Reddit Shadowban Checker

Three different things people call a shadowban

Most people who think they are shadowbanned are not. Three distinct mechanisms produce the same feeling of shouting into a void, and they have completely different fixes, so identifying which one you have is the whole job.

1. A sitewide shadowban. Reddit-wide and silent. Your account works normally for you and is invisible to everyone else, everywhere. Your public profile returns nothing to a logged-out visitor, which is the detectable signature and the only one of the three this tool can see. Typical causes are spam heuristics tripping on a new account posting links, or ban evasion. Fixed by appealing at reddit.com/appeals.
2. A subreddit ban. One community only. You are usually sent a modmail saying so, sometimes with a duration, and your account works perfectly everywhere else. Your public profile still loads fine, so this tool will report you as visible. Fixed by replying to that modmail once, politely, and asking what to change.
3. A removed or filtered post. A single post, in a single subreddit, taken down by automod or a moderator. The post still looks live in your own profile and does not exist for anyone else. This is by far the most common of the three and it is not a ban at all. Most large subreddits filter posts from accounts under a karma or account age threshold, commonly around 50 to 100 karma, and many also apply flair rules, link rules, or promo-day-only rules on top.

The thirty second test that separates them: log out, or open a private window, and look. If your profile is gone, it is a shadowban. If your profile is fine but one post is gone, it was filtered or removed. If everything is fine except one subreddit, you are banned from that subreddit. The full diagnosis in order of likelihood is in why your Reddit posts keep getting removed.

How the check works

Reddit publishes a public profile endpoint for every account, which is the same data a logged-out browser receives when it opens a user page. This tool asks that endpoint from a server, so the answer cannot be contaminated by your own session, cookies or cache, which is what makes checking your own profile in a private window unreliable when you have ever been logged in on that browser.

A profile that loads means Reddit is serving your account to strangers, which rules out both a sitewide shadowban and a suspension. Nothing coming back means Reddit has no public profile at that name, and that has two explanations that no external tool can tell apart: you are shadowbanned, or the username does not exist. That is why the result asks you whether you can see the profile while logged in. If you can see it and the world cannot, you have your answer.

The check never touches your account. There is no OAuth, no password, no connected Reddit login, and VoicePost never posts to Reddit on anyone's behalf. Requests are rate limited per visitor and each username is cached for sixty seconds so refreshing the page does not hit Reddit twice, which is ordinary API etiquette rather than a limitation on you.

A suspension is not a shadowban

If the tool reports a suspension, that is the loud version: Reddit tells you it happened, the profile page says so publicly, and it often carries a duration. Suspensions are appealable and frequently temporary. Shadowbans are silent and, because nobody tells you, usually discovered weeks late by a founder wondering why three good posts got zero replies.

How to appeal, and what not to do

Appeal once, from the affected account, at reddit.com/appeals. Describe what you were posting, say you want to follow the rules, and ask what to change. Do not argue, and do not appeal repeatedly. For a subreddit ban the equivalent is a single polite modmail to that subreddit's moderators.

The one thing that reliably makes it worse is creating a new account. Ban evasion is detected, and it converts a recoverable situation into a permanent one across every account Reddit associates with you.

How warmup prevents this in the first place

Nearly every founder shadowban traces to the same sequence: create an account, post a link to your product within the first week, trip the spam heuristics that exist precisely to catch that pattern. The prevention is boring and it works. Comment for a couple of weeks before you post at all, get past the karma and age thresholds the large subreddits filter on, and keep the ratio of non-promotional to promotional contributions at roughly nine to one.

You can check where your account currently sits with the Reddit karma and warmup calculator, and check whether your promo ratio reads as safe with the ban risk checker. The full sequence for a new account is in how to warm up a new Reddit account, and the promotion playbook that keeps it clean afterwards is in how to promote your SaaS on Reddit without getting banned.