Reddit can silently hide all of your mesages/topics

Any of you thinking about marketing your game on reddit should read my story:

https://www.gamedev.net/forums/topic/695190-reddit-can-silently-hide-all-of-your-mesagestopics/

Basically reddit can put your account into a "shadowban" mode, where you would see your own messages but nobody else would see them. I lost like two weeks worth of posts and comments there due to this and feel myself like a fool.

Here is how to avoid it: log off from time to time and check if you see your own posts - if you don't you are shadowbanned.

 

I've been shadowbanned a couple of times too but always got some sort of a notification about it and a link to the shadowban test subreddit + other instructions.

 

Isn't the whole point of it that you don't know about it? Also what does one need to do to get banned multiple times there? I'm not familiar with reddit culture.

 

Well, I guess it works if everyone but me knows about it's effects. It's curious though, cuz once you know how it works its insanely easy to spot and circumvent. Oh well, from what I've learned since my "accident" I would never trust reddit again. It's quite shocking to see such blatant censorship from a popular western social media.

 

are there any mods prowling reddit? I think you should talk to them.

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/ShadowBan/comments/6an2bv/an_unofficial_guide_on_how_to_avoid_being/

 

Why would you be shadowbanned in the first place?

 

Seems like what people usually mean with "promote your game on reddit" is not allowed on reddit.

Thanks for the helpful list @Ryiah

 

This thread is very thinly related to game dev and Unity though and almost got locked. Had to read twice.

Yeah good call on game marketing, helps to ensure you have a good reputation before you start.

 

Well every shadowban I've received I have had to contact reddit employee as subreddit mods cant do anything. Every single one of the bans have been a false one due reddit algorithms being trigger happy and I assume that's partly the reason why at least some subreddits have bots scanning and giving notifications about it.

Never created a thread in reddit, behaved badly nor promoted anything

 

Doesn't seem like reddit is a good place to directly market. I would not do that. I would instead create a support page / network for people to chat and help each other. Direct marketing seems like a dumb thing and should be banned.

Otherwise you're going to just turn reddit into a free for all advertising platform nobody uses any more.

 

Being shadowbanned is specific to the subreddit, so he broke some rules on that particular subreddit in order to be shadowbanned.

There's really no link to what he did to be banned, just whining about shadowbanning. That's not even relevant to this forum

 

What was your "accident"? Because that whole thread you linked is a serious mess and overly confusing.

 

Reading over your lengthy thread, it looks like you repeatedly violated the rules of the subreddit and they had to shadowban you to keep you from doing it again.

 

I sympathize with you. Reddit is heavy handed on banning and silencing. Granted, yes, you probably violated their terms and you should generally not do that. However, lots of places have rules but the mods don't all act like Benito Mussolini. That's probably all I should say about Reddit. But rest assured, my comment will be posted on some obscure sub with my username blacked out so people can anonymously express their distaste.

Any form of social media where people can freely comment, post images and comments and yell at you (about how good your game is of course) is better than some heavily moderated discussion format. Also, generally avoid dev communities. People are haters.

Twitter is also useless.

 

Unless things have changed, mods cant shadowban. They can ban you temporarily/permanently if they don't like someones posts but then you are also notified about it and fully blocked on doing anything.

Shadowban however is an automatic system "ban" based on behavior algorithms and subreddit mods cant do anything about even if they wanted to, this includes unbanning the shadowban status. The system does not always work correctly which is why they dont block you from posting. Only reddit admins manually remove these bans and they probably check the reason at the same time to adjust the system on false positives.

 

Maybe your just doing it wrong?

What are your thoughts on other social medias @Master-Frog?
facebook
tumbler
flicker
youtube
twitch
TIGSource
instragram
dev blogs?

 

Twitter is extremely useful in promotion, lots of devs - even larger studios - use Twitter very successfully and gain a lot of traction with it.

If people aren't receptive to your content, then its generally a problem with content, not the platform used to distribute it.

 

Not long ago i joined reddit to advertise my assets. I noticed people hate when you do that there. Unless subredit is for advertising assets... Which is nothing strange of course, people hate that everywhere. Just, for some reason i feel level of hate there is stronger.

 

Reddit is pretty fickle since the entire spectrum of personalities can upvote/downvote your posts so it's important to be appealing to the general public in what you post or at least be sure that the vast majority of that subreddit is very interested in what you're posting.

People dislike advertisements in general so if you're going to promote a product you have to do it the right now and in the right places. Subreddits need to be pruned of content like that because if they weren't then it would turn into a cess pool of advert garbage that no one wants to see.

