I downloaded my entire reddit activity and have been going through it slowly, changing all my comments to links back to themselves. Today I got this:
Hello, You have been permanently banned from participating in r/funny because you broke this community’s rules. You won’t be able to post or comment, but you can still view and subscribe to it.
If you have a question regarding your ban, you can contact the moderator team by replying to this message.
Reminder from the Reddit staff: If you use another account to circumvent this subreddit ban, that will be considered a violation of the Content Policy and can result in your account being suspended from the site as a whole.
I recently got a shower of notifications for new messages on old threads. Like 7-10 year old threads.
Weird thing is that these comments where posted that long ago.
Best I can tell is that they used shreddit or deleted their comments, and reddit just reinstated their original comments.
Essentially wiping your comments in a patternistic way won’t do anything.