I’ve had my account of over 22,000 karma that I had for years and that I’ve spent a colossal amount of time and energy in research and composition to make quality posts, a lot of which are in academia, shadow banned, and all my contributions gone, just like that, seemingly for no reason other than I was using VPN.
Every account that I’ve tried to create gets shadow banned the instant I post (or shortly afterwards), no matter how long I wait to post after creating the account, or where I create the account from (different devices, OSs, browsers, locations - e.g libraries) or how many LEGIT likes or comments I make prior to posting. It doesn’t matter if the account was created with or without VPN - if at any point I use a VPN to post (maybe even comment or just browse? While logged in?), i WILL get shadow banned. That has been my experience consistently (regardless of the device or VPN provider I use - free ones)… Use VPN = Get banned.
This is a major concern because I use public WiFi most times (as I am traveling constantly) and I always use VPN when doing so (for obvious security reasons). My devices have VPN apps with a kill switch installed that automatically activate whenever I connect to a public WiFi.
I see no mention of VPN in ANY of Reddit’s policies, so I am guessing they are using some obscure interpretation of one or several of their policies to justify the ban on the usage of VPN.
Appealing to get your account back is a hit and miss (mostly miss). My 22k karma account was reinstated after about a week (or 2) with just 4 appeals but then shadow banned AGAIN just a few weeks later. I appealed almost daily for about 2 months before just giving up. The other accounts (that i’ve appealed consistently, in different verbiage, for about a month) were never reinstated.
The utterly disheartening thing is even after your account is reinstated (by some miracle), it’s not like all your pre-ban contributions (posts, comments, likes?) are also reinstated. No. They are permanently gone! So all that hard work you put in just for the benefit of others and for future reference to anyone that is looking up the topic… It no longer exits!
I don’t understand the reasoning behind that. It seems self-sabotaging on Reddit’s part because 1) It discourages people from spending time and energy into making quality contributions because there is a high likelihood of it being deleted for whatever random reason, and 2) A lot of useful content that were put out there on the platform that makes a website great have been deleted. Why would you do that to yourself??
Yes you can ask the mods of the group you posted in to reinstate the posts (and comments?), but that’s not realistic if you got hundreds or thousands of comments and posts, and considering a lot of groups have admins that are not responsive.
I get that they are trying to prevent bots and nefarious activity, but there are countless other ways to do that (especially with the advent of ai). There are ways to decipher whether a post or a comment is legit or not instead of “the enemy is wearing red. Lets kill EVERYONE wearing red”
A lot of the reasons of why people used Reddit and what made Reddit great seem to no longer exit after the API change. They seem to be actively making it difficult to use Reddit.
OK, rant over, and back to the main question… How can I circumvent these bans while still using VPN or which free VPNs or Socks can I use that would be less likely to get banned? I don’t care if the VPN sells my data because I will isolate it and use it only for Reddit perhaps through a VM (I’m on Linux). As long as Reddit and its cronies can’t ID me anywhere else outside of that Reddit account (e.g know that it was me who searched “Where to buy marine paints?” on x search engine 2:44 mins ago), I’m good.
