The way I found out was a comment with 1 view on it.
Not zero. Zero would have been a fluke. One view. A comment I'd written on a gaming sub, on a thread that already had a hundred replies, sitting at the bottom with one little eyeball icon next to it. The next comment down had 3 views. The next one, 47. Mine, one. For a whole day.
I'd been doing the thing every "how to grow as a solo dev" guide tells you to do. Engage in communities. Be helpful. Don't just drop links. Comment for weeks before you post anything. I'd been doing it for 30 days straight after a previous post of mine got removed by a sub mod on a different platform. Pure comments, no links, no pitches, nothing in the body about what I was building.
It wasn't until I checked my profile that I noticed the small thing I'd left in there a year ago, when I first registered the account and barely used it:
Solo dev building AI companions that actually remember you. Try it: tendera.chat
One sentence, in the bio. From a year ago. Long before I ever started actually using the account.
That sentence, apparently, was enough.
What flagged accounts feel like
Reddit doesn't tell you. There's no email. No warning. No "your account is under review." You just notice that your comments stop getting any traction. Then you notice they're not getting any views at all. Then you check from a logged-out browser and discover your comment is technically there, but for some reason no one is seeing it.
The technical term for this varies. Shadowban. Soft suppression. Throttling. The category doesn't really matter to the person it's happening to. What matters is that you spent 30 days being a thoughtful, on-topic, no-link community member, and the platform was treating every single one of those comments like spam.
I'm not going to pretend I'm a victim here. I had a promotional link in my bio. The reason it was there was that I'd written it in February when I created the account, with no plan and no expectation that I'd ever do anything serious with Reddit. By the time I actually started commenting in earnest, that sentence had been sitting up there for over a year. It blended into the wall. I forgot about it.
To Reddit's anti-spam systems, it never blended in. Every comment that account made was a comment from "a user whose bio is an ad." Doesn't matter what the comment said.
The contradiction
Here's what nobody warns you about. The advice solo builders are given goes roughly like this:
Don't be that founder who joins Reddit, drops a link to their product, and gets nuked. Spend weeks in the community first. Be a real participant. Comment. Contribute. Help when you can. Then, eventually, when you do mention what you're working on, the community will be receptive.
OK. Reasonable.
But the same guides also tell you, in different paragraphs, things like:
Be transparent about what you're building. Don't pretend to be a regular user when you're actually a founder. People can tell.
And:
Your Reddit profile is part of your indie hacker presence. Have your project linked. People who like your comments will check your profile.
These two pieces of advice are both fine in isolation. Together, applied as written, they produce: an account that comments authentically in good faith with a bio that says "I made a thing, try it." Which Reddit's automated systems read as a spammer with a softer-than-usual content strategy. Which they handle by quietly making your contributions invisible.
The "authentic engagement" advice has an asterisk and the asterisk is: your bio is not a place to be transparent about what you're building. Your bio is a place to be a person. The transparency goes in the comments, in context, only after the community has reason to care.
What I'd do differently
If I were starting from zero and wanted to actually use Reddit as a builder, here's the version of the advice that would have saved me a month.
The bio gets nothing promotional. No product name, no URL, no "founder of" anything. If you want people who read your comments to find your project, the Social Links section of the profile is what that's for, and even there I'd hold off until you have an established, unflagged account with a track record. A clean bio with a flat "solo dev, tinkering with AI" reads like a person. The version with the tagline and the link reads like a billboard, even if you didn't mean it to.
When you do mention your project, mention it inside a comment, in a thread where someone is asking something it's relevant to, in your own voice, as a person who built a specific thing. That gets you scrutiny and sometimes downvotes, but it doesn't get you the silent treatment from the platform itself.
Treat the account like reputation, not like a storefront. You're building credit over time. The landing page lives at your actual URL. Every promotional signal compounds. One little link in a bio that you forgot about a year ago can quietly tax everything you do on the account afterward.
Where this leaves me
I cleaned the bio. I'm watching to see if comments get views again over the next week or two. If they do, the account is salvageable. If they don't, I'll have spent a year accidentally building a flagged account, and the only fix is starting over.
The product I was so carefully not promoting in 30 days of comments is Tendera. Solo-built AI characters with specific voices, built for people who are tired of chatbot blandness. One of them, Mia, is a bartender I spent more time writing than I'd publicly admit. I'm a dev who's been at this for fifteen years across game studios and now solo. I'm not new at building. I am new at Reddit.
The lesson I came out of this isn't that Reddit is unfair to builders. Reddit's automated systems are dumb the way most automated systems are dumb. They can't tell that the link in your bio is from a year ago. They can't tell that you just want to learn from users in a sub where your audience lives. The systems pattern-match on signals, and the signals were on.
If you're a solo dev reading this and you're about to write your bio: leave the product out. Put it in your replies, in context, when you have something to say. That's where transparency actually belongs.
Good luck out there.
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