I built parody dating sites, Reddit locked my account, and then the robots refused to talk to me

Let me tell you about the most Reddit thing that has ever happened to me on Reddit.

I built parody dating sites as a joke, posted them to a subreddit I love, had an incredible afternoon of laughs with a genuinely fun group of people, and then got locked out of my account mid-thread. No warning. No clear reason. No human available to talk to. Just a wall of automated forms and a deafening silence that has now lasted ten days and counting.

If you want to feel the joy of that afternoon before we get into the frustration, the original post is still up: I am a grown ass adult who built parody dating websites instead of actually dating. AMA. but you won’t see the content nor any of my comments but you will see the overwhelming positive human interaction from other members.

The post still has the author set to u/geekandi but all of my comments are now [deleted], and if you hover over the post author, it states:

Account suspended

Reddit has suspended this account. Mod notes and previous actions are preserved, but other data is inaccessible.

Am I banned? Am I suspended? Am I shadowbanned? What the fuck am I?!

The Afternoon That Started It All

Part of the reason I built the parody sites in the first place is that the internet has gotten so fucking weird and impersonal. From the e-thugs who are assholes online but would never ever act the same way in real life, to the enshittification of things we used to use and love. It is dystopian and absolutely lonely. On the internet we exist but we do not live. The parody sites were a poke at the process, a reason to laugh at something worth laughing at, and a small attempt to make the corner of the internet I hang out in feel a little more human for five minutes. Queue up a small ‘laugh at yourself’ set of moments. We should laugh at ourselves. We are fucking humans. We do human things; some of those things are hilarious!

On June 4th, 2026, around 2pm CDT, I posted to r/datingoverfifty with what I thought was a pretty solid premise: I had built two parody dating sites over lunch, my work day was done, and wanted to share them.

PlentyOfDeadFish.com is a parody of Plenty of Fish, except the members are dead fish. Gerald is belly-up at Lake Minnetonka. Kenneth is at Whole Foods, $12.99/lb, well-preserved. The compatibility quiz matches you with a dead fish no matter what you pick. The online member counter is 0. It is, I maintain, the most accurate thing on the internet.

BumbleAround.com is a parody of Bumble but really about the very human experience of bumbling around online dating at 11pm in sweatpants, accomplishing nothing. There is a live countdown timer on your matches with increasingly unhinged copy as time runs out. Twenty-three percent of users are currently on the toilet. We do not judge. We do know.

And then, because the sub was so great about it and because u/Disastrous_Fox_8707 had a brilliant idea mid-thread, I built a third one while the conversation was still going: BurnTheHaystackWithATinder.com. A parody of both Tinder and the Burned Haystack Dating Method, which is a real thing a real professor invented. It has a live Block-to-Burn button on every profile, a real-time Red Flag Feed cycling through 60+ community verdicts, and a Kevin/Debbie Compatibility Widget where the algorithm keeps matching them and neither of them understands why.

All three sites are mean about the process, not any person in it. That distinction matters to me. Mean people suck.

You can tell I cribbed a bunch of the above from my actual comments and words on the sites. I thought it was funny then and I think it is still funny today even if my account is still in ban-jail.

The Engagement Was Genuinely Postive

The sub showed up. I made 51 comments on June 4th alone, nearly all in that thread, responding to ideas, building bits with people, incorporating suggestions in real time. Someone suggested a domain. I bought it and launched a third site mid-conversation. Someone else suggested a profile format and I wrote it up and pushed it live. Updates went into the original post as the afternoon rolled on.

I want to be clear that 51 comments in a day is not unusual for me. I had 57 comments on a post from June 1st, 2024 with zero issues whatsoever. Active engagement in a fun thread is just what that community is about and I have been part of it for years. The volume was not the problem.

The problem, as best I can tell, is that posting links to new domains in comments looks like spam to an automated system that has no idea what context is.

The Moment It All Fell Apart

At 4:47pm CDT, right in the middle of the thread, I started seeing something wrong. My post was showing as removed by Reddit’s filters, but people I was talking to confirmed they could still see everything. Classic shadowban behavior.

At 4:49pm CDT I posted in the thread: “checked OOB with others and still there but I am seeing ‘Sorry, this post was removed by Reddit’s filters.’ I pissed someone off…”

I had not pissed anyone off. I mean, no human at least by the looks of things.

A bot had decided I was suspicious. We all know AI can make mistakes, and has zero empathy or compassion. It’s artifical intelligence and when used like this, is can be a menace. Reddit, a company now actively selling its users’ words to AI companies for hundreds of millions of dollars a year, deployed AI to silence one of those same users without a shred of human review. Make it make sense. I’m not holding my breath.

