Just wanted to share a frustrating story. I've made a reddit account several years ago and recently started posting in it. It took me around few weeks to realize that something is off. As I logged off and went into the threads I've posted in, I was surprised to see that none of my messages are presents. NONE, no topics, no comments absolutely nothing. Reddit hid all my stuff and told be absolutely nothing about it. You can try it yourself - Google:

cubrman site:reddit.com

And no results would return. I lost several threads and around 15 comments until I finally realized what is going on. In case you are wondering here is how my inbox looks like:

It shows that I've received a notification where the reddit bot says that they've hidden ONE OF MY THREADS because it thinks it is a link to a screenshot. NOWHERE it says that I was banned, or shadowbanned or anybanned.

Yeah "shadowban" that is apparently how it is called in case you did not know, which (as it appears) are supposed to know. At least that was the impression that I got after I created a new account on reddit and posted a thread to understand what is going on:

https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/7wd00x/reddit_can_silently_hide_all_of_your_messages/

Apparently the reddit community thinks this is normal and calls it "the necessary evil". The purpose of the ban is to prevent people from spamming unworthy comments or threads by isolating them. They will think they are not banned and will not create another account to circumvent the ban. Well I can only say that I felt myself like a complete fool. I wasted a tone of time responding to people only to see all my work gone. I guess I should thank God other communities, like gamedev, do not use such inhumane measures. I've made mistakes before I never said I am a saint, but in most cases I was contacted by moderator, learned something new, re-read the rules and never made mistakes again. Well, I guess reddit thinks that they have a better solution for this problem, even though it makes people feel like morons. The funniest thing is, nothing prevents spammers from learning this system once the hard way and never falling for it again.

So yea, be warned, there are tools in place at some sites around internet that are designed to make you feel stupid. Don't let them do that.
 

EDIT: Since I posted my thread here, I can no longer see my thread on reddit, luckly, I made screenshots of it, here they are:

By the way,  a quick reddit search shows that some other people are concerned that reddit hides stuff silently and it might not be just the stuff from spammers. This one, as I understood, is connected to politics:

This one is related to links about crime (wtf?):

Fox news report on reddit censorship:

http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2016/12/02/social-media-site-reddit-censors-trump-supporters.html

I know not the most trustworthy website but here is another article from zero hedge:

https://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2014-02-25/reddit-censors-big-story-about-government-manipulation-and-disruption-interne
 

Edit: guys from Unity forums helped me realize I did not actually post the screens, where I was posting with my banned nickname. Here is one of the most hilarious cases (the one where I actually realized that I am silently banned) - I've just wrote a lengthy answer why IMHO Unity is better than UE4 and then one dude just adds an answer after me saying "I would love to know why people pick Unity over Unreal"



Edit: guys from Unity forums gave some very useful insight on this problem:
https://forum.unity.com/threads/reddit-can-silently-hide-all-of-your-mesages-topics.516820/

And here is the link to a reddit thread about shadow banning:

Edit: around 5 days after I contacted moderators they unbanned me. I am not an expert, but it seams that they believe I was shadowbanned by accident:

I've contacted moderators of the subreddit /r/gamedev and they told me that they cannot do anything and told me to contact the general admins. I contacted general admins and I am still waiting for their response.

You might have missed, that no matter what the admins response would be in this situation, the damage has already been done. I never said I did nothing wrong - I had around 3 threads that must have violated reddit's rules, but after that I did like 15 to 20 large posts over the course of several days, which most likely had nothing wrong with them as I just answered other people questions. All of those posts are gone and even if they were brought back by admins right now - no one would see them, because that's the nature of reddit. I basically lost several hours of work and feelt myself like a fool. If you think this is me being an "angry user trying to badmouth reddit" that is your way of interpretation I guess.

Hmm, I have some serious suspicions about twitter. I've recently posted 4 times about the shadow ban there and the posts just went unnoticed (16-20 views), while my previous posts sometimes had over 1.5k views. I thought that the reason might have been the lack of hashtags, but I've just posted a message with hashtags, logged off and cannot find it when searching for any of the hashtags I wrote. I actually think my messages don't even go to my readers (~300). This thing is frickin alarming.

My twitter post got two likes, I guess false alarm there.

 

1 hour ago, Hodgman said:

So... what did you post to get banned from reddit?

Sorry for being unclear in my post, I already understood from all the feedback that I've turned it into a mess. Basically:

1. I cannot be sure when what or why, because that's the whole point of the shadowban.

2. Once I was shadowbanned I got all of my posts and threads wiped out from reddit so that I cannot even find any of my past activities to pinpoint after which post this happened.

3. I do have a message in my inbox from a reddit bot, which I received for a thread, where I posted a link to my game's Steam page's News post, where there was some text and a tone of screenshots. Bot said that my thread was hidden, which seams to mean it was visible before. Bot suggested to post this kind of stuff into a specific reddit thread and said nothing about any kind of ban. I can only guess that that was the moment and the reason why I was banned.

Shadow bans are used to keep things advertiser friendly. If all you do on reddit is post links to your games, advertisers can't monetize it because they're implicitly endorsing your product.

Same thing with twitter etc.

12 hours ago, conquestor3 said:

Shadow bans are used to keep things advertiser friendly. If all you do on reddit is post links to your games, advertisers can't monetize it because they're implicitly endorsing your product.

 

Same thing with twitter etc.

I am never against any kind of moderation and I admit I made the wrong thing, my sole point is that this kind of punishment is ruthless and inhumane and I wanted to share my experience so that less people will be likely to be turned into idiots like I was.