I got shadowbanned twice before I figured it out.

The first time, I thought it was bad luck. The second time, I knew it was me. I was building a small tool to share updates about my indie project across a few subreddits, and I was posting too fast, too often, too mechanically. Reddit's spam filters are ruthless, and they don't care that your intentions were good.

The fix wasn't clever. It was embarrassingly simple: I needed to slow down and act like a human.

What Was Going Wrong

My original script looped through a list of subreddits and fired off posts one after another. No delays. No randomness. Just a tight loop hitting the API as fast as it could. To Reddit's systems, that looks exactly like a bot — because it is.

The problems were:

No delay between posts — humans don't post five times in four seconds

No randomness — identical timing patterns are a red flag

No queue — if something failed, I had no way to retry gracefully

The Fix: A Simple Rate-Limited Queue

Here's the core of what I built.…