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New Redditors face several hurdles, but the important thing to remember is that it is not personal and they’re not intended to make it difficult for good faith Redditors.

The spam filter and shadowbans

Reddit is plagued by spammers and other bad actors and while there are measures in place to prevent them, and Reddit is working really hard on improving them, bad actors change their behaviour to get around new measures - it’s an arms race and one that is likely to continue.

Sometimes when new measures are put in place new Redditors can, unfortunately, get caught up and may be shadowbanned. A shadowban means that while you can post and comment, no one but the moderators in each subreddit can see your posts and comments, and then only if they have time to be checking their spam queue.

If you find yourself shadowbanned our guidance is here.

Hopefully, a happy medium can eventually be found that does not negatively impact new Redditors, but that catches the vast majority of spammers and other bad actors.

I’m pretty confident in saying that Reddit really does want this fixed! There is no sense in a company scaring off customers after all. More Redditors mean more opportunities to make a profit through advertising, awards, Reddit Premium, and so on.

Karma restrictions

In the meantime, this also means that individual subreddits have their own measures in place - karma and account age requirements. This is the main hurdle new Redditors face.

Please check out our guide on this to learn more and read our guidance on how to build up your karma genuinely.

Remember the bad guys are the spammers and bad actors, they are the root cause of all these measures. Subreddit mods are volunteers doing what they can to keep their communities healthy and using karma and account age restrictions can be a huge help. Again, they’re not intended to prevent good-faith Redditors.

That said, it can be beneficial to spend some time observing communities, learning about their rules and culture, and gradually engaging by commenting, before working up to posting. This gives you a feel for the community, what is allowed and what isn’t, and means your risk of accidentally breaking any rules is minimised.

What you can do to help

Report spammers and bad actors!

Make sure not to abuse the report button, but if you see someone breaking the site-wide rules you should hit the report button and let Reddit know.

This not only helps Reddit remove the content and take action on the account, but Reddit can use the information they gain from reports to learn how people are breaking the rules and improve the prevention measures.

Use two-factor verification on your account. I don't think it's common, but compromised accounts can be taken over by bad faith users and used for spam or worse.

General guidance

Things to always keep in mind

1. Always follow the site-wide rules
2. Never ask for karma or upvotes No asking for karma/votes
3. Always check each subreddit for its rules Joining in on Reddit
4. The reddiquette
5. Avoid karmafarms

Navigation

Reddit can also be difficult to navigate. Check out our guide on navigation.

I made a video to illustrate searching on a sub but Reddit has now switched to default to the results being in the sub if that is where you are when searching (and you can click to view the search for all of Reddit), so IDK how helpful that is anymore. I’ll have to remake it!

If you are, for example, on the home page (not in a sub), the search will search all of Reddit by default.

You can use multi-word searches and search operators to improve your search results.

Reddit is also working on improving searching.

You can find all our handy links and guides in our wiki.

Thank you for reading! I hope it was helpful.

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Guide for mods on spam, shadowbans, and false positives