An introspection into Reddit's Machine Learning Ban Evaders Detection Algorithm

Before I proceed, I will like to give a little backstory. However if you do not care about the ramblings of a failed redditor(wonder how you can fail at this thou, lol), skip the next two paragraphs.

So, I have a reddit account, which used to be my main one, actively posted comments with, till one day, I tried to make a post on a sub reddit about an opensource project I created, only to get hit with the “Sorry, this post was removed by Reddit’s filters” tag.

After days of research, I eventually found the “appeal test”, which basically asks you to visit this url: reddit.com/appeals. If you are permitted to be able to submit an appeal, you are “banned”, but in my own case, “shadowbaned”(essentially, you can only comment, and view, nothing more).

I tried to create another account to bypass the “shadowban”, only to get shadowbanned after making a post.

Unfortunately for Reddit, I specialize in evading detection and fortunately for me, account creation on there is relatively easy.So how did I come to the conclusion that Reddit detects ban evasion by some sophisticated pattern matching and not using fingerprints and IP address?

True, they still use tradition bot detection frameworks like this. I tested, by creating an account on a mobile affiliated with my original account in the past, even after deleting the app for a while and a change of IP address they still figured it was me trying to evade.

My guess is, even if you delete the app, there are still little snippets, ruminants of data that still hangs around, so on reinstall, it does lookups and the device is still tagged via the device id, so there is that.

But you can’t really tag a browser. No I’m not talking about chrome(I can think of 100 ways to still smell you even if you delete your browser and reinstall). Brave fares much better along with some VPN juice.I first tried posting the same pieces of content on one account, then tried changing the content with different “wordings”, while keeping two links in the contents, even guising them with a “link shortener” in certain tests. For both cases I got shadowbanned. However, it will do justice to consider that it was a pretty niche content — subject around “browser automation cluster”.

Then I tried posting only the link in the comments, but was given a pass. I therefore concluded it has very little to do with the links.

Further, on new accounts, created random posts and comments across in “related” subreddits (related in the sense of where I regularly hang out in the old accounts). I never got “shadowbanned” doing this.

Then lastly, I reworked the original post using llms to repost using a new account. Then I got “shadowbanned”.

I would like to think the only reason why the axe kept dropping on these accounts was because it was new, but Reddit has become more strict along with other social sites. which is perfectly normal and understandable, especially in this year 2026, no thanks to “AI Slop” and “malicious bots” leaving innocent accounts to get caught in the crossfire.