In this post, I'm sharing my personal experience with Reddit's moderation and shadow bans, not as a personal grudge but as an example why Developers and Freelancers should pay attention to each platform's governance, moderation and transparency policies because when your visibility and reputation are tied to third party platforms, you want to assess the risks associated with those platforms to your professional presence and your ability to reach your audience.
I left Reddit for many years and rarely engaged with it as a platform since it forced users to disable their VPN or sign up and share their data.
One day, I wanted to give it another shot after seeing some interesting content. I signed up again and began participating in technical discussions.
I kept posting from time to time absolutely and purely technical comments.
I began to notice over time that my posts or comments were not getting views or replies at all. While this doesn't bother me that much, I found after a couple of weeks that all my posts had 1 view. This situation raised my suspicion, so I began doing research on the matter.
Lo and behold, I realized that I was actually shadow banned and there was no warning, no violations, nothing... I was not using bots or VPN or anything out of the ordinary.
I learned later after doing further research that moderators can easily trigger Reddit's auto ban system by reporting someone even if there is no reason.
Now, the question is, why would someone go out of their way to report my account specifically. Yep, you guessed it! In practice, there’s no way to know; Reddit provides no transparency about who reported you or why, which leaves users guessing whether they did something wrong or not.
Imagine that every time you want to post something, you need to go through each subreddit's "Rules" and also Reddit's own policies and terms which are enforced inconsistently; this often feels like a legal exercise.
On Reddit,in some cases, you can post inflammatory content and get little to no moderation but my neutral technical posts were hidden.
Despite the fact that Reddit has an "Appeal" system, the time it takes Reddit to review your appeal can take anywhere from 1 week to several months; at the same time, if you create a new account, you risk getting banned again for having an alternative account.
Reddit's ban system is a perfect example of failed distributed moderation system where a moderator can ban your whole account because they dislike your presence or disagree with your opinion.
Reddit relies heavily on volunteers to moderate posts or comments, and they are often overworked and burnt out.
At the same time, Reddit laid off around 5% of their workforce in recent years.
Reddit's system is unique and bizarre in a bad way because on one end, moderators can flag your entire account for bans, not just their own subreddit, on the other hand, Reddit claim that the system is fair, distributed and decentralized.
While Reddit's moderation and ban policies can be broken, this is not unique to Reddit as other large tech platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook (Meta), Twitter (X) and others also have poor user experience when it comes to moderation; this made me more cautious about relying on a single platform for visibility or professional networking.
Lessons learned:
- Don't treat big platforms as neutral parties; they are private companies with opaque policies and guidelines.
- Don't put all your eggs in one basket. Diversify your presence to multiple platforms and don't be scared to try new ones.
- As a rule of thumb, if your content can be hidden or removed by someone other than you, treat the platform as an amplifier rather than your primary go-to place to gain visibility.
- Obtain your own domain, learn how to build your own site (easy with AI for people who don't like frontend).
As a cloud and security consultant, I now treat every hosted platform as a temporary amplifier, not a permanent foundation for my professional presence.
Disclaimer:
This is based on my personal experience on Reddit and reflects my subjective view of its moderation and appeal processes, not a legal or technical audit of the platform.