Took me 4 tries to finally pin down that shadow ban pattern

Kept posting links in a specific sub and watching my stuff get zero traction, even though the content was solid. Turned out my link shortener was flagged by the auto mod, and it took me about 6 weeks of testing to realize it. Anyone else ever waste time chasing an algorithm when it was just some dumb filter setting?

2 comments

2 Comments

adam1865d ago

Man, that is painfully relatable. My buddy spent like two months trying to figure out why his videos kept getting zero views on a music sub. He was tweaking his titles, changing the thumbnails, even re-recording the whole thing once. Turns out his file host was on some site-wide blacklist from an old spam wave. He only caught it when he posted a direct link by accident and it blew up overnight. The dumbest part is he had a spreadsheet of all his "tests" and the filter was the one constant the whole time.

danielowens5d ago

That’s a wild story, @adam186, but honestly I see it a bit differently. Your buddy’s spreadsheet probably did more harm than good because he was so focused on the variables he could control that he never stopped to question the one thing he couldn’t see. The filter being the constant isn’t the dumbest part to me, it’s that nobody thinks to check the boring stuff like host reputation until they’ve burned weeks on guesswork. Most people would’ve given up after the first few re-recordings, so the real lesson is that stubbornness paid off, just not in the way he expected. Glad he finally caught it, but I bet that spreadsheet taught him more about his own blind spots than about video titles.