Am I shadowbanned?

What is a Reddit shadowban?

A Reddit shadowban hides your account from everyone but you. Your posts and comments look normal on your screen, but nobody else sees them, and your profile shows a 404 error to logged-out visitors. Reddit sends no notice, which is why people post for weeks before noticing the silence.

It's an anti-spam measure aimed at bots and link farms, but real people get caught constantly, especially founders and marketers whose posting pattern (new account, one product, lots of links) resembles spam. The full picture is in our shadowban guide.

How to check if you're shadowbanned

Open reddit.com/user/yourname in a private browser window while logged out. If the page says there's nobody with that username, you're shadowbanned. If it loads normally, your account is visible.

Here's the manual version, step by step:

1. Open a private or incognito window. This matters because Reddit shows you your own content even when nobody else can see it. Logged out, you see what everyone else sees.
2. Type reddit.com/user/yourname into the address bar, replacing yourname with your exact username. No spaces, and spelling counts: a typo produces the same 404 a shadowban does.
3. Read the result. A shadowbanned account gets a page saying nobody on Reddit goes by that name. A visible account shows the normal profile: avatar, karma, post history.
4. Test individual posts too. Copy the direct link to a recent post and open it in the same private window. If your profile loads fine but the post 404s, your account isn't shadowbanned; the spam filter removed that one post.

Re-check after anything changes: a few days after you file an appeal, after a burst of link posts, or any time replies and votes drop to zero overnight. A shadowban can start at any point, so a clear result last month says nothing about today.

The checker above runs the same test for you: it loads your profile the way a logged-out visitor would and reads the result. It also checks Reddit's suspension marker, so you don't confuse the two states, and shows your karma and account age for context.

Shadowban vs suspension vs spam filter

A shadowban silently hides your whole account. A suspension is public: your profile page says the account is suspended. The spam filter removes individual posts while your account stays visible. All three make your content disappear, which is why they get mixed up.

• Shadowban: account-level and silent. Profile 404s logged out. Everything you post is invisible to others.
• Suspension: account-level and announced. You can't post at all, and everyone can see the suspension notice.
• Spam filter: post-level and silent. Your account is fine, but a specific post is hidden. Open the post link in a private window to confirm.
• Subreddit removal: one community removed one post, by a moderator or AutoMod. The rest of Reddit is unaffected. Our removal diagnosis guide walks through telling these apart by symptom.

Of these states, spam-filtered posts are by far the most common. In the first half of 2025, Reddit admins removed 55.1 million posts and comments, 40.9 million of them for spam, and the sitewide spam filter does the bulk of that silently. If your posts keep vanishing while this checker says your account is fine, the spam filter is the first suspect.

Why Reddit shadowbans accounts

Shadowbans come from Reddit's sitewide anti-spam systems, not from subreddit moderators. The usual triggers are behavior patterns that look automated: posting the same link to many subreddits quickly, a young account posting links to one domain, buying or trading votes, or coming back on a new account after a ban.

You don't need to be a spammer to trip these. Posting your own product from a three-day-old account into five subreddits in one afternoon reads, to a filter, exactly like spam.

The specific patterns that trip it, as far as anyone outside Reddit can tell (Reddit doesn't publish thresholds, so these come from watching which accounts get caught):

• The same link in many subreddits, fast. Posting one link to five or more subs within a few hours reliably trips detection. Three in quick succession is enough when the domain is brand new.
• New account plus new domain. A young account posting links to a domain with no Reddit history is the highest-risk combination. It's also exactly what a product launch looks like.
• A feed that's mostly self-promotion. Reddit's old 9:1 guideline (nine real contributions for every promotional post) gets enforced at the account level. The danger zone is when 60 to 70 percent of your recent activity points at one product or domain.
• Vote manipulation. Coordinated upvotes, alt accounts on the same connection, vote trading. Upvoting your own launch post from a second account is a common way in.
• Ban evasion. Reddit links accounts through shared IP, device, and email. A new account tied to a banned one inherits the problem, usually within a few weeks of being created.

How to recover from a shadowban

Appeal directly to Reddit admins at reddit.com/appeals. Keep it short and honest, stop the behavior that looked like spam, and wait: reviews usually take days, sometimes weeks. Posting more while shadowbanned doesn't help, since those posts are invisible too.

What to write: a few sentences. Say what you were doing (posting your product link to several subreddits in one day, for example), say you understand why it looked like spam, and say what you've stopped. Admins read a lot of these. Short and honest gets further than a wall of protest.

Then wait, and leave the account alone while you do. Some appeals get an answer in days, some take weeks, and some never get one at all. Two things make it worse in the meantime: posting more, since every one of those posts is invisible and adds to the pattern, and creating a fresh account, which Reddit's ban-evasion system ties back to the shadowbanned one.

Recovery is as silent as the ban. There's no notification; your profile just starts loading for logged-out visitors again, so re-running the check every few days is the practical way to know. When it lifts, comment for a while before you post links. The account's history is what got flagged, and comments are how you rebuild it.

How the shadowban checker and test work (and what they can't see)

The checker loads your profile the way a logged-out visitor would, which is the one reliable shadowban tell, and reads Reddit's public suspension marker so a suspension never gets mislabeled as a shadowban. When the account is visible, it shows your public karma and account age for context. That's the whole method: the same test you'd run by hand in a private window, without the window.

Two things it can't see. First, post-level spam filtering: an account that checks out clean can still have individual posts silently removed by the spam filter. That's a per-post state, not an account state, so the fix is the manual test above: open the post's direct link in a private window. Second, a logged-out 404 from a shadowban looks identical to a 404 for a username that never existed. If you mistype your name, the result reads the same, so the checker calls that case inconclusive instead of guessing.

How to avoid it next time

Warm up before you promote: comment more than you post, keep your own links to a small share of your activity, and space launches out instead of blasting one link across subreddits in an hour. Most of all, know each subreddit's rules before you post, because removals and reports are what feed the filters.

That last part is what WillItStay does: paste your draft, pick the subreddit, and it checks the post against the sub's live rules, AutoMod gates, and your account signals before you publish.

Shadowban questions, answered