2 founders I know got their LinkedIn accounts banned last month. Both were automating the wrong way
One was auto-connecting with 80 people a day. The other was scraping prospect data and feeding it into outreach sequences. Both had been doing it for months and both got flagged within the same week. LinkedIn rolled out new bot detection and it caught up with them fast.
I'd been doing LinkedIn manually up until a few months ago partly because I'd watched too many people build their whole pipeline on something that stopped working overnight. When I started using LiFast I checked how it actually posts. Schedules content, publishes natively, no browser extensions running in the background, no fake activity intervals. Posts go out the way a real person would.
Three weeks in I had two inbound calls. Both said they'd been seeing my posts for a while. One converted and paid. Zero account issues.
The two founders are rebuilding now. One lost 3,400 connections built over two years. The other had to start fresh with a new account. Both said they knew it was risky and figured it would keep working until it didn't.
LinkedIn has been getting more aggressive about this every quarter. Most people find out after it's already happened to them.
I feel like Reddit also enjoys banning accounts. I'm curious, what are your experiences and thoughts on the Reddit platform?
high risk to promote but high reward
This matches what I've been seeing too. The people who treat LinkedIn like a numbers game are the ones getting hit first. The ones who treat it like a content channel seem to fly under the radar.
What I find interesting is that most automation tools focus on outreach volume — connections, messages, profile visits — whereas something like LiFast focuses on publishing frequency. LinkedIn seems way more tolerant of the latter, probably because it looks like a power user rather than a bot.
The 3,400 connection loss is brutal but honestly not surprising. Anyone running high-volume connection requests has to know that's the most detectable pattern on the platform.
Curious — do you think the content-first approach will stay safe long-term, or is it just a matter of time before LinkedIn cracks down on scheduled posting too?
always the content-first approach will stay safe long term
Reddit can be even stricter than LinkedIn in some ways.
From what I've seen, the biggest mistake is treating Reddit like a promotion channel instead of a community. If the account is new, posts links too early, or repeats the same message across subreddits, it gets flagged fast.
The safer approach is to participate first, answer genuinely, build karma, and only mention your product when it's directly relevant to the discussion.
Yes reddit is very strict. I joined a few days ago for the launch of my startup Voyage Health and even though its free and I was trying to help people and not sell anything, immediately it's seen as promotional and I was banned in that subreddit. I'm getting more used to how it works as I go though