Shadowbans are not something the average user needs to worry about. Except in rare circumstances or things like autokicks, bans are not handed out lightly.

 

Well it's up to you to close this thread really, I personally only wanted to prevent other people from making a fool of themselves. I am not against banns or curation/moderation, I just think it should be humane. I am a dev and figured other devs might get into a similar situation.

Aaah, so nice to see people still can't read on the Internet. And full of spite too! Nice to meet you too, good Sir.

A. I cannot possibly know when or why I was shadow banned. That is the whole point of the shadow ban.

B. I've posted my inbox picture where one can read that a bot notified me about one of my threads being hidden, because it was a link to a screenshot which, in my view, was the whole reason why I got shadowbanned as I never received any replies from anyone since that message (I know it now in hindsight). If you summ it up with what @Ostwind said:

just before your comment, you get the picture, but sure reading is not an option at all. It's obviously better to just spill insults.

Aaah, the trend continues.

A. I never noticed a thing that would suggest I REPEATEDLY violated reddit's rules. Your response most likely means that you 1) never really read my "length thread" properly"; 2) don't know reddit's rules; 3) did not read the other posts in this thread either.

B. I never said I am a saint, obviously I posted the wrong thing, instead I wanted 1) to express my frustration with the system and 2) to prevent other people from feeling like complete idiots, just like I felt.

C. If you were to check the stuff people post on /r/gamedev, and especially /r/unity3d you would be surprised how much shameless self promotion is there.

Thanks for your kind words Sir, to be honest I crave for negative feedback and swearing towards my games. That stuff is way more useful than positive "good job", "i like your graphics" or some other stuff. Negative comments, when filtered and distilled of swearing can be digested into grains of wisdom about the weak spots of your game. Honestly I never understood when people say they are afraid/shy to show their game because of negative feedback. Negative feedback IS the feedback, the rest is just noise.

Well, returning to the point at hand, I am at least glad that Unity forum does not have such a brutal system. The truth is noone is an angel, but it's our mistakes that make us better people in the end of the day.

Huge thanks for your insights.

It's pointless to write that I WAS, in fact, handed the ban lightly, because you clearly cannot read what other people write in this thread, I can only wish you to never feel as dumb as I felt when I got into this trouble.

 

There are always people who get away with it at this level. On forums or reddit, the strategy is to catch what you can and don't sweat the rest. It's not 100% fair but it's pretty much the same as casual policing as well. The objective is to keep the pot from boiling over (justice is an archaic irrelevance for these models) so it is still a resource people can use. Some people get caught and that's life. It doesn't mean anyone is going to care enough to chase every last person down.

Because the objective is to stop things going too far, and this is enough, and sane enough. The concept of fairness is better replaced with a concept of physics.

 

Thanks for the link.

Well, I am sorry for not being clear for you, maybe my English is off, given it's my third language, but basically I've been replying to people on reddit for several days only to realize noone can see my comments.

 

It is indeed, particularly when you get the right snowball effect of likes and retweets.

I've had tweets liked by big companies which instantly gave projects a lot of traffic. After a day or so it tends to dwindle, but if it's a like, not a retweet, there could be a long tail effect. If you're not just making niche server stuff like I do, you could see quite a bit of extra traffic for a long time.

I treat Twitter like a feed of random, vaguely curated links. You follow people who find good stuff if you want to find new things, and you apply the right hashtag magic to make people retweet or follow you.

It's an awful system for actual communication though

 

Srsly, I am getting a feeling that I speak Chinese. I never said I am against moderation, in fact I said this:

I don't need to be explained the importance of moderation, I value the work of moderators and appreciate it as a forum user. I totally agree with all you've said. That part of my answer that you took out of context was actually addressing the statement:

which basically degraded me to a child who selfishly posts whatever he wants and does not care about other people. I was just trying to point out that my post, in my humble opinion, did not differ that greatly from other posts on reddit and still I received the most brutal and sadistic punishment I've ever experienced online. You all laugh at me, but I wrote like 2000 words over those few days, which involved browsing the web, searching for references, etc. It really stung that my work, albeight worthless for some, was simply silently erased.

 

Did I blame you? Or was I merely commenting on the state of reddit and forums in general? Please tell me who is speaking what language, again?

 

Well this is quite off-topic, but because quite a few people talk about it I would say that my experience with twitter was quite decent. I've been promoting my unity plugin there and people respond positively. It's not like fantastic, but it got me around 100 views on YouTube and I did not do that much. Good tip is to simply repeat your tweets from time to time. Simply repeat them.

