I Reached 1k Karma on Reddit, Then Got Banned for Posting My Project
Account bans on Reddit
A developer's firsthand account of trying to share an open-source project on Reddit. Each new account was banned: for posting a link immediately, for commenting too soon, for writing a post that seemed AI-generated, and finally after a month of building 1k karma. Moderators advised earning karma and using the mobile app, but even a manually reviewed post led to a ban. Reddit users never saw the projects.
It turns out that if your post is longer than two paragraphs, is well-formatted, and contains no errors, the moderators or algorithms will determine that it’s AI-generated. And generated text leads to account bans.
- 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.
- 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.
- mattcasmith
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.
- 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.
- 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.