Will You Get Shadowbanned for Promoting a Product in Comments?

A post can be deleted in a second, so a comment feels like the safer place to mention a product. This page tests that feeling. I measured 81,381 real YouTube comments and two live Reddit threads, and I read what each platform says it removes.

69% of YouTube comments get zero likes, so most comments are read by nobody

Before asking whether a comment is risky, it is worth asking whether anybody sees it. I took the public sample of the YTCommentVerse research corpus and counted the likes on every comment in it.

• 69.1% of the 81,381 comments I measured received zero likes.
• 85.2% received either no likes or exactly one like.
• 93.3% received fewer than five likes.
• The middle YouTube comment has zero likes, so zero is the normal result rather than a bad one.
• Those comments came from 21,765 different videos across 15 subjects, so this is not one unusual channel.

The top comment on a video takes 40% of every like that video's comments get

Zero likes for most comments has to mean the likes went somewhere. They went to the top of the page.

• The single top comment takes a median 40.0% of all the likes given to that video's comments.
• The top three comments take 68.2% of them.
• The top ten comments take 97.3% of them.
• Comment number eleven and everything below it share the remaining 2.7%.
• I measured that across the 351 videos in the corpus that had at least 30 comments sampled and at least one like.

On a video with 2.4 million comments the top comment beat the second by 47 times

The averages above hide how sharp the drop is on a single popular video. I opened one in a browser and read the two numbers off the page.

• The video had 2,456,552 comments in total.
• The top comment on it had 309,000 likes.
• The second comment on the same video had 6,600 likes.
• Moving from first place to second place on that video costs you 47 times the attention.
• Nothing about the writing changed between those two comments, only the position.

YouTube hides every reply behind a button, so replying is the worst move on YouTube

This is the question most people get wrong. It feels clever to answer a comment that already has thousands of likes, because the crowd is already there. On YouTube the crowd cannot see you.

• YouTube drew zero replies on the page until I clicked, on a video with 2,456,552 comments.
• The top comment there had 963 replies, and all 963 sat behind a single button reading "963 replies".
• The second comment had 46 replies, also hidden behind a button.
• A reply on YouTube is read only by the people who deliberately open the reply thread, which is a small share of the people who read the comment above it.
• Replying to a big comment on YouTube puts you inside the one place on the page that is closed by default.

Reddit shows replies on the page, so 3 in every 4 comments a reader sees are replies

Reddit draws the same thing in the opposite way. It indents a reply under the comment it answers and leaves it open, so replies are not hidden behind anything.

• On the first Reddit thread I measured, 71 of the 100 comments drawn on the page were replies.
• On the second thread, 78 of 100 were replies.
• Reddit drew replies nested six and eight levels deep without me clicking anything.
• So roughly 3 in every 4 comments a Reddit reader passes are replies rather than new comments.
• A reply under Reddit's top comment sits at the top of the page, because Reddit puts a reply wherever its parent already is.

Reply on Reddit and write a new comment on YouTube

That is the whole answer to the question, and it is different on each platform because the two sites draw the same thing in opposite ways.

• Reply on Reddit, because replies are 71% to 78% of what a Reddit reader actually sees.
• Write a new top-level comment on YouTube, because every reply there is behind a closed button.
• Being buried inside somebody else's comment is a real risk on YouTube and not a risk on Reddit.
• A new comment can go viral where a reply cannot, but only on a post that is still new.
• I measured YouTube and Reddit directly and did not measure TikTok or Facebook, so treat those two as untested.

Reddit ranks comments by a confidence score, so a new comment with no votes starts last

Reddit's default comment order is called "Best", and it is not a vote count. It scores each comment by the lower end of a statistical confidence range, which punishes a comment for having few votes rather than for having bad ones.

• A comment with 10 upvotes and 1 downvote can rank above a comment with 40 upvotes and 20 downvotes, because the first one is more certain.
• A brand new comment has no votes at all, so its confidence score is the lowest score there is.
• Posting a new comment on a Reddit thread that is already hours old puts you underneath every comment that has proved itself.
• Nobody scrolls that far, so the comment is technically live and practically invisible.
• The only way a new comment climbs is to be there before the votes are handed out.

