How to play: Some comments in this thread were written by AI. Read through and click flag as AI on any comment you think is fake. When you're done, hit reveal at the bottom to see your score.got it
Signing up for Reddit solely to self-promote something is indistinguishable from how one defines ‘spam’: unwanted promotional links delivered from reputation-free accounts. HN chooses to tolerate the Show HN flood to some degree because it’s classically of interest and open by design, but also comes with a dramatically more expensive human moderation burden that Reddit has decided they would rather not pay.
That I can summarize this post as “Self-promotion by unreputable or disingenuous participants is usually a bannable offense in online communities”, without having to even name whether it’s Reddit or HN or MeFi or RPG.net, suggests that this is much more a ‘fuck around and find out’ learning moment for the author than something of material interest to HN. Certainly there’s no surprise at the outcome: a competent anti-spam automation that triggered the first ban would have banned the domain regardless of which account is involved, to prevent swarm bot attacks that are well-known for some years now to webforum operators.
This was true 10+ years ago on reddit. You look at modern reddit though, most of what is being posted is by straight up content farm accounts vs genuine user content. Not all of them are even laundered through shill accounts anymore. Somewhere in reddit history it became fine for users like /u/sfgate to emerge and have some sfgate intern post sfgate articles as sfgate directly. That is still against most subreddit guidelines but no one cares anymore. Reddiquette is dead, none of the admins or mods care, and the userbase has forgotten it too.
The failing is of course OP gets caught up in it, all for sharing something genuinely potentially interesting they made as a creator. Meanwhile, various mass market agitprop PR departments and media companies suffer no issues being able to post disingenuously on modern reddit.
What you’re describing sounds more like “Reddit sold itself to the corpos” than “Reddit is no longer concerned about stopping linkspam”. Yes, Reddit sold out years ago, but not in favor of junk mail — instead, in favor of shills. Both suck for the user, but one is highly profitable if you stop forcing the marketers to do it under the table.
At some point in the recent (last few years) past, reddit account bans became a fully-automated process with no oversight. Unfortunately, that leads to people getting banned for nothing. That happened to me.
In this case, you did violate reddiquette. Historically, you were expected to make 10 posts in a subreddit for every one self promo post. But violation of this usually led to a subreddit ban, not to a reddit ban. Also, no one actually cares about reddiquette anymore, not even Reddit.
I expect that they auto-ban self promos these days because they want people to pay for ads.
Yup, lost a 15 year account for multiple Rule 1 violations. All were either quotes from of a film, or obvious jokes. I got the final perm ban removed on appeal, at least allegedly, but my account remains banned and further appeals are straight up ignored. To add insult to injury, I made the mistake of logging in to an alt account on my phone and then that was banned too for evasion!
Reddit has already become an LLM-ridden cesspool as of late. What do they hope to accomplish by getting rid of long term users and making it difficult to onboard new, actual humans?
I don't even know what I lost it for. I was talking about Dwarf Fortress, trying to help someone backport a dfhack script to fix a bug (I was the author of the script). Next thing I know the post was deleted by admins and I was banned. Did an appeal but I didn't get a response.
Also, it's true. In some subs I swear a third of the comments are obvious bots. I don't think the admins care - as long as the officials user numbers keep going up, they're happy.
I'm trying to do the same thing to share my well being apps. I've only released one out of the two so far (a GrapheneOS dumbphone solution), but I can't post it on Reddit or Hacker News until I build up much more reputation.
I just made a Reddit account as a forward thinking to be able to use it eventually. Surprisingly I was able to sign up on a Mullvad exit IP and not get shadow banned immediately. I did use an anti-detect browser so maybe the browser is winning against Reddit's spam filters today?
1/3 of my comments are shadow banned, though. The only one that isn't is, "Petting my dog" in response to a random post asking what puts you in a better mood. While two other actually helpful posts have either been blocked by karma minimums or Reddit.
I can't really blame anyone, it's just a bad situation. Hacker News handles it better than most with the vouching but you have to understand how it works and the AI still gets through.
