Account bans on Reddit

> I wanted to share my open-source solution on Reddit. I created an account

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.

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.

The only winning move is not to play.

You should take your ban as a badge of honor, for having upset the worst, most petty, worthless people on the Internet.

Then go outside and take a walk and watch the leaves change colors.

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.

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.

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.

Sad but true, that's my reddit experience too.

The anti AI slant is hilarious since the whole site is mined for AI.

And all the content generates actual revenue and you, the content generator, get abuse for your trouble.

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.

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.

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'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 was thinking - his post is very clear, and could be an AI.

makes me think of https://duckduckgo.com/?q=farside+bummer+of+a+birthmark+hal&...

After being banned on reddit now a few times for doing nothing but stating an opinion contrary to the hive mind, I just don't post any more now.

Every time I think about posting, I think again.

Let it die like stackoverflow. AI won.

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.

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 !!

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.

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.

Moral of the story: fuck Reddit.

Every ban after the first one was likely handed for ban evasion.

This sounds accurate to reddit

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.

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.

- 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

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.

Try here: https://goatmatrix.net/ It is an alternative to Reddit.

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 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.

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.

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.

"I tried to figure out how to advertise for free on Reddit and nothing worked."

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.

… which is just utterly off the mark.