According to this reddit thread: Reddit - Dive into anything
They are banning plex accounts at seemingly random blaming monetary compensation.
What’s going on?
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I’m curious about this too. I saw a few more Reddit threads pop up recently about the same topic. From reading all of them, it sounds like the money excuse is bogus and it might be Plex (due to pressure from the studios) squeezing down on the number of people you can share with. Starting at 100 and then banning accounts for sharing with more than 50 friends … then 25 … and doing a cap at like 5-10.
But who knows…just wild guesses.
UPDATE: Looks like one of the folks on Reddit complaining about this deserved his ban. He was on some sub-reddit, sharing his server with anyone and when people started busting him out for that, he deleted his entire post history.
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Is it random?
There are only a few people in that thread actually claiming this happened to them and these are two of them
Plex sharing is suppose to be for close friends and family. These people are handing out shares to anyone who wanders by on the internet and then crying that they are unjustly accused for no reason
Plex doesn’t have access to your PayPal, Venmo or bank account so they can never truly know you are receiving monetary compensation unless you’re stupid enough to go on Reddit and say ‘GIVE ME MONEY FOR THIS”
They have to make a judgment call when they see things like this and I don’t blame them. This type of behavior is shady at best or directly against the TOS at worst.
I’m sure Plex makes mistakes like anyone else but that’s why there’s an appeals process
The people on Reddit can believe anything they hear on the internet if they like. But the woman they’re dating who lives in Ohio might also be a man who lives in the Philippines.
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Are you saying that Plex is looking through their customers’ Reddit posting history to find TOS violations?
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Who knows how many thousands of people could have seen that and it only takes 1 to report it
There is a lot of cross traffic between Reddit and this forum, users, mods and employees.
Those screen shots were still up on their account this morning even as they were telling everybody how they were being victimized
Obviously, they weren’t trying to hide it very well
They’re giving out their credentials to 100 random strangers in a public internet forum. This is a terrible method for keeping a secret
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I counted 9 people in that thread saying they had been banned.
Just banning people without providing any proof.
The enshitification continues
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If the limit is 100 users then why people with “too many” shares are being banned. It does not make any sense to me at all. If they do not want you to have so many shares then reduce the limit. “Close friends and family” is way too subjective, to a Hikikomori those “random” people from the Internet and his “friends”.
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I’ve seen reddit posts about this, but didn’t look into post history. It would be good of Plex to be a bit more transparent on this, without being specific they could elaborate than no comment.
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All for snitching on abuses of Plex. I have snitched on a few myself over the years. Won’t let a few people spoil things for the rest of us.
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Good they should ban them all who do this. Receiving money for sharing a Plex server has always been a clear violation of the TOS and on top of that is also illegal. Who cares how they find these people out, if they are guilty ban them!
This is the kind of stuff studios WILL litigate because money is being made for copyrighted material, and that is the area of piracy they care about most. Not necessarily that you download a movie or TV show from the internet for home use, but when you start charging people for movies and shows you don’t own any copyright too? That’s the kind of stuff that can get a company like Plex shutdown and the users who are caught actually fined or in jail.
An issue like this could ruin things for everyone so I’m glad they are banning these users. Adios!
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Reddit and this forum are the ONLY places Plex employees reply to issues. So maybe people shouldn’t post about their mega servers and access in those places. Also, anyone can report a person so…
Better to have 9/10 people banned than a swathe of users through ISPs etc. Ban them‼️ Ban the whole lot‼️
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I do agree, but it would be good to have some transparency from Plex e.g. they investigated and found clear abuse. Right now it just looks like they are guessing based on library share/stream duration/number of users with access.
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I’m sure they are doing more than guessing. A lot of people advertise “21K TV shows and 100k movies” online and you have to join a discord server or something. Would be very easy to just act as a user wanting to buy different servers so you can get the host server information, and ban that way. Also I’m sure they have different metrics they can look at on their end.
Ban em all!! 
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Are you saying that’s a lot? BTW, several of those people were banned long ago and only came in there to get their sympathy upvotes from the “Plex is evil” crowd
What’s being implied here is that Plex…
Out of 16 million user accounts just woke up one day and for no reason decided to arbitrarily ban these 9 people who weren’t doing anything wrong
The idea that Plex banning these people simply because they have a lot of shared accounts is speculatory and unreasonable
There are a lot of people who have been sharing with a lot of people for a very long time who aren’t breaking the TOS and none of them have had any problem.
I understand people want answers
Publicly stating a specific reason for why these people were banned and how they obtained that information is not something that should be shared.
This simply exposes their methods of detection and gives dishonest people clues on how to beat the system
We may not have all the facts and sometimes you just have to live with that. What you can’t do is fill in the blanks with some kind of conspiracy theory speculation and have it become reality
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IMO, Plex doesn’t owe us any explanation. The only potential party they really need to provide reason to is those who are banned. In fact, I am sure their legal counsel is suggesting the same. As others have said, there are plenty of people, even on this forum, who boast about media size, their “customers,” and services they offer to friends. This was never really the intention and we all know as Plex gets bigger it becomes more of a target. Is anyone really surprised bans are happening?
Fair enough, I guess the Reddit posts have spooked a few people including the OP to post this, into suddenly having a banned Plex account after years of usage due to library size or user size. Looking at the post history and the context it does seem that they were just open sharing, so that is good at least to see the (expected) context.
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Some of the users in Reddit have reported they were unbanned after appealing the decision. It is surprising and a bit disappointing here the sentiment was mostly anti-user, pretty strange.
Anyway, my opinion still is if 100 users is too much then do not make 100 the limit.
We have to remember that the “number of users” as the criteria is still just speculation. It’s the most common denominator, I agree, but it doesn’t tell us how many people have 90+ users that weren’t banned.
Releasing this statistic would probably ease a lot of the worries and stop the push to lower the number of max shares. Because I would rather not be forced to keep removing “less than active” users just to make room.
