Account Bans on Reddit

A developer attempted to share an open-source GitHub project on Reddit and encountered repeated account bans despite trying many strategies. Initial posts with links were immediately deleted and accounts banned. He learned through trial and error that accounts must appear organic: post plain comments first, wait days, limit comments to 1-2 per day, and avoid polished, long posts that can be flagged as AI-generated. He adopted evasive tactics - short, error-filled, first-person posts - and sometimes those remained, yet any post that included a link triggered deletion and bans. Creating a private community and posting links caused the community to be removed and the account banned as well.

Conversations with moderators produced more rules of thumb - sign up through the mobile app and earn roughly 1,000 karma before posting links - but even after following that path and reaching 1k in a month, a link post sent for manual review resulted in another ban. The practical finding is that moderation and automated checks operate opaquely and inconsistently, producing false positives and imposing burdensome, informal gatekeeping on legitimate self-promotion, effectively preventing this developer from reaching potential users.