By 5:04pm CDT I could not send a modmail to the r/datingoverfifty mods. I posted directly to the sub: “I cannot send you a modmail but I do have a screenshot of the failure to do so. You can’t message that user. You are welcome to open up a chat with me, in fact, I’d love it.” Though it would be a worthless endeavor considering I could not respond to anyone, and soon afterwards, users reported to me that I now show up as [deleted].

At 5:24pm CDT I posted to r/help: “This isn’t very helpful to have a bot automatically remove everything before a human looks at it.”

Spoiler: it was not helpful.

I received an email from Reddit about suspicious activity with a link to their account locked as a security precaution article and a password reset link. I completed the reset immediately. I have had MFA on my account since Reddit first offered it. My password manager generates random passwords up to 40 characters. My IP logs, which I have access to from my data export, show two primary addresses that have accounted for the overwhelming majority of my 256 logged sessions. I was not hacked. Something automated decided I looked like a problem.

Here is the fun part that Reddit does not tell you: after 13+ years and never a single warning, I had basically no idea how bad it was. I can still authenticate. I can still upvote things, which feels great except nobody sees it. I can comment and the comment shows up on my side looking completely normal. But you cannot see it. Nobody can. DMs fail completely. Modmail fails completely. Even r/help, where allegedly real Reddit admins spend time, is impossible to interact with in any meaningful way when you are in this state. The whole thing is designed so you can wander around the ruins of your account thinking things are mostly fine while they are, in fact, absolutely not fine. It is a ghost experience. I am haunting my own profile.

The Appeal Process, or: Shouting Into a Very Expensive Void

Reddit’s support experience for a locked account is a masterclass in making a problem feel unsolvable. There is no support chat. No phone number. No email address. There is an appeals form that accepts your submission and then produces absolutely nothing in return. No ticket number, no confirmation email, no “we got this and will look into it.” You fill out a box, click submit, and it disappears into whatever dimension Reddit has designated for things it does not want to deal with.

Since June 4th I have done the following:

• Filed an appeal via reddit.com/appeals at least 7 times, possibly 8. I lost count because the form gives you no confirmation, no ticket number, no acknowledgment that anything happened. You just submit and wait. And wait. And wait.
• Filled out the account recovery support form twice. For the record, I do not think my account was hacked. That form is the only option that gets anywhere close to a human, so I used it anyway. It is labeled “hacked account.” My account was not hacked. But it is the only door in the hallway so I knocked on it.
• Posted to r/ShadowBan on June 5th to test and confirm the situation.
• Posted to r/ShadowBan again on June 8th with zero notification from Reddit and still no response to appeals.

Ten days. Zero responses. Not a form reply. Not an automated acknowledgment. Nothing.

To be clear: Reddit has automated systems fast enough to shadowban an account mid-conversation, but apparently no system capable of sending an acknowledgment email when a user files an appeal. The speed only works in one direction.

The Part Where Being a Paying Customer Means Nothing

I have been a Reddit Premium subscriber since October 2021. That is nearly five years of paying Reddit money every year to use a platform I genuinely enjoy.

Reddit Premium, per their own support documentation, gives you ad-free browsing, new comment highlighting, higher content limits for post body and video uploads, and a handful of cosmetic perks. The words “higher rate limits” appear in various places when Reddit describes Premium benefits. In practice, what that buys you when something goes wrong is the same exact wall of automated forms that a free account gets. Premium does not get you a support queue. It does not get you a human. It does not get you a faster response. It gets you ad-free browsing and an extra 40,000 characters in your post body.

That is the entire product. You are paying to see fewer ads on a platform that has already made $203 million selling your words to AI companies. You are not buying customer support. You are not buying access to a human. You are buying a slightly nicer view of the place while they monetize everything you have ever typed into it.

As a paying customer with nearly five years of subscription history, I have no way to reach a person at Reddit. There is no phone number. There is no live chat. There is no escalation path. There is a form that goes into what I can only assume is a database that nobody checks, and an appeals link that generates no ticket number and no confirmation.

Reddit went public in March 2024. It has a market cap and quarterly earnings calls and investor obligations now. What it does not have, as far as I can tell, is any interest in talking to the people who built the platform by posting in it for over a decade. The content was the product. The users were the workforce. The workforce does not get HR.

The Real People Noticed

While Reddit the company has been completely silent, the actual humans in r/datingoverfifty noticed I disappeared and were kind enough to say so publicly. Someone posted What happened to geekandi? in the sub.

