Developer banned six times on Reddit while trying to share an open-source project

A ban for posting a GitHub link

A first-person account of trying, and repeatedly failing, to share an open-source project on Reddit reached the Hacker News front page. The post, published on orchidfiles.com on 6 October 2026, describes six consecutive account bans, each triggered by a different unwritten rule the author only discovered after being kicked off.

The premise was unremarkable: the author had built something, open-sourced it on GitHub, and wanted to tell a subreddit that exists for sharing exactly that kind of project. The post disappeared immediately and the account was suspended. What followed was a month-long exercise in reverse-engineering Reddit's moderation from the outside.

Six accounts, six different rules

Each attempt failed for a new reason, according to the account.

The first ban taught the author that fresh accounts cannot simply post links; they must first build up a history of ordinary, link-free activity. A second account, registered from a different IP address, left three comments right away and was banned anyway — the inferred rule being that new accounts need to sit for several days before engaging, and then comment only once or twice a day.

The third attempt followed those rules and posted a link-free piece of text that had performed well on other platforms. Within a minute, a commenter dismissed it as AI slop, and both the post and the account were removed. The author's conclusion: writing that runs longer than a couple of paragraphs, is neatly formatted and contains no typos now reads as machine-generated to moderators or automated filters, and that suspicion alone appears to be grounds for removal.

Attempt four leaned into the absurdity — short, first-person posts with deliberate mistakes — and survived until a link went up, at which point the account was banned again. Creating a subreddit of one's own, attempt five, got the community deleted and the account banned too.

For the final try, the author followed advice gathered from moderators and other users: register through the mobile app, which supposedly makes an account look more trustworthy, and earn 1,000 karma before posting any link. After a month the karma target was reached and a link to another GitHub project went up. The post was queued for manual review; hours passed without a moderator decision, and the account was banned before that review concluded.

The author stopped creating accounts at that point, noting that Reddit users never got to hear about the projects that prompted the whole effort.

A rulebook nobody can read

As the account tells it, the operative rules on Reddit — minimum account age, comment frequency caps, karma thresholds, app-based signups, an aversion to polished prose — exist mainly as folklore passed between moderators and users, enforced silently and learned through failure. Bans arrive without explanation, and each successful adaptation simply reveals the next tripwire.

That opacity is the post's real subject. A newcomer who follows every visible rule can still be banned for reasons they have to guess at, and the feedback loop — deleted post, banned account, no diagnostic — makes the guessing expensive.

Why it matters

Reddit remains one of the largest discovery channels for open-source work, so friction there directly affects whose projects get seen. The account describes a system that, intentionally or not, filters newcomers by their willingness to spend weeks manufacturing an artificial posting history before mentioning their own code.

The AI-slop wrinkle cuts in both directions: as platforms scramble to suppress machine-generated text, writers whose output is simply clean and well-structured become suspects, and the prescribed workaround — adding errors on purpose — effectively punishes competence.

Finally, the story's traction on Hacker News suggests the experience is widely shared. The deeper problem for platforms is that would-be contributors cannot tell a legitimate spam rejection from an arbitrary one, and many, like this author, simply conclude the channel is closed to them.