I built a Reddit posting bot for my SEO agency. Here's the honest scorecard.
Built a Reddit posting bot for my SEO agency. Goal: stop spending 5h/week on social presence busywork.
Final stack after rewrites
- Apify scans subs, scores threads on intent + age + engagement
- OpenAI gpt-4o-mini drafts posts and comments (cheap, ~$0.002/draft)
- Playwright on old.reddit.com submits (new Reddit UI fights you on every selector)
- JSON files for state. No DB, no queue, no Docker.
What worked
- Comments landed from day 1. Posted on r/SEO, got real replies.
- Cooldown logic (7d/sub) stopped me from spamming the same place twice.
- Found 13 safe subs by scraping each sub's about.json + rules.json. Filter out karma minimums and anything over 1M subs (heavy automod).
What broke
- First 3 self-posts got nuked silently by AutoModerator. Account was 3 months old, 1 karma, email unverified. Reddit's spam classifier reads account age x karma x verified flags before it reads content.
- My success detection looked at page URL after submit. Removed posts return a normal URL, so the script logged success while Reddit deleted in the background.
- The LLM hallucinated tech terms not in the OP. Temperature 0.7 to 0.6 helped, stricter prompt helped more.
What killed the account
After ~2h of automated runs from a datacenter IP (OVH), Reddit shadowbanned the account. Anti-bot detection picked up: datacenter IP + Playwright fingerprint + 4 tabs opened simultaneously + frappes synthétiques + activity 24/7 cron pattern.
Total cost
- 14 days, ~30 hours coding, 4 restarts
- $4 OpenAI, $7 Apify
- Zero hours saved (account got banned before karma built)
The real lesson
You cannot automate past Reddit's reputation system. CQS (Contributor Quality Score) is the hidden gate. Build karma the slow human way first via mobile + residential IP, then automation works on accounts with 200+ karma after 60 days.
Anyone else hit the wall where automation works perfectly but the platform silently shadowbans the output?
I built vocalis.pro — an AI-powered SEO content automation tool. The bot from this story is one of its modules. If you want to skip the 30 hours of pain, check it out.