A new comment is a lottery ticket that only pays if you are early

A new comment can reach first place on a page, and a reply never can. The condition attached to that is what decides whether commenting is worth the time at all.

• A new comment can reach first place and take 40% of the video's comment attention, which no reply can ever do.
• It can only do that if it arrives before the votes are handed out, because both Reddit and YouTube sort by votes the comment does not have yet.
• Commenting on an old popular post is the worst of both, because you get neither the crowd nor the position.
• Commenting first on a small new post is better than commenting late on a huge one.
• 69.1% of comments winning nothing is the real cost of this strategy, not the chance of a ban.

Use Camera to Clipboard to put a photo in your comment instead of a link

Every filter in this article is hunting for a link. A picture is not a link, and a comment carrying a real photograph of the thing being discussed reads as somebody showing their work. The awkward part is that the photo is on your phone and the comment box is on your computer. Camera to Clipboard, one of my own apps, closes that gap by putting the photo straight onto your computer's clipboard.

• You take a photo on your phone and it lands on your computer's clipboard, so the next thing you do is press paste in the comment box.
• You pair the phone and the computer once by scanning a QR code on the screen, and after that there is nothing to set up again.
• Nothing is emailed to yourself and nothing is uploaded to a shared folder first, which are the two steps that usually stop people posting the picture at all.

Reddit blocks every crawler except the two companies that pay for access

Where a comment ends up matters more than how many people read it on the day. I checked Reddit's own instructions to crawlers.

• The file at reddit.com/robots.txt says "User-agent: *" followed by "Disallow: /", which tells every crawler on the internet to stay out.
• Google reads Reddit anyway because it signed a content licence with Reddit in February 2024, reported at about $60 million a year.
• OpenAI signed its own Reddit licence in May 2024, which is why ChatGPT can quote Reddit threads.
• Bing and DuckDuckGo have no licence, so recent Reddit content is largely missing from both.
• Your Reddit comment is therefore readable by the two machines that most people ask questions through.

A Reddit comment keeps working for years and a YouTube comment is buried in days

The same sentence has a completely different working life depending on where you type it, and that difference is bigger than anything you can do to the sentence itself.

• A Reddit comment sits on a page that Google indexes, so somebody can find it through a search two years later.
• A YouTube comment is not reachable through Google, so the only people who ever see it are people already watching that video.
• New comments keep arriving under a popular YouTube video, and each one pushes yours further from the top.
• A Reddit thread slows down and stops attracting new comments, so nothing keeps pushing your comment down.
• One good Reddit comment can outlive a hundred YouTube comments written the same week.

Facebook puts your friends' comments first, so a stranger's comment loses twice

Facebook is the one platform where the reader's relationship to you changes what they see. Meta describes the ranking on its own transparency site.

• Facebook says it puts "your own comments, your friends' comments or the author's comments" at the top.
• You are a stranger to almost everybody who reads a public Facebook post, so you start below all of them.
• One of Facebook's four ranking models predicts "how likely a comment appears spammy, abusive, or policy-violating".
• That same model uses your past violations, so one removed comment makes your next comment rank lower.
• Facebook is the worst of the five platforms here for reaching people who do not already know you.

YouTube Shorts stopped making links clickable in 2023, so a link there is dead text

Shorts deserve their own answer, because YouTube changed the rules for them and did not change them for ordinary videos.

• From 31 August 2023 links stopped being clickable in Shorts comments, Shorts descriptions and the vertical live feed.
• YouTube's stated reason was that links in Shorts were driving clicks to "malware, phishing, or scam-related content".
• A link you type in a Shorts comment is still visible as text, so a reader has to copy it out by hand.
• The Shorts comment panel is also closed by default and opens only when a viewer taps the comment icon.
• YouTube Shorts is the worst place to put a link and one of the better places to say a product name.

