What is Shadowban?

A shadowban on Reddit is one of the most feared moderation outcomes for marketers and founders. When shadowbanned, your posts and comments appear completely normal from your own perspective — you can see them, interact with them, and think everything is fine. But no other user can see your content, and you receive no indication from Reddit that anything is wrong. This is intentional: if shadowbanned users knew they were blocked, they would simply create new accounts. Reddit applies shadowbans to accounts that violate site-wide rules, particularly around spam, vote manipulation, and aggressive self-promotion. According to community research and moderation logs shared publicly on Reddit, over 11% of new accounts engaging in promotional activity within their first 48 hours receive some form of automated shadowban. The key prevention strategy involves building genuine karma through non-promotional participation for at least 14 days before posting any links or brand mentions. This warm-up period signals to Reddit's anti-spam systems that you are a real community participant rather than a throwaway spam account. You can verify whether you have been shadowbanned by opening your profile URL in an incognito or private browser window. If your profile returns a 404 error or shows no posts despite you being able to see them when logged in, you are shadowbanned. Tools like ReddWise's compliance checker help identify behaviors and patterns that increase shadowban risk before you post, letting you course-correct before the ban happens. If you receive a shadowban, the typical recovery path is to appeal via modmail or, in many cases, to simply create a fresh account and rebuild karma properly from the beginning. There is no formal appeal process for automated shadowbans — Reddit's systems treat them as final.