RE: Reddit censoring all steemit links
When a post is marked as spam, the user who posted it can see it in their submissions, and it will be marked as removed. Moderators of the sub can see it in their mod mail. The post can be approved by the moderators and it will show.
Shadow ban means that it's done stealthily. The user that posted it will be able to see it in their submissions, and if they visit the subreddit, they will be able to see it posted.
But nobody else on reddit will be able to see it. This is done as to not alert the user that their post is not showing, and it will seem to them that simply nobody found the link interesting.
I suspect that this is not done by reddit "because steemit is competition" but rather because a lot of users and moderators consistently mark posts from steemit as spam. The one time I posted a link from steemit on reddit, it got quite a lot of negativity. This is because if you try to google what steemit is, you mostly get articles saying it's a scam or a pyramid scheme.
FWIW over at /r/technology we have had to create special rules just for cryptocurrency blogspam because there is so much of it. The trouble is people promoting those get rich quick schemes and other nonsense.
From what I can tell there are no specific rules against steemit so it is probably like you say people spamming steemit links bring the whole site into disrepute.
Can shadow banning be automated, or is a shadow ban always an explicit decision by a moderator to conceal a specific comment or post?
In our Reddit AMA, we made a comment that showed up to others as "Comment removed", however it appeared to us as if it had posted:
So I'm still pretty confused, as this "comment removed" seems identical to shadow banning in that the original poster cannot see that the comment was removed.
I'm not familiar with this specific case. I know people and websites can get blanket shadow banned. I also know it's not a tool available to subreddit moderators, only reddit moderators.
It's possible reddit moderators have other tools to make posts and comments appear differently to posters and everyone else. Quite devious.
Shadow bans are the province of admins not sub moderators. However there are sitewide automod rules that will flag some sites as spam (or some users) which will automatically pop up in the mod queue and will need to be manually approved by the mods. However when an item is reported like this it is not clear why it is marked and so maybe just removed from the queue out of a need to keep it clear.
The best course of action is to contact the mods of the sub and ask them why a submission has been removed. Assuming your account does not look like a spammer or a newbie account then they will look at it and can decide retroactively to approve it or suggest you resubmit it again and they can make sure it gets approved manually then.
Hope that clears up some confusion.