Hellbanned on Reddit

[DanielBMarkham]

I've been a reddit user for many years. I didn't use it a lot because every time I posted, usually I got a bunch of ugly/snarky comments. HN had a lot higher standard for posting and conversations.

But a couple of years ago I decided to record some of my coding sessions, so I posted those Vimeo links over on reddit. I also started participating in the history forum. I love history.[1]

Weirdest thing, though. Nobody ever replied to my comments. Nobody ever voted up any of my articles or commented on any of my posts.

I'm not posting out of narcissism. It's fine with me if I have nothing useful to say. But for months on end? It was odd.

So finally, in a fit of curiosity this morning, I check the site from incognito mode.

I'm hell-banned. That is, nothing I type in appears so that anybody else could see it.

I don't know how I got this way. Doing some Googling, looks like most folks never get out of jail once they get in.

I consider this amazingly fucked up. I spent a lot of time trying to add value to a lot of conversations. None of it mattered. This looks like one of those situations where a vendor thinks that their time is valuable and your time is worthless.

I'm not really sure what to do from here.

1. Here's a link to a comment I wrote 10 months ago with a score of 33. As far as I know, I haven't done anything that could be contrued as spammy of self-promotional since then. https://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/3to3n4/woodrow_wilson_was_extremely_racist_even_by_the/cx7ucab

[just_observing]

As described here - https://www.reddit.com/r/shadowbanned - message the admins.

But from https://www.reddit.com/wiki/reddiquette:

"Feel free to post links to your own content (within reason). But if that's all you ever post, or it always seems to get voted down, take a good hard look in the mirror — you just might be a spammer. A widely used rule of thumb is the 9:1 ratio, i.e. only 1 out of every 10 of your submissions should be your own content."

and do feel free to remind them that

Shadowbans are meant for spammers, not real users according to reddit's CEO /u/spez - https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3cxedn/i_am_steve_huf...

Good luck.

[DanielBMarkham → just_observing]

I understand that I may have run afoul of that from posting the coding videos and some of my blog stuff. There's a different standard on HN than reddit.

But it was quite a while back. The only thing I can figure is that some bot ran in the last ten months and flagged me for stuff I did 1, 2 years ago (without meaning any harm)

It's extremely ironic that I didn't want to participate on reddit because of the poor atmosphere -- and ended up getting punished, presumably for contributing to the poor atmosphere?

Thanks for the links! :)

[paulpauper → DanielBMarkham]

...you may have logged in from a blacklisted IP address

[DanielBMarkham → paulpauper]

Could be. I'm mostly online from home, but who knows? I might have logged in from one of my AWS servers?

I think that's what makes me pretty damned frustrated. I didn't know that it happened, I don't know why it happened, and I have no idea of how to fix it now that it's happened.

That's whacked.

Thanks for the idea. Who knows?