Guide to asking a simple technical question on Reddit when shadow banned? | Hacker News Reader

Guide to asking a simple technical question on Reddit when shadow banned?

6 pointsmorpheos13711 comments

I rarely use reddit. I loath the Orwellian culture. One thing I do [did] like about reddit is the ability to register a non verified account and quickly ask a technical question about a niche topic and get responses often within the hour. I don't have a stack exchange account and I expect if I did it would be a longer latency to response.

To my chagrin I recently have discovered that whenever I create a throwaway reddit account posts made from it are shadowbanned. even on a different IP address or a different device that belongs to me. This is ridiculous. I have no idea why I am shadowbanned. I should not need to go to a library to ask a technical question on reddit.

Does anybody know a way to ask throwaway questions on reddit without having to deal with stuff like shadow bans?

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If you want instant response on Stack Overflow don’t post a question. Post a wrong answer to a similar question.

ULPT, but I like it.

Good luck. Years ago I was one of those evil people who spammed social media sites with automation. It was hilarious to see people comment that "they couldn't understand how this post got so many upvotes" on some sites.

I never tried to spam reddit because it was clear they were not fooling around, had all kinds of protective mechanisms I didn't immediately understand. It was pretty clear they'd block you on a hair trigger so I never tried.

How did you accomplish automated forum spamming? Was this the pre-Captcha era where forums were still the Wild West?

It was easier then.

Some of the people I was hanging with at the time posted a PHP script (really!) that used a neural net (before deep learning was hot!) to read CAPTCHAs.

This crossed a line and got them attacked by (Russian I think) hackers.

That incident got a certain anime character investigated by the FBI because that anime character used Tor to connect to the chat room. That anime character told them that they weren't interested in helping them distribute child porn because they knew that child porn was a major enforcement priority for the FBI.

Hanging out with over IRC I presume, not IRL?

Why did the script cross a line with the hackers?

Was that anime character Detective Conan?

Unfortunately, you have to feed your throwaway reddit accounts like you'd feed a pet. I cycle between them every now and then. Just take on a different persona for each one and it becomes a little game. You can register multiple accounts with a single email, so it's not even breaking any rules.

Take the time to answer some questions; you have to give back a little to the community.

Subreddit mods have a way to set whether new accounts or accounts with less karma are allowed to make posts. I think you are running into that. I suggest just creating an account solely for this purpose and gaining a bit of karma and then only use that account for this purpose.

There could be limitations on accounts recently created through Tor and other well-known VPN/proxy IPs. Have you tried creating a new account and letting it sit for a few hours or days before your first post?

Spend a few days using Reddit normally. This doesn't need to be torture, find a few small subreddits with a niche interest (there are tons of good tech subs) and just make a couple comments each day.

That's all it'll take for your account to not be automatically flagged in most places. It could take 10 days, but assuming you're not getting downvoted that should be enough.

Gain some karma points in other subreddits. You can do it within an hour with enough effort. Each sub has their own rules for new posters. If you want instant answers, try a mailing list or IRC chat for whatever your questions pertains to.

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