It’s pretty much my first time creating a Reddit account. I posted a question about a camera, and it immediately ran into issues—deleted, probably. The subreddit moderators privately messaged me saying it was likely auto-removed by Reddit’s system, and they mentioned they could manually approve and restore it. In the end, my post finally went live, but after that incident, my account was shadowbanned, and now it’s permanent. I have absolutely no idea why.

I created my second account about a few months later. I commented normally, but as soon as I made a post, I got shadowbanned. About half a year later, I created a third account, and the exact same thing happened: commenting was fine, but the moment I posted something, I was instantly shadowbanned.

A few months after that, I made a fourth account. I managed to keep it going for 5 days, built up my interaction to around 14x karma, and decided to try commenting in a SaaS subreddit. Boom. I couldn’t see my comment anywhere, and I knew what that meant. At that point, I hadn’t seen the red server error message yet, so I tried posting in another casual, friendly subreddit. Right then and there, I got hit with a shadowban. The next morning, I created a brand new account; the very first comment I sent out resulted in a shadowban in less than 60 seconds.

I once read a post where someone mentioned:

Old account left inactive for a long time, reactivated just to comment => ban. New account created on a banned device => ban. Randomly commenting out of context => ban. Buying an old account, logging in, and trying to comment => ban.

As for me, I’ve probably been device-banned.

It’s a vicious cycle. They really should just say it bluntly: “New account? Go get 200 karma and make sure it’s at least 30 days old, otherwise your account will be banned, which will lead to a device ban!”

Since I started using the internet, I have never seen a system designed in such a bizarre way. It’s truly brutal.

As a tech guy, I love discussing AI topics and introducing my own side projects, but dealing with Reddit like this is just tragic. I feel like I have no right to speak just because I don’t have enough karma or my account isn’t old enough. Then, sitting around waiting for an appeal feels like gambling, with no idea when the results will come. Meanwhile, the chances for a new account are as fragile as sea foam.

I even tried building an app to break Reddit’s dominance, but in the end, it went nowhere.

And that’s why I’m here, on Lemmy. I’m trying to figure out a way forward, because honestly, things can’t go on like this, LOL.