Ask HN: Is Reddit shadow-banning broken or is it just me
I've been using reddit since the beginning. I've stuck through the ups and downs, but now I'm just about forced to give up on the whole thing.
I delete my reddit account every year and create another, on principle, around the time I change all my passwords. Last year I did this, as usual, but found that my young account got shadow-banned and I don't know why. I am about to create my 12th new account because the previous 11 accounts were shadow-banned over nine months. I don't do malicious things, I believe. I just try to answer questions in r/arduino and r/learnpython and occasionally express an opinion on a few other subreddits. I get upvoted on my comments with a few downvotes, but I continually get banned. I have tried appealing, but I wonder if those appeals get read. They certainly have no effect on anything.
So I wonder if reddit management, to solve some sort of problem they have, have put in place code to identify "bad actors" and that code produces a lot of false positives. They have an appeal process but that doesn't help in my case. I suspect they get so many appeals that their response is "the code says the user is guilty" and that's that.
Has anyone else noticed this? As bad as reddit is it's the best place I've found to answer technical questions in my areas of interest and I would like to continue. Any suggestions on how to get out of this situation?
In my experience, reddit will shadow ban accounts if your IP changes frequently (at least more than once per day). The likely scenario for this is if you are connecting to a VPN connection multiple times per day. For me, in the past, this has been a guaranteed eventual shadow ban. You basically get caught in their bad actor filter or something.
I've experimented with a few things but haven't looked at my public IP. I don't think it changes that often and I don't access reddit through a VPN. I'll have to write some code to check my public IP address and see how often it changes. I connect through an ISP in South East Asia and do have problems with my IP address being on a black list occasionally, but turning the modem off overnight usually fixes that, or at least shakes things up.
If you think your IP may have previously been banned, clear your cookies before you restart your modem then make a new account and don't touch any old ones.
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