Reddit, one of the largest social media platforms, always grow subject to ever-increasing over their user content. Every day, it is becoming common for social media platforms to remove whole communities concerned about their shared content. With this, Reddit strikes on a popular Subreddit named /r/MicrosoftSoftwareSwap, a popular community to trade digital licenses for Microsoft products, on the 5th of October 2022. This step of Reddit coincided with banning another Subreddit, /r/MicrosoftServices.

After that, Reddit officially stated that the content of these Subreddits was being used for spam as the reason for removing these Reddit communities. This statement represents the strict interpretation of Reddit’s content policy, as these Reddit communities frequently contained duplicated posts to keep the active and fresh sellers on top of the listings.

The Subreddits undisturbedly operated for almost a decade which conveniently led up the Reddit’s potential stock IPO, and this led some displaced community members to conclude that the ban was actually about distancing the social platform from the Subreddit’s activity and content to avoid attracting negative attention from Microsoft. As you know, Microsoft software’s EULA doesn’t authorize this type of backdoor reselling process, and the discounted license key price offered on Reddit Microsoft Software Swap may also cut a significant share of Microsoft’s retail software business.

Members, sellers, and even the administrators of these banned Reddit communities had no idea about the sudden ban and its impact. One of the former moderators of the/r/MicrosoftSoftwareSwap Reddit community, going by username S5ean, who had been trading the product license keys with the Subreddit from the beginning, accumulated a large base of license key customers. Reddit’s whim negatively impacted his livelihood and left him scrambling to reconnect with the customers as his account was also taken down.

To move forward from this situation, S5ean created a website named microsoftsoftwareswap.com and a Discord community which he titled as Microsoft Software Swap, where he expects to gather his customer and reconnects with them through this community. He planned to keep trading the discounted Microsoft license keys with the website and the community to reach out to the customers.

If you were a member of the /r/MicrosoftSoftwareSwap Reddit community, you could join the new Discord community by following this link. If you want to contact S5ean, his Discord account can be found at this link with the username S5ean#5359. Moreover, you can still find him on Reddit as phrasedi.