The five ways Reddit kills your account, and which one just happened to you
AutoMod filter, reputation filter, subreddit ban, shadowban, suspension. They look identical from the inside and the fixes are completely different.
the short answer: reddit has five different ways to stop your content, they produce almost identical symptoms, and the fix for each is different. most founders diagnose the wrong one and then “fix” something that was never broken. i got 40+ accounts killed learning to tell them apart. here is the diagnostic.
The five, from mildest to terminal
1. AutoMod filter. your post disappears immediately, or never appears in new. the subreddit still works, you can still comment elsewhere, your account is fine. this is a per-subreddit rule catching a keyword, a domain, an account age, or a karma threshold. it is silent and it is the most common thing that happens to founders. recoverable: yes, easily.
2. Reputation filter, driven by Contributor Quality Score. posts get filtered in subreddits that have the reputation filter switched on, even when your karma and account age clear the stated bar. CQS is a real reddit feature with five tiers, and it is invisible to you. you cannot see your score and you cannot appeal it. karma farming raises your karma while lowering your CQS, which is why the standard advice to “build karma first” can actively make this worse. recoverable: yes, but slowly, and only by behaving differently over time.
3. Subreddit ban. you get a message saying you have been banned from that community. everything else on reddit works normally. recoverable: sometimes, by modmail, once.
4. Shadowban. account level and completely silent. you keep full access, your posts look fine to you, and nobody else can see anything you write. the tell is a simultaneous engagement collapse across several normally active subreddits on the same day. recoverable: sometimes, and hard.
5. Suspension. visible, either time boxed or permanent, with an email. appealable at reddit.com/appeals. recoverable: occasionally. reported restore rates across all appeals sit around 12 to 14%.
How to tell which one you have
do this in order, it takes five minutes.
open a private browsing window and log out. go to your profile url. if your posts are invisible while logged out but visible when logged in, you are shadowbanned. that single check separates the account-level problems from the subreddit-level ones and almost nobody does it.
if logged-out shows your posts fine, the problem is local to one subreddit. check whether you got a ban message. a message means a subreddit ban. no message plus a vanished post means AutoMod or the reputation filter.
to separate AutoMod from the reputation filter, post something harmless and entirely non-promotional in the same subreddit. if that survives, you triggered a content rule and AutoMod caught it. if that also vanishes, the filter is reading your account rather than your post, and you are looking at CQS.
if you got an email from reddit, it is a suspension and the appeal form is the only route.
What to actually do about each
AutoMod: message the mods once, politely, with a permalink. say which rule you believe you met and what you will change. do not ask what the thresholds are, because mods will not tell you and asking marks you. do not repost.
Reputation filter: stop promoting entirely for a few weeks. comment usefully in places unrelated to your product. verify your email. do not farm karma, it works against you here.
Subreddit ban: one modmail, short, no arguing. if the answer is no, it is no. arguing turns a local ban into a wider problem because mods talk to each other.
Shadowban: appeal, and in the meantime stop everything on that account. do not create a new one to continue. see the next section.
Suspension: appeal once, honestly. accept the outcome.
The mistake that turns a small problem into a permanent one
ban evasion is punished harder than whatever you did originally. a three day suspension plus a fresh account becomes a permanent ban plus network-level action against you.
reddit’s ban evasion filter reads device and browser fingerprints, IP and network reputation, writing style, posting cadence, and overlap with a banned account’s threads and people. new accounts on the same machine, in the same subreddits, writing the same way, get linked. i learned this the expensive way more than once: each new account i spun up to “start clean” got caught faster than the last, because the signal it was matching against was me, not the account.
if you are banned, the account is gone. the next account has to belong to a different person doing genuinely different things, or it is not a different account.
Why any of this is worth the trouble
because reddit users retain. at ZuAI, reddit seeding was not the biggest volume channel but the users it brought stayed, and that is what let the blended CAC hold at $0.02 as we scaled from 10K to 2M users. a channel that brings people who leave is not cheap at any price.
reddit is also harder now than when i burned those accounts. its systems block around 23 million spam views a day and catch roughly 25,000 spam posts and comments daily, and since march 2026 accounts showing suspicious signals get prompted for human verification. the tools selling automated posting into this are selling you a ban.
the rules that keep an account alive are in the SAFE reddit playbook. this post is what to do once you have already broken one.
if you want your subreddits mapped and your approach checked before you burn an account, let’s talk.
sources: reddit help documentation on contributor quality score, safety filters, crowd control and the ban evasion filter · reddit’s june 2026 platform update on spam volumes · reddit’s march 2026 human verification announcement · published appeal-outcome reporting.