English is my second language. Although the law says English classes are mandatory for schools in my country, in practice they’re very bad and people take paid courses, which can be quite expensive and my parents could never afford. So I learned it on my own through games, music, and eventually technical or academic texts. I took pride in it, not because I think knowing any language makes you superior, but for achieving something on my own that my country’s shitty education system wouldn’t allow me to. For actually learning enough to have voice chats with people from around the world when so many people whose parents paid for them to properly learn English never get to that level.

Over the years I started consuming more and more technical content. I spend a lot of my time reading stuff written by programmers and engineers, both formal stuff like books and papers, and informal stuff like Reddit and Stack Overflow. I also read other stuff, watch shows, etc, but given the recent events, I think I ended up picking on some robotic sounding writing quirks, idk, it’s my best guess.

Back when I was using reddit, I was often accused of being a bot. It’s extremely discouraging because it only happened whenever I put any effort into my writing. Not even much, just reading it before posting to see if it was too verbose or unpleasant to read. I wanted to switch to the Fediverse for a while now, and the sheer amount of bot accusations finally made me do it.

So when I came to create my Lemmy account, there were a few requirements for the application, I followed them and everything went right. I remember they were structured as a list, so I answered as a list. Got approved, here I am, no issues.

Then I tried creating a mastodon account in an instance that I felt would be good for me. They had some questions, I answered them. Since the questions weren’t presented as a list, I answered normally: “[Answer 1], [answer 2], [answer 3]”. I answered concisely because in my experience LLMs tend to be verbose. “The answer to question 1 would be [long detailed answer 1], while the answer to question 2 is very interesting, it would be [long detailed answer to question 2]…”. So I avoided that.

It took them over a week to respond, which is understandable because there seems to be a lot of bots these days. Today I finally got the answer, and my account had been frozen because they thought I was a bot. They sent me instructions to appeal and it included reading a text about the current bot situation. I understand the problem, I really do. I love that they’re taking measures to stop it. It’s just hurtful that somehow my writing makes me sound like a bot.

Perhaps this isn’t such a big issue for a native speaker, but for me it feels like failure. Learning another language on my own is one of the few things I take pride in. In my country, English fluency is pretty much a class signal. You hear someone having an English conversation, you assume they grew up privileged. For me it was a reminder of odds I overcame. Of being born poor and still making it to university and being able to participate in a worldly ecossystem. I was able to read technical books in their original language, my country isn’t very relevant in the computing world so most content in my language is webdev and IT admin stuff which doesn’t interest me. Learning English opened paths I wouldn’t be able to follow otherwise.

It’s not a big deal, I do therapy and take meds, I do my best to know who I am and stay mentally well, it’s just that until today I hadn’t realized how much this affects me. I wrote a very passive-aggressive appeal and I regret it. I feel stupid. That’s it.