I described the final state for brevity, but the slightly longer version is:

1. One morning my account was shadowbanned. Literally everything from any time in any subreddit, including truncating threads and taking other people's replies with it.

2. I logged in and used the appeals page... and it was eventually "granted" with an apologetic message!

3. But nothing changed, except that appeals page stopped working, as it claims the account is normal.

4. Mods can briefly approve what I post, but it doesn't stick. After a few minutes it becomes blocked again, with no audit-trail.

5. So... I dug up an old resume-feedback throwaway account from ~5 years ago to go asking for help...

6. Within a day, it got shadowbanned the same way.

7. For a few months, I did a monthly attempt to make a ticket via support.reddithelp.com, but never got any kind of response.

8. I guess I gave up trying to fight the faceless Kafkaesque system and slid into mild depression, as Reddit had been my primary social conduit after the pandemic.

Even if I go back and try to build up a presence again, without answers I'll be plagued by anxiety waiting for some mysterious stupid algorithm to stab me in the back and destroy everything again.

Yeah, you're in a black hole :( I can't even find anyone to pay off at Reddit, so you can't even go that route. My friend has an account and she has appealed it once per day (you can appeal every 24 hours) for the last 370 days and no response.

I did have an open conversation with spez about all of these things, but he eventually ghosted me.