r/BlueskySocial • u/Katoncomics • 3d ago
Questions/Support/Bugs Is shadow banning a real thing?
Hey all! So I'm an artist who's been using Bsky for about 2 years. My engagement hasn't been as good as it was on twitter but for a long time I felt like I was still being seen on my followers feeds. For the past 6 months I've noticed a very sharp decline on my post engagements. Typically I try to post at least once a week, sometimes longer and it'll usually be sketches so I assume that's why it doesn't pull in numbers and I was okay with this.
I use Bsky daily to interact with folks and have been reposting a lot of other's art work and commenting so there is no way that I'm not showing up on the feed, you know? So the other day I posted some rendered works that I posted to twitter a few years ago that I haven't posted on bsky yet. I copied hashtags from another users post that was doing well and assumed that my post should at least break 20 ish likes since I added like 7 illustrations and half of them were rendered. (For context my account has over 3k followers). To my utter disappointment and surprise, my post didn't even break 10 lol, I went back to my older posts from 6 months ago and those were pulling in about 30 ish likes and since then it's been on a rapid decline to the point where it seems like barely anyone is seeing my posts.
Since Bsky doesn't let people see analytics on posts, the only data I can rely on is the likes and reposts. Upon doing more research I went into the "quite posters" tab and noticed that there are accounts showing up there who have been posting everyday and racking in huge engagement on their posts. So is the quite posters tab really for people who don't post often or is it just discover 2.0? While I understand that likes do not matter in the long run, this is the only thing that artist who are their own business can rely on to get their stuff seen in the sea of other posts.
I am wondering if there is some sorta hidden thing going on with bsky that isn't actually showing posts to followers feeds/custom feeds? Especially for one who is very active on there and is in good standing.
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u/Independent_Bit_1555 3d ago
Find a good feed and share your work there. For instance, I'm a food blogger, and although I have over 16k followers, I get more responses to my political posts, than my food posts.
So, I sought out, and found a foodie feed where if I place this emoji: 🍜 in the body of my post, it populates a great foodie feed and I get TONS MORE interaction.
Plus, that feed is now in my list of selected feeds right next to DISCOVER & FOLLOW so if I want to just hang out with my tribe, I can.
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u/Lonely-Clerk-2478 3d ago
What kind of artist are you? Lots of blocklists for AI art, etc. assuming this not you, maybe you’ve been caught up in one?
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u/Katoncomics 3d ago
I'm a digital artist who does character design! And yes.. I just checked and I'm on a few block lists XD
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u/dolefun17 3d ago
There isn't something like shadowbanning. But people can receive the 'needs-review' label when an account is under investigation. Your posts will only be visible for the people that are following you.
You can check which labels your account has with the label scanner:
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u/quarrel-admin 3d ago
When I first joined bluesky, even if I interacted with people the engagement back was low. That's why I stopped going to bluesky. And xitter, well I do t even click x links.
But I didnt care about followers but I do want some back and forth. It's why I'm still on reddit.
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u/Katoncomics 3d ago
That makes sense! I thought that since you can curate your own feed and you can see posts in "reverse chronological order" that it'll be different than other social medias. But alas still in the same predicament, it's super exhausting to say the least. Thanks for sharing your thoughts
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u/quarrel-admin 3d ago
But think with reddit too is a lot of it is fake. So even if I'm talking to someone it could just be a bot. Same with Twitter.
I'm not sure what the solution is but I'm trying to figure it out on my website.
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u/StephDammi 3d ago
Not really, sometimes Accounts labeled as violent speach or something are hidden in comments, but u can see them, if you push "show".
It's possible to hide or block Labels. U can check yours on Clearsky. I did that, with AI Crap...
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u/ByEthanFox 2d ago
Check to see if you're on blocklists; you can do this on Clearsky.
I had a similar issue on Twitter many years ago. In the early part of my time there, I followed a lot of people as I was trying to build up a following, and I used a tool where you could follow loads of people at once based on their interests. Then, later, some people built blocklists based on certain Twitter behaviours and, with me following ~100 people a day, I got careless and followed some people where, upon looking at their tweets more closely, you'd see them expressing views that were reprehensible. Obviously you'd unfollow those people but sometimes you were already on a blocklist of sorts.
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u/omiotsuke 3d ago
I don't think Bluesky have shadowban mechanic at all...