Reddit is the best place to comment and Facebook is the worst

All five platforms, on the five things that decide whether a comment is worth writing.

YouTube's own comment filter names self-promotion as a thing it holds

You do not have to guess what YouTube objects to, because YouTube writes it down in the settings every creator can see.

• A held comment is invisible to everybody except the creator, and it sits in their review queue for up to 60 days.
• You are never told that your comment was held, so it looks published to you and to nobody else.
• The setting called "Strict" holds a wider range of comments than "Basic" does.
• A creator can also set "Hold all" so that no comment at all appears until they approve it.

A creator can hold every comment containing a link by ticking one box

The link is not just a signal that a machine weighs against you. On YouTube it is a switch that anybody who owns a channel can flip.

• YouTube gives every creator a setting to hold comments that contain a web address, and it is one tick box.
• Once it is on, a comment with a link never appears to anybody unless the creator personally approves it.
• Approved users and channel moderators skip that check, and you are neither.
• A creator can also block any word or phrase they choose, including your product name.
• Nothing on your screen tells you which of these settings a channel is using, so a link is a coin toss on every video.

YouTube removed 224 million comments in three months and most of them were spam

It helps to see the size of the machine you are walking into. YouTube publishes its own removal counts.

• YouTube removed over 224 million comments between July and September 2018 for breaking its guidelines.
• YouTube said the majority of those removals were for spam.
• YouTube also said that 224 million is a fraction of the billions of comments posted each quarter, so removal is common rather than rare.
• The removals are made by a mix of automatic detection and human reviewers, not by one or the other.
• That 2018 figure is the clearest number YouTube has stated in plain words, and its newer counts are published only inside an interactive report.

Use Repeat Recorder to practise a script until it sounds natural

Repeat Recorder is another of my own apps. It records you, then plays the recording back on a loop so you can hear the same line over and over and change it until it stops sounding stiff. It was built for language practice, and it works the same way on anything you have to say out loud.

• Repeat Recorder loops your own recording so you hear the same sentence again and again without pressing play.
• Repeat Recorder runs hands-free, so a whole practice session happens without you touching the screen.
• Repeat Recorder can add a countdown before recording and a gap before playback, so you get a breath instead of racing the app.

Reddit shadowbans an account for a pattern, not for one comment

A shadowban hides everything you post from everybody else while it still looks normal on your own screen. Reddit is the platform where it is feared most and understood least.

• The pattern that triggers it is the same link posted to several subreddits in a short time.
• A young account with almost no karma that starts posting promotional links is the clearest version of that pattern.
• Repeating the same wording across many comments is treated as automated posting even when a person typed it.
• You will not be told, which is the whole point of the word "shadowban".

Reddit retired its 10% self-promotion rule in 2016, so there is no safe ratio left

Almost every guide still quotes a ratio at you. It is worth knowing that Reddit itself stopped using one a decade ago.

• The old guideline said no more than 10 of your last 100 posts and comments should promote something you own.
• Reddit retired that guideline in 2016 because people optimised for the number instead of the intent behind it.
• Accounts posted 90 low-effort comments purely to earn the right to post 10 links, which is exactly what the rule was meant to stop.
• What replaced it is judgement by each subreddit's own moderators and their own AutoModerator rules.
• So no ratio makes you safe, and every subreddit gets to draw its own line.

TikTok counts filling comment sections with promotional links as spam

TikTok is the platform where a hidden comment is hardest to detect, because you are shown your own comment as if it were live.

• TikTok's guidelines name "flooding comment sections with promotional links" as spam.
• Posting the same video from several accounts and mass messaging people are listed in the same category.
• Promoting a product on TikTok requires you to turn on its content disclosure setting.
• A comment can be hidden so that only you can see it, which is why people report comments that get no replies at all.
• Links in TikTok comments are not clickable, so a link there costs you the risk and returns nothing.

Facebook scores your comment on how spammy it looks and on your past violations

Facebook does not hide your comment so much as sink it, and the sinking is permanent in a way a removal is not.

