. I know the families we helped, the problems we solved, and the late nights we worked to earn those 5 stars. They are 100% genuine. We have offered to provide the moderators with invoices, email chains, customer contacts—literally anything to prove our innocence.

We have messaged them over 10 times, begging for a chance to clear our name. We have been met with total silence. Meanwhile, they have scrubbed dozens of legitimate reviews from our customers, erasing years of our hard-earned reputation in seconds.

I am not asking for special treatment. I am asking for basic fairness. We are willing to spend our hard-earned money to undergo a third-party audit or provide any proof required to show we are real, honest people running a real, honest business.

I’m posting this for two reasons:

1. I need help. If anyone has dealt with a situation where a moderator’s misunderstanding destroyed a business’s reputation, what can we do? Is there any way to appeal this to someone who will actually listen?
2. A warning. If your business relies on a Reddit community, please understand how fragile that is. You can do everything right for 5 years and still lose it all because of one wrong assumption by a person you can’t even speak to.

We just want to get back to work. Thank you for listening.