Can shadow banning be automated, or is a shadow ban always an explicit decision by a moderator to conceal a specific comment or post?
When a post is marked as spam, the user who posted it can see it in their submissions, and it will be marked as removed
In our Reddit AMA, we made a comment that showed up to others as "Comment removed", however it appeared to us as if it had posted:
So I'm still pretty confused, as this "comment removed" seems identical to shadow banning in that the original poster cannot see that the comment was removed.
I'm not familiar with this specific case. I know people and websites can get blanket shadow banned. I also know it's not a tool available to subreddit moderators, only reddit moderators.
It's possible reddit moderators have other tools to make posts and comments appear differently to posters and everyone else. Quite devious.
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Shadow bans are the province of admins not sub moderators. However there are sitewide automod rules that will flag some sites as spam (or some users) which will automatically pop up in the mod queue and will need to be manually approved by the mods. However when an item is reported like this it is not clear why it is marked and so maybe just removed from the queue out of a need to keep it clear.
The best course of action is to contact the mods of the sub and ask them why a submission has been removed. Assuming your account does not look like a spammer or a newbie account then they will look at it and can decide retroactively to approve it or suggest you resubmit it again and they can make sure it gets approved manually then.
Hope that clears up some confusion.
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
Submit