I'm a mod of a default subreddit. We can't shadowban people from the entire site, but we can use AutoModerator to moderate comments and shadowban users in a specific subreddit based on certain criteria (e.g. one day old account with negative comment karma or if account mentions certain keywords) or by manually adding a user to a shadowban list. This is separate from reddit's built-in subreddit ban, which is much more obvious.
It's possible (and sounds a lot like) he got banned/shadowbanned in /r/news and the mods there thought his self-promotion went too far and got reported for spam to maybe be banned outright from reddit. That seems excessive though. I usually just tell people to do a better job contributing to reddit if they're being spammy, and I only report people when they're creating new accounts to harass others.
Someone might want to message the mods of whatever subreddit he was banned from. I don't know enough about the situation to feel justified in doing so. But I checked /r/spam, and found this:
I don't mod a default, but in my experience it's historically been really easy to get someone shadowbanned for self-promotion by submitting to r/spam. I don't know if it's run by a script or just overworked interns, but anyone technically breaking the 20% rule over any period of time has tended to get the axe without consideration of mitigating factors (celebrity, posting to subs that encourage self-promotion, etc).
I don't know if that's changing with the drama over r/gamedeals company reps being repeatedly shadowbanned for trolls submitting them to r/spam, but not optimistic.
I'm a mod of a default subreddit. We can't shadowban people from the entire site, but we can use AutoModerator to moderate comments and shadowban users in a specific subreddit based on certain criteria (e.g. one day old account with negative comment karma or if account mentions certain keywords) or by manually adding a user to a shadowban list. This is separate from reddit's built-in subreddit ban, which is much more obvious.
It's possible (and sounds a lot like) he got banned/shadowbanned in /r/news and the mods there thought his self-promotion went too far and got reported for spam to maybe be banned outright from reddit. That seems excessive though. I usually just tell people to do a better job contributing to reddit if they're being spammy, and I only report people when they're creating new accounts to harass others.
reply