• One of Facebook's four comment ranking models predicts "how likely a comment appears spammy, abusive, or policy-violating".
• Meta lists "commenter violation history" as one of the inputs to that model.
• So a comment removed last month makes today's comment rank lower, even if today's comment breaks no rule.
• A second model predicts how likely you are to click like on the comment, which favours comments that already have likes.
• Nothing tells you your comment was ranked down, because it was never removed.

How to check whether your comments are being hidden on each platform

Every platform in this article can hide a comment while still showing it to you. The check is the same idea everywhere, which is to look at your own comment from somewhere you are not signed in.

• Open the page in a private browsing window with no account signed in, and look for your comment.
• On Reddit, open your own profile in that window, because a shadowbanned profile shows nothing at all to a signed-out visitor.
• On YouTube, a comment that you can see and a signed-out visitor cannot is being held for review by that creator.
• On TikTok, ask somebody else to look for your comment, because private browsing is unreliable there.
• Do this before you write fifty more comments, not after.

Naming your product with no link is the only version that passes every filter

Every filter described in this article is looking for a web address. A product name is not a web address, which is why it passes.

• YouTube's hold-comments-with-links setting cannot fire on a comment that has no link in it.
• TikTok links are not clickable anyway, so a name loses you nothing there.
• Shorts links are not clickable either, so a name is strictly better than a link on Shorts.
• A name only works if the name is unusual enough to find, so a product called "Notes" cannot be searched for and one called "Repeat Recorder" can.
• Naming a product without a link makes the reader do more work, so fewer people act, and that is what you pay to avoid being removed.

Measure a name-drop by watching searches for your product name, not clicks

Dropping a name with no link creates a real measurement problem, because there is nothing to count a click on. The answer is to count the search instead.

• Nobody can click a name, so your click reports will show nothing and you will wrongly conclude it failed.
• Watch the number of people searching for your product name each week instead of watching clicks.
• Google Search Console shows how many people searched your product name and then reached your site.
• App Store Connect and Google Play Console both show how many people found your app by searching its name.
• Compare the week you commented against the four weeks before it, because a single day proves nothing.

Say you made it, because hiding it is what gets the comment removed

The instinct is to pretend to be a happy customer. That is the version that gets caught, and it is also the version that performs worse when it is not caught.

• Writing "I made this" is a normal comment, while writing "I found this great app" about your own product is the thing every platform calls deceptive.
• TikTok requires a disclosure setting for promotional content, so hiding it breaks a written rule rather than an unwritten one.
• Reddit moderators can read your entire comment history in one click, so a pattern of pretending is easy to spot and hard to explain.
• Readers who work out you were hiding it will report the comment, which adds a violation to the record that Facebook and Reddit both score you on.
• Saying you made it costs you almost nothing in performance and removes the one thing that turns a removal into a ban.

Use Camera to Clipboard to move a phone screenshot onto your computer

Checking whether your comments are being hidden leaves you with the evidence on your phone and the place you want it on your computer. Camera to Clipboard, one of my own apps, moves a screenshot across without email.

• A photo you take on your phone pastes straight into whatever is open on your computer.
• Pairing Camera to Clipboard is a one-time QR code scan, so there is no account to create and no folder to sync.
• Camera to Clipboard also runs on Windows, so the computer on the other end does not have to be a Mac.

Conclusion: will you get shadowbanned for promoting a product in comments?

No, not for one comment. You get shadowbanned for a pattern, and you get ignored for everything else.

• 69.1% of comments get zero likes, so being unseen is the real risk and a ban is the rare one.
• Reply on Reddit, because 71% to 78% of what a reader sees there is replies.
• Write a new comment on YouTube, because every reply is hidden behind a button.
• Comment early or not at all, because Reddit and YouTube both sort by votes your new comment does not have yet.
• Use Reddit, because Google and ChatGPT can read it and cannot read the other four.
• Drop the link and say the product name, because the link is what every filter is hunting.
• Say you made it, because hiding it is what turns a removal into a ban.
• Never post the same wording to several subreddits in one day, because repeating yourself is what triggers a shadowban.