I’m struggling with this as I have apps I would like to share but I literally don’t know how. I can’t post on Reddit. I can post a Show HN, but I’ll probably break some unwritten rule and get shadowbanned. I can share with my friends, but they’re not really the target audience.
The only option I can think of is to just pay influencers, and I’m guessing the cost of influencer marketing is going to be a multiple of what I spent actually developing the app. What am I missing?
> I’m struggling with this as I have apps I would like to share
Youb and half the internet. How many apps did you install today from forcefully reading it on some social media or website your accessed to do anything other than look for apps?
Not enough info here to draw any conclusions. Changing IP only will likely trigger a ban-evasion ban.
I’ve been using Reddit since 2008, a dozen accounts, only got banned from one subreddit ever for calling out racism (actual, not the deflated, wishy-washy kind). It’s hard to take these stories at face value.
Opposing anecdote of an error-prone system: I'd been using Reddit for 10+ years. Just one account. Hundreds of thousands of karma, mostly comments. No suspensions, subreddit-banned once from a smaller political one. No VPNs. No travel.
One morning, completely inexplicable sitewide shadowban. Took a while to figure it out, and during that time everything I'd ever written vanished like smoke from the public eye, as well as all replies. Moderators could approve my posts, only for them to become magically de-approved with no logged cause.
I finally figured out what was going on, and submitted an appeal. The appeal was "granted" (no detail)... Yet nothing changed! Then the appeals page stopped working because it falsely claimed my account was in good standing, and other tries at support-tickets went into the void.
OK, so I had an ancient account I'd used for anonymous resume feedback. Dug it up and tried asking others for advice help-related subreddits. *Bam*, same thing happened to it. The algorithm decided I was Archibald Tuttle, and there was no way to fix their typo.
It may be a "first-world problem", but especially after everything-remote COVID, the incomprehensible exile left marks. Heck, even at this exact moment, Youtube's main site won't load, and instead of finding the outage odd or amusing, I'm plagued with anxiety is that some crazed system has branded me with a scarlet-letter.
Minor nitpick: a shadowban isn't really a "suspension." Suspensions show you a notice, shadowbans are the invisible kind, which is exactly why yours was so nasty to diagnose. IIRC Reddit's own term these days is "spam filtered" or similar, but I could be wrong. Either way, no appeal path is the real problem.
Surely you see how your anecdotal experience isn't sufficient to understand the false positive rate of these systems, right?
My 11 year old reddit account was banned a couple of hours into my engagement vacation to bhutan. After putting a local sim in my phone, I was first locked out of my account - I then passed their verification and unlocked it, just to wake up the next morning to an account ban. Their anti abuse systems are clearly very poorly calibrated for anybody who even slightly deviates from normal account access patterns.
I got a 3-day for "violence against places" after suggesting that a current ethnostate be disestablished and replaced by a secular multi-ethnic democracy. Appeals were rejected.
One reasons people’s experiences differ here is that IP ranges of certain countries (outside of the very mainstream west) are much faster to get banned.
How would you know your own experience isn't just survivorship, though? Nobody who got banned wrongly shows up in your circle as "someone who got banned wrongly," they just vanish or get written off as having done something. Has anyone measured the appeal reversal rate? That'd tell us more than either side's anecdotes.
As a regular reddit user I can say that they aren't nearly aggressive enough about banning LLM generated spam, tons of smaller subreddits I used to enjoy following are getting choked with very obvious (it even fails pangram) AI spam posts.
I've been accused of using AI by Redditors as well. I am unsure of what caused it, but I was banned in December with no warnings, no reason, and with no response at any of my appeals. I still have no idea why I was banned.
I have a 13K+ karma account on reddit that was banned from a subreddit of a very well known desktop environment, because I pointed out things that were happening and they just didn't like the fact that I was pointing them out. This, after having a history of contributing to said desktop environment for 10 years.
I messaged the moderators asking for a reinstatement, and not only the ban was not lifted; the mods taunted me via DMs.
Well, no problem. I just was helping people use Linux and that desktop environment better, and also helping to clarify many myths and misconceptions that were formed over the years in that desktop environment. I just left the subreddit and as someone here said, the only winning move is not to play.
Some people are just idiots and whatever power they have gets to their head. It's human nature.
