Basically what the title says. I commented on a post and sent a link to my comment to my wife to get her take on the post and my response. To start, the link just takes her to the topic and not my comment. If she tries to find my comment it isn’t listed. If she manually goes to my profile and tracks down the comment all it says is “[Removed]”. However, from my perspective the comment is still live with 1 view and no activity. I’ve tried closing my browser, refreshing the page and everything and for me the comment is still visible even on the page for the post. For everybody else though it has been removed.
The crazy thing is the comment isn’t even controversial; somebody asked for marriage advice and I gave some. The “removal” seems to be automated too because I sent her the link basically as soon as I posted the comment and it was already shadow banned.
Are you sure you’ve been shadow banned? You can check your account here.
What you’re describing just sounds like a regular comment removal by automod without a reply telling you about it (so you don’t get notified either).
That’s how removal works. It’s still visible to you, it shows up as [Removed] to others. Iirc comments by shadowbanned accounts just don’t show up at all to other users.
Edit: Are they even still removed by now? Might have just been a tentative removal pending moderator approval. I do see recent marriage-related comments on your Reddit profile (assumed same name as here) which I can find in their respective threads.
You’re right, it appears to be back now. It’s just annoying to have probably half my attempts to contribute auto moderated by a bot because I included some trigger word, or I forgot to add the proper “flair” etc.
I still call this shadowbanning if it’s just the comment and not the whole account, because intentionally hiding from someone that nobody is seeing what they write is what shadowbanning is all about.
But how can it be a shadowban if no one got banned? Shadowremoval or shadowdeletion would make sense, but shadowban sounds misleading for that usecase.
I used the term shadow ban in the OP because honestly it feels like it happens a LOT to me, and for things that honestly, I don’t think are controversial, don’t contain excessive (or any) swearing, etc. I commented on a video of somebody passing out and said “don’t lock your knees” and the comment got removed for being “too similar” to other comments, per an auto response I got. I told a lady being attacked by a dog to protect herself and the comment got removed for “threatening harm to others” until I requested review and told the mods to actually read the damn comment before removing it. It just gets tiring trying to use Reddit at all when there’s a 50/50 chance that anything I do will get removed or hidden from view, sometimes without my knowledge.