We are only sharing the actual post links with the admins (hence the private message link), though we'd also share them in private with other mods who've encountered this problem so we can try to determine a way to detect these. If you/anyone has encountered these and have other examples, message me.

In general, the posts appear to be hidden from desktop and the API, but users still report and comment on them; we assume from mobile, but we have no way of knowing.

Here are the timestamps of the 6 8 9 posts we've thus far identified; will update this if we find more (UPDATED Oct 25):

• Wed Oct 4 06:18:26 PM UTC 2023
• Wed Oct 4 06:18:46 PM UTC 2023
• Wed Oct 4 06:18:31 PM UTC 2023
• Mon Oct 2 09:22:14 PM UTC 2023
• Thu Sep 14 05:09:31 PM UTC 2023
• Tue Sep 26 06:06:04 PM UTC 2023
• Mon Oct 9 06:24:18 AM UTC 2023
• Tue Oct 10 10:34:58 PM UTC 2023
• Tue Oct 24 09:36:11 PM UTC 2023

If you/anyone else see any correlation here, it'd be interesting to know that.

We do not have a way of finding "invisible" posts that have been deleted by the user, so older data is going to be more sparse than recent. The concerning part is having 4 of these this week alone, several of them rule-breaking. The communities this is happening in are ones we cannot have undetectable unmoderated content persisting in.

It's not blocking, as some of their posts are visible, but not others, within the same community. Blocking shouldn't be affecting mods anyways.

We're seeing this going back at least 20 days; we've identified a post from 2 days back that seems to be visible now, but was never visible to our bot, and a post from 20 days ago that's still invisible to me.

Seems to be unrelated; the window for a post to have been visible before being hidden is only a few seconds, so I don't think they're ever appearing in the feed at all. Otherwise our bot would have seen it, which is not happening.

There seems to be variations in which feeds a post appears in; e.g., we've found one which shows in /hot but not /new, and another which seems completely hidden from desktop entirely but shows up in the reports feed after a user reported it, and presumably that user saw it somewhere on mobile. Most but not all of these posts are also hidden from all user profile feeds we've looked at.

In at least two cases, we believe a post not shown in /new later did appear there, so apparently some of the time these show up later on. So it's very flaky behavior all around.

No modlog entries are generated for any of the invisible posts, we did try to find them there. The only way we've thus far been able to locate most of them is by searching Pushshift and comparing the results list with what we can see. There are some posts which do not appear to be visible to any feed on Desktop, but evidently show up on Mobile given that users were able to report them. If there are any posts that don't show in Pushshift, we have no way of detecting them at all.

We aren't sure whether or not Automod can see these posts, as we've not found an example where one would or should have triggered an Automod rule; the affected communities are primarily moderated by our bot, not Automod.