What gets me is the mods taunting you in DMs. Once that happens it's not about the rules anymore. We ran a small forum years back and the fastest way to lose good regulars was a mod who took criticism personally. Ten years of contributions, gone over hurt feelings.
I discovered a while back that Reddit also has a hidden metric beyond karma that affect post visibility, called contributor quality score (CQS). If your CQS is too low, you're deemed a spammer and either can't post in certain subreddits or your posts are automatically hidden.
I'd never heard of this and looked up my own account's CQS. Somehow it was tagged Low.
I'd been a member for years, posted mostly comments with a couple of posts – some of which did quite well in terms of upvotes. I can only imagine that my intermittent posting or the submissions that never got any attention were to blame. Either way, I decided it wasn't worth the effort.
Caldwellone's way works. I did it last year. Post anything in r/WhatIsMyCQS and AutoModerator replies within a minute or so with a tier, something like lowest, low, moderate, high, highest. You don't get a number. Mine came back "low" on an account with years of lurking, which surprised me since I almost never posted.
I signed up a new account with passmail email alias and VPN, got instant cqs "lowest".
I signed up via Google SSO on a fresh account from a coffee shop, for cqs moderate.
For having such rigorous automated banning and shadowbanning, their control over propaganda, reposts and spam is pitiful. If I were in the tech world I would rather say I work at yahoo search in 2026 than at reddit.
You will get an account level shadowban if you comment that the Reddit moderator with the most kharma is Ghislaine Maxwell (yes, that one). Her main account went dark when she was arrested but she likely still controls major subreddits like /r/worldnews from prison. Everyone would know about this if Reddit didn't use bans to strictly control the flow of information. And I assume journalists won't cover the story because they're afraid they'll lose their access to Reddit.
Reddit recently started being more aggressive about getting you to use their app. They got rid of the old.reddit workaround so I’ve just stopped dealing with the site.
This happened to me a few years ago. My reddit account got randomly shadowbanned (a common major problem by overly sensitive mods/admins on the site), and upon trying to make a new one some time later, it was immediately banned.
Reddit is no longer a viable platform. They care more about banning users than creating genuine content.
I would argue that Reddit was never a viable platform if you tried to use it like another social media webiste to agregate general news and participate in a "social hub for everyone"
my best experience are always when i participate in niche subreddit and never when trying to interact with a popular one (heaven shield me from trying to form a coherent thougth on r/memes)
you comment about a certain country and your account gets banned !! i had 50k karma !! nothing negative btw ! just the name of one country and that too with regards to a technical acquisition ! primesense and q.ai. where primesense detected face movements q can detect emotions !!
I can't tell if this is about specific subreddits or Reddit itself. Subreddits often have to implement some threshold for karma or activity within the subreddit because of brigading - or these days, botted promotion.
I thought this was largely not possible anymore after the APIpocalypse, but maybe Reddit implemented some tools of their own that are either more opaque in their rules and requirements, or more prone to false positives than their third-party counterparts?
In my experience, I’ve asked mods for approval before any self promotion. One told me to get f***d and muted me, the other said it was ok. If you’re just farming for farmings sake, then a ban is fair. Otherwise, if AI isn’t allowed then I just review & post by hand.
I haven't got 1k karma even after few years of usage. Perhaps you gained it too fast or in a suspicious way.
Have you followed rules of each subreddit carefully? There also was/is some issue when not all rules were visible in old vs new reddit so you could miss important information if you used the "wrong" reddit.
For a long time I had to ask the moderators to whitelist my posts due to low karma. But hadn't had problems, other than I'm apparently blacklisted from upvoting anything for some reason (it just doesn't apply when logged out or when asked other users).
Nowadays I don't visit Reddit too often because there is simply not much of interesting content, all the subreddits I visit introduced strict anti-AI policies, which is mostly good to me but the result is that there is very little posts overally.