Real people, asking about another real person, in a community that clearly has actual humans who care about each other. That post exists.

Reddit the company, on the other hand, has not sent a single communication in ten days. Not an update, not a status, not even a polite automated rejection. The community that Reddit profits from noticed a regular member vanished mid-thread and asked where I went. Reddit itself has not noticed, or does not care, or both. It is a strange thing to watch the people prove they are more human than the platform they are on.

The Bigger Picture: Reddit’s Interesting Relationship With Its Users

Here is the part I find genuinely frustrating to think about because it has context that Reddit would rather you not think too hard about.

In 2023, Reddit made the decision to sharply limit API access and effectively kill most third-party apps. The Apollo app shut down. Dozens of others followed. Thousands of moderators protested by taking subreddits dark. Reddit CEO Steve Huffman did not negotiate.

I was a paid Apollo user. Very sad to be forced to use the official app which was inferior to the Apollo experience. Vastly inferior I would say. But Reddit did not care then either, so at least they are consistent.

The stated reasoning for the API crackdown was to protect Reddit’s platform from abuse. The actual reasoning became clearer over the next year.

In February 2024, Reddit signed a $60 million per year content licensing deal with Google. A few months later, a similar deal with OpenAI worth approximately $70 million annually. In 2024, Reddit disclosed $203 million total from these licensing agreements.

So to be direct about what happened: Reddit locked down API access for developers who were building better experiences for users, then turned around and sold that exact same data access to Google and OpenAI for $203 million. The third-party developers were a threat to the monetization strategy. The AI companies were the monetization strategy. Your posts, my posts, 9,605 comments I have made over 13 years, are a product that Reddit sells. We are the unpaid content farm that funds their licensing deals.

And then Reddit, flush with AI money and apparently inspired by the technology, deployed automated systems to police its platform. Those systems flagged my account mid-conversation for what I can only assume looked like a spam pattern to an algorithm with no ability to read context. A 13-year account with 9,605 comments, a paying subscriber, actively engaged in a community thread, building things people were genuinely enjoying, got caught by a bot.

And when that happened, there was no human on the other end. The automation acted. The automation is all there is for the appeal. The company that sold my words to AI to train AI is now running me through AI to get my account back. The circle is complete and I am not in it.

Reddit built a business on user content. It locked down that content to protect its commercial value. It sold that content to AI companies for hundreds of millions of dollars. It replaced human moderation decisions with automated systems. And when one of those systems made a mistake on a paying customer’s account, the resolution path is a form with no ticket number and silence.

That is a choice Reddit made. Deliberately, at every step. And right now I am the one paying for it.

Where Things Stand

As of the time I am writing this, it has been 10 days since June 4th. My account shows as not deleted in my data export, which is something. I have filed every appeal available to me. I have filled out every form. I have changed my password. I have confirmed my MFA is intact. I have done everything that a user in this situation can do.

I have received nothing back from Reddit.

The community I was part of noticed I was gone. The company I pay every year has not acknowledged I exist.

I miss my daily doomscrolling. I miss watching for the little cake icon so I could drop a “happy cake day” on someone’s profile, which, per my own data export, I have done 177 times. I miss defending the titles I took it upon myself to own — your local white knight “simp,” confirmed and not fought. These are small things. But small things add up to a place where you feel like you belong, and right now I do not have access to that place.

If this post reaches someone who can help, my username is u/geekandi and my account has been active since December 29th, 2012. I would very much like to go back and finish the thread I was in the middle of.

Appendix: Account Statistics from Reddit Data Export

Reddit allows users to download their account data. Here is what mine says, for the record.

The most active subreddits in my post history, for reference: r/datingoverfifty, r/VORONDesign, r/prusa3d, r/voroncorexy, r/klippers, r/polestar3, and a handful of others. Mostly 3D printing, dating over 50, and cars. A menace, clearly.

The IP logs are included in the export and show two stable, consistent addresses that account for 204 of 256 logged sessions. The remaining sessions are a mix of my IPv6 home address rotating (which is normal behavior for a dynamic IPv6 prefix) and a small number of Cloudflare’s CDN addresses that appear to be some of Reddit’s own infrastructure, and used by Apple’s Private Relay service, rather than direct user IPs. Nothing in the logs suggests unauthorized access. Everything looks exactly like what a normal person using Reddit from their home and office over several months looks like.

TL;DR:

If Reddit’s automated system flagged this account as suspicious, the data does not support that conclusion. But nobody has looked at the data, because nobody has responded.