It’s the spam filtering, and they consider people spamming any link… and each subreddit can set the spam fitler higher or not. This was going on long before Lemmy and I’ve seen it even with BBC links.
RoundSparrow @ .ee
Stephen Alfred Gutknecht
Professional in social media since 1985, created / sold social media server apps at age 15. Traveled the world to study media ecology.
“Finnegans Wake is the greatest guidebook to media study ever fashioned by man.” - Marshall McLuhan, Newsweek Magazine
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Edit 4: The Shadow-Ban doesn’t seem to work on r/help but definitely on r/hfy.
I’ve seen this come up with a large number of links on Reddit that were even to BBC website. It comes down to the subreddit settings on spam filtering…
I think the whole process of automatic hiding of spam filtering for user accounts is a bad-faith experience. People on Reddit are infamous for not actually reading links and wanting bots to bring in text and such, and I think a lot of the anti-spam measures cultivated this for a very long time.
One thing that crowdsoucing never was very good at was spam filtering… because too many would sell out and buy upvotes/likes on Twitter/Reddit etc.

Many people on social media platforms don’t realize the spam filters can be abused by attackers to prevent certain topics from being mentioned. And on front-page subreddits they do not publish comments, they look published if you are logged in, but if you check from off-axis they are unpublished. I’ve been posting some of them here and on Bluesky, but nobody cares (on Bluesky, but people have here) !CensoredByReddit@lemm.ee maybe some tech press will cover it.
Lifetime (of the person) bans on Reddit for individual subreddits and accounts are dumb. That sites been around for decades. I can only image how many people got banned there at age 16 and are completely different people at age 22. I never see people bring this kind of criticism up.