Apparently I've been site wide banned from Reddit for months without realising it and this is normal because it's called being Shadowbanned.

What is a Shadowban

A shadowban is a site-wide ban that is automatically triggered when a user engages in suspicious activity. A shadowban is tricky because it will look like all of your content is visible on the website, however other users will not see your contributions to the community.

Screen grab of my user profile when I am logged in

Screen grab of my user profile from a different account

Triggered by 'suspicious activity'

A ban automatically triggers by 'breaking the reddiquette'. This can be by:

• Posting too many links.
• Making a link submission as your first action as a redditor is a huge red flag. Even if you are posting a genuine, relative link, it still looks suspicious to moderators and Reddit’s source code. If this link gets remove or marked as spam, your account might be done for. We recommend always posting comments and voting on other submissions before you start posting links.
• ...

I'm going to stop there because I did make the noob mistake of posting a link to my blog as my very first activity but wow.. That is harsh... For weeks I kept wondering what I was doing wrong because I was still able to upvote, comment, provide feedback and think that I was actually participating in the discussions.

Easiest way to find out if you are shadow banned

Go to: https://www.reddit.com/r/amishadowbanned/ and submit a post with the title 'Am I Shadowbanned?' and a bot will answer the question

Steemit Admins

I hope you never implement Shadow Banning and always have the curtesy to warn users if they are doing something stupid or frowned upon.