 

Um, you quoted my post, in internet terms this is a direct answer. Anyway, sorry I misunderstood you. Again, even if I was mistaken, this thread was never about undervaluing the importance of moderation, this thread is simply a strive to spread awareness about a brutal imperfection of the system, which many of the users of this forum are likely to use.

 

https://www.reddit.com/user/cubrman

Goes nowhere.

What posts? Inbox is messages sent to you, not your posts.

Your 'story' doesn't include what you posted. Only that you were banned. So, as it stands, there's no really relevant information for us here to consider you an innocent victim.

If being dumb is not being naive then I'll happily brand myself a moron.

 

But this is, of course, photoshopped.

Btw. thank you for confirming you did not understand the point of the thread.

 

Ah. Okay. I just thought there was more to it than that and the sheer size of the post threw me off.

 

Ok, by distilling your spite, I finally understood a valid criticism behind it. I will edit Gamedev thread now.

 

Some quotes from the thread @Ryiah shared:

Basically I broke these rules with a few of my posts:

However, this is baffling:

This describes a fair system. According to this fair system, my few violating threads would be invisible, while my comments, which had zero ads there, should have been visible (after some time). I think that quote is wrong because my comments never appeared.

 

What was the length of time you waited? I know with Unity Answers the moderators are entirely volunteers (just like with the forums) and there's no motivation to constantly watch the queue so it can very easily take a few days or longer to get through (fortunately after a small amount of karma you auto pass it).

 

Honestly this is an issue you should take up with the subreddit's moderators directly as it's basically meta-discussion. They have the power to adjust their rules, lift bans, modify auto-kick bots, etc. There's nothing we can do here and this feels more like a rant train than anything else.

 

No, notice it says "shadowbanned user." It sounds like it shadowbans a user based on whatever criteria, and then everything the user submits has to be approved before being shown publicly.


I personally don't really like the idea of Reddit, mainly the upvote-downvote system. It leads to cute irrelevant quips being the most popular comments obscuring actual helpful information. Additionally it leads to a bizarre insecurity where if a person gets a downvote, they'll edit their comment and complain about it.

Also,

Lol.

 

...which is then followed by upvotes and comments that were against the poster get downvoted instead. Tables turned!

 

Sure. I would be happy to admit I am doing things wrong, but first I would need to see someone doing them right. Dev communities are full of developers, who have opinions and don't necessarily like the games others are working on. I think talking about doing something is mutually exclusive with doing it.

I think what matters is not what platform or approach, but the product people make. Namely, when people make good games and people like them, then they get more social media response. And of course, let's be realistic... Spending money on promotion is the ultimate factor that takes something from small time to prime time. So it's sort of beating a dead horse.

Twitter is not good because Twitter is hard to navigate, and confusing. The best advertisement is to get popular streamers to play your game without paying them to do it, but that takes skill and luck.

Luck is king, man. I'd rather be lucky than a genius.

 

Twitter has exponentially beneficial results based on the popularity of an account that you control. However, up until you have 50,000 followers or thereabouts, you have no actual presence on Twitter that is worth anything. How do you get 50,000 followers for your game that you just started? You need attention to get attention... Ultimately you must pay for promotion if you want anything out of Twitter, or already have brand recognition. For most people, especially small time individuals, Twitter is useless. You're just participating in a game to gain followers against other people who are doing the same.

Ultimately, the goal of any promotional means is that people will discover your product who aren't necessarily looking for it in the 1st place.

Discoverability is the key to any sort of promotional marketing campaign.

Twitter users algorithms and methodology switch make your product extremely difficult to find unless somebody else chooses to promote it go already has a high degree of popularity. People with a high degree of popularity don't retweet things, often unless there's something in it for them. Promoting your little game doesn't exactly have a lot of benefit.

An account with 50,000 followers might might get 12 subtweets on a popular post. But there not the tweets that you want because they are only coming from people that are already subscribed to your Twitter feed. What you want is the organic retweets? What you want is people openly and broadly sharing your? Content across the Internet and that's simply something that really just doesn't happen.

Organic content interchanges and interactions really don't happen frequently on social media where everything tends to be extremely calculated.

And, of course, the idea that just by having good content. You can automatically have a popular Twitter account is pretty amusing.

 

Any metrics on the conversion rate between Twitter impressions and sales?

Cause I'd really love to read about that.