ToNice
Junior Member
- Apr 14, 2024
- 143
- 53
I'm writing this because I read a lot of contradictory advice, and in my experience some of it is expensive to disprove on your own money.
Browsers: desktop, not mobile emulators
I always work with a desktop machine, an anti-detect browser and proxies. I often read people recommending mobile emulators or using your own phone, but anti-detect browsers have been around longer, have accumulated more fixes, and to me they're more reliable.
And there's a logical consequence a lot of people miss: if you're using an anti-detect browser you're emulating a desktop machine, so you need desktop IPs.
Mobile proxies
They're wasted money, and not for a technical reason: they cost more than residential and give you nothing extra. With a browser declaring a desktop machine, paying the mobile premium makes no sense.
Your phone's 4G connection
It depends on who used it before you. If that network has already been used for Reddit spam by someone else, it's flagged — and you have no way of knowing in advance.
My 4G farm: what it cost me
I built a farm with ten 4G dongles. Serious money. I ran two months of account creation, warm-up and commenting, and in the commenting phase the accounts were getting banned — not all of them, but around 50%.
I can imagine the damage I caused to everyone else using my same mobile carrier.
I tried switching carriers, since different operators have different IP ranges. Another $150 in new SIMs. Same result: two months later, bans.
I also tried a program that tuned the TCP/IP stack, thinking that was the problem. Money wasted there too.
So why do I still use the 4G farm for warm-up
Because warm-up, done without votes and without comments, performs no visible actions. It's just browsing. It's in the commenting phase that the IP gets tested, and that's where the farm burned half my accounts.
My warm-up method
I wrote a post about this a while back, here's the short version.
It's built on random numbers between 3 and 7. For each account I prepare a list of the subreddits I want to work in. Then, for each account, I draw a number from 3 to 7 to decide how many subreddits to visit. Inside each one, I draw again from 3 to 7 to decide how many posts to open.
Random dwell time on every post.
And be careful here: no upvotes, viewing only.
This applies to purchased accounts and to accounts you log back into after a break, because in both cases the fingerprint and the IP have changed since the last session.
My current setup
Account creation: rotating residential proxies, around $1/GB.
Warm-up: my 4G farm.
Comments: rotating residential, $1/GB.
Links: rotating residential, $8/GB.
One important note on warm-up
I only do it on shelved accounts. When I create accounts, I export around 80% and don't use them: I let them age and bring them back into the database later. That means they come back on a different fingerprint — a different machine — and to put them to work they need warming up.
Accounts created and used straight away are a different story: within an hour of creation I send them out to post a comment, because it makes them more stable and they don't need warm-up.
In conclusion
My view is that anyone who wants to work with Reddit today has to be ready to spend something. Working for free — a phone and a 4G SIM — means flipping a coin and hoping.
Browsers: desktop, not mobile emulators
I always work with a desktop machine, an anti-detect browser and proxies. I often read people recommending mobile emulators or using your own phone, but anti-detect browsers have been around longer, have accumulated more fixes, and to me they're more reliable.
And there's a logical consequence a lot of people miss: if you're using an anti-detect browser you're emulating a desktop machine, so you need desktop IPs.
Mobile proxies
They're wasted money, and not for a technical reason: they cost more than residential and give you nothing extra. With a browser declaring a desktop machine, paying the mobile premium makes no sense.
Your phone's 4G connection
It depends on who used it before you. If that network has already been used for Reddit spam by someone else, it's flagged — and you have no way of knowing in advance.
My 4G farm: what it cost me
I built a farm with ten 4G dongles. Serious money. I ran two months of account creation, warm-up and commenting, and in the commenting phase the accounts were getting banned — not all of them, but around 50%.
I can imagine the damage I caused to everyone else using my same mobile carrier.
I tried switching carriers, since different operators have different IP ranges. Another $150 in new SIMs. Same result: two months later, bans.
I also tried a program that tuned the TCP/IP stack, thinking that was the problem. Money wasted there too.
So why do I still use the 4G farm for warm-up
Because warm-up, done without votes and without comments, performs no visible actions. It's just browsing. It's in the commenting phase that the IP gets tested, and that's where the farm burned half my accounts.
My warm-up method
I wrote a post about this a while back, here's the short version.
It's built on random numbers between 3 and 7. For each account I prepare a list of the subreddits I want to work in. Then, for each account, I draw a number from 3 to 7 to decide how many subreddits to visit. Inside each one, I draw again from 3 to 7 to decide how many posts to open.
Random dwell time on every post.
And be careful here: no upvotes, viewing only.
This applies to purchased accounts and to accounts you log back into after a break, because in both cases the fingerprint and the IP have changed since the last session.
My current setup
Account creation: rotating residential proxies, around $1/GB.
Warm-up: my 4G farm.
Comments: rotating residential, $1/GB.
Links: rotating residential, $8/GB.
One important note on warm-up
I only do it on shelved accounts. When I create accounts, I export around 80% and don't use them: I let them age and bring them back into the database later. That means they come back on a different fingerprint — a different machine — and to put them to work they need warming up.
Accounts created and used straight away are a different story: within an hour of creation I send them out to post a comment, because it makes them more stable and they don't need warm-up.
In conclusion
My view is that anyone who wants to work with Reddit today has to be ready to spend something. Working for free — a phone and a 4G SIM — means flipping a coin and hoping.