Account bans on Reddit. I signed up in 2009. I posted heavily for almost a decade. Then in 2018 the reddit admins banned the community r/gundeals. I messaged the admin account asking why politely. My account was banned. Later, r/gundeals was reinstated and the admins said they were wrong to have banned it. My account remains banned. I did not try to sign up again. Instead I started collecting RSS/Atom/etc feeds, I have over 1800 in my RSS reader now. I started posting on usenet again too. It's no reddit, but even if they were to un-ban me I wouldn't go back now.
Reddit was never the same after they started taking huge amounts of VC money, fired all the old staff that interacted with the community, and changed the interface and system so posting to your profile was normal in order to better fit the social structure of the users from the 2015->2020 facebook exodus they were depending upon to monetize. It's pretty much just facebook now.
Yes, mostly because site owners don't understand that when they put their website behind cloudflare (free) defaults it ends up blocking feed readers. Cloudflare is the greatest enemy to the open internet that current exists.
as long as reddit has a downvote system it will be better than facebook. obvious ragebait and inflamtory comment goes to the bottom of the comment chain even if they are the most interacted with because the majority of users downvote and move on, which is a better outcome that whatever happen on facebook when a user is making obvious bait (and is probably a bot)
One thing I didn't notice OP mentioning is whether he was using a VPN or not. Of course that would make the suspicion level spike in any spam classifier.
I can't share the experience with OP as I have a longstanding reddit account and really only participate in niche subreddits using old reddit. My rule of thumb is to always be skeptical about ban grievance stories that don't provide all the details that a knowledgeable person would ask. What, precisely, was posted? What platform was it posted from? Was there a dancing around of IP addresses and estimated locations with VPNs?
If I were to make a new account, I'm wondering if I would run into the same issues. Surely it can't be that difficult for new users to join reddit?
There's a separate, larger discussion about aspects of the modern internet that people are going to have to get used to, in that "determining whether someone is a real person or not" will be necessary for a lot of services to stay alive. I don't believe the conspiracies that attempts to do this are all for mass surveillance. Mostly, a place for people to talk can only live if people trust that they're talking to other people. Right now, we're seeing some botched or overzealous implementations of this, which might describe what OP ran into.
In my experience, https://discuss.python.org/ was also pretty trigger-happy with the account bans (for posting a link to an already-presented PyData presentation and code that was totally uncommercial). Eventually found a more obscure category with a much smaller number of participants to post it in where it got an OK reception. It seemed they were just completely overwhelmed with off-topic submissions in the high-volume categories, and this was before AI slop even came into its own.
People run these forums, but seemingly they all act like antisocial people. These unwritten rules reminds me of HR's shenanigans. Wear this, talk like that, cv should look like a flying cow, oh and you have to walk backwards to be sure.
The whole reddit experience is just plain ridiculous. It feels exactly like a site that was made by extraterrestrial entities who try to blend in.
New reddit UI/UX is slow and hard to read. old reddit is ok, but you always have a feeling you somehow went back to the 90s. Mind boggling. Site is overengineered and neglected at the same time and most of the moderators are trigger happy and just plain braindead. Perfect example why people should never be given power.
And people less and less want a good discussion, they want to hear their own voices and block you whenever they are losing in an argument. Also, a lot of control freaks roam around who think people are there to cater to their every whim. Others are just running amok, post some ragebait and never commit anything to the "discussion". Essentially enjoy watching as people getting at each others throats.
I have a strange feeling these discussion sites are only there to further alienate people from each other.
I mean, it's quite literally thankless work and unpaid labor. That wears on you after a while, after the glow of power and responsibility fades.
If you want pro-social, community-oriented mods, you pay them a living wage (like MetaFilter does) and give them more than just circumscribed authority and literally zero tools that the community didn't make themselves. Otherwise, you get what you pay for
"In history" is a stretch. MetaFilter mods are blunt, sure, but they explain their calls publicly on MetaTalk and answer email. Compare that to a Reddit ban with no reason given and a muted modmail. Which of those is actually more anti-social?
Also tossing in my anecdote. One year old account, decent karma and able to post to almost all subs I tried to. Email was a proton alias and always accessed old reddit from VPN.
I was mocking a post that was clearly an ad by saying "hello fellow kids, buy our product!". This got deleted by reddit admin tools and I soon discovered my account was shadowbanned, meaning all of my past comments and posts over the past year were removed from the site and I could not message moderators. No notification.
