Forgive me if this isn’t allowed to be discussed, but it’s not against rules 1 through 10, so I’m taking my chances.

I’ve been banned from certain subreddits, which having nothing to do with politics, for having some liberal / non progressive views. I won’t even say conservative views, but classically liberal views. If I were smart I’d just avoid the rare political post that comes up, but I forget and say what’s on my mind, and then it seems, moderators want to take their anger out on people like me, and ban me. I ask why, try to appeal, and they just ghost me.

For this reason, I don’t feel especially bad about ban evasion. I don’t think I’m a bad person, or that the topic of ban evasion should be taboo. I tried talking to the popular AI’s about reddit ban evasion, and they refused to help, even though it’s not a crime of any sort to do so.

I also think the practice of shadow banning people in general is fucked up. If they only did this to bots, who cares? But I’m a real person, and they’re going out of their way to deceive me.

I’m curious what recipe people have, if any, for creating a new account and not having it be shadow banned within hours.

I’ll share what I’ve come up with so far. They appear to use a risk scoring system, so there’s no one trip wire, but a bunch of trip wires that sum together to result in a shadow ban.

There are likely positive and negative flags. Obviously if you use the same email address as you had with a banned account, they will ban your new account as well. If you use throw away email like protonmail, there’s no insta-ban but it probably loses you point. If you use a public proxy, this probably loses you a point. If the location of the proxy doesn’t match the time zone reported by your web browser, you probably lose a point.

Then there is obviously tracking of behavior done after the account has been created. I suspect that every time you look at a thread and upvote something, you gain points, but these activities have to be spaced out by a matter of minutes, so that it doesn’t look like you’re doing things rapidly.

The biggest risk to seeing a new account become shadow banned is posting anything, be it comments or submissions. I don’t know how long you have to wait to post anything, but from what I can tell, you should probably wait a whole twenty four hours before making any comments, and then post only once, wait another twenty four hours before posting another, and continue at that rate for a whole weak.

Ever since reddit started requiring an email to create and account, it has become harder to figure out how to create accounts, so I figure this is the sort of thing we have to work together to come up with reliable steps to create a new account.

Even if you’re a genuinely bad person and should be banned from reddit, just the fact that it might take you up to a week, if not a month, in order to get back to where you were pre-ban, is punishment in and of itself, but a lot of us are not jerks, we just believe in, for example, individual rights over collective rights, and that by itself can result in a mod banning you, ruining your ability to interact with a lot of like minded people for no good reason.