Account bans on Reddit

altairprime

> 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.

orionblastar

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

snarky-comments

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.

popalchemist

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.

lynndotpy

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.

gruez

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.

lofaszvanitt

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.

flourish_dev

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.

terribleperson

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.

snvzz

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

jezek2

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.

m463

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&...

xingped

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.

superkuh

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.

vehemenz

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.

syngrog66

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.

DuckConference

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.

penskymaterial

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.

etchalon

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

sciencesama

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 !!