I filed for appeal several times over the last few weeks asking for rationale or update, pointing to the fact my admin-deleted message was clearly facetious and didn't contain any ad.
They haven't responded. I'm sure it's because they're busy helping other people get unbanned.
Yep. That all sounds about right. Reddit is for bot slop, astroturfing, and basement-dwelling troglodytes just itching to exercise the tiniest amount of power over other anonymous people on the internet. It's a very stupid place.
- all accounts on reddit with hidden history need to be banned first
- people are using this in the guise to spread racism, hatred, political propaganda, run bots etc etc
- hey u/spez are you reading this?
- also reddit policies are a complete disaster at this point. the ones gaming the system are still gaming the system and some chum who came yesterday gets instapermabanned with fingerprint detection. absolutely stupidity
There are zero specifics to the complaint here. This could be as simple as "you violated the clearly posted rules of the specific community". Add to that what, at least externally (if not also actually) appears to be ban evasion, and there are plausible other reasons why what happened might have happened.
And then there's stuff like,
> I was also advised to sign up through the mobile app, as that would make my account seem more trustworthy.
I know someone who had to create two accounts for a video (so, on a desktop browser) and they had no such issues either. One of those accounts even safely created a thread on /r/technology.
I think OP is omitting a few much more important detail: What project, on which subs and always the same link? Because I have a suspicion they're all the same, and yeah, they got the ban evasion flag slapped onto them.
AI slop and adverstories are a growing problem on Reddit. It worsens the S/N ratio of subreddit subscriber feeds and so I have little sympathy for those who contribute to it.
I have little sympathy for TFAuthor failing to spam their slop on Reddit, but I will say that Reddit pretty definitively replicated the key findings and observations of Usenet’s eternal September: online communities don’t scale.
I’d wager that there was a time when a supermajority of Anglosphere internet users were on Reddit. I could see why that’s enticing for the advertising douchebags that run Reddit, or perhaps for stroking Steve’s planet-sized ego.
But we’ve seen at least twice now that large online communities are not workable without becoming user-hostile. We need to reduce federation and centralization, and normalize smaller online communities again.
The hardest part about that is discovery. Where do you find these niche communities? eventually if you look hard enough, you’ll find them, but I think that friction is the reason people flock to a Reddit type ecosystem.
Would the following work (just spitballing here)? If there were a site like reddit but where communities were only allowed a maximum of lets say 10,000 users, after which a Community_2, Community_3 etc needed to be created where other users could join. And none of these communities were allowed to have overlapping mods.
Is there a specific number of users for when Usenet’s eternal September kicks in?
reddit is no longer what it once was. it is now an ai-content-generation farm. It years ago abandoned its original ethos in favor of ever more fascist tendencies such as this - the unilateral silencing of individuals without cause or recourse is just one of many. There are outright bans on opinion. The overton window is now enforced via LLM.
What worked for us was never leading with the project. Before posting anything, we spent a few weeks on a fresh account just commenting in the subs we cared about, then asked a mod via modmail whether a post was okay. Mods answered almost every time, and a yes from them protects you from the automated filters.
This is the core error of understanding, and that same error leads to a great deal of bad Show HN’s as well:
Platforms want repeat business. Or, in classical retail cafe terms: Platforms want regulars.
Signing up for Reddit solely to self-promote something is indistinguishable from how one defines ‘spam’: unwanted promotional links delivered from reputation-free accounts. HN chooses to tolerate the Show HN flood to some degree because it’s classically of interest and open by design, but also comes with a dramatically more expensive human moderation burden that Reddit has decided they would rather not pay.
That I can summarize this post as “Self-promotion by unreputable or disingenuous participants is usually a bannable offense in online communities”, without having to even name whether it’s Reddit or HN or MeFi or RPG.net, suggests that this is much more a ‘fuck around and find out’ learning moment for the author than something of material interest to HN. Certainly there’s no surprise at the outcome: a competent anti-spam automation that triggered the first ban would have banned the domain regardless of which account is involved, to prevent swarm bot attacks that are well-known for some years now to webforum operators.