You’re not shadowbanned. There’s no shadowbanning on Tumblr. If you can tell something is obviously wrong, then it’s a bug.
When I asked why asks from certain users don’t show on the /posts/submission endpoint of the public API, I was ultimately told this:
Later the same day, one of the affected users reported that they were now showing up in searches and notification feeds, which had not been true before my support ticket.
There is a state that users can get into.
It has various symptoms like not showing up in searches and notifications.
The state exists on purpose, even if it’s sometimes applied to a given user inappropriately.
There are spam prevention filters that can put a user in this state.
The state is commonly (if perhaps misleadingly) referred to as “shadowbanning” by the user base.
Is this state a “bug”? I wouldn’t call it that. It’s meant to exist.
I suppose one could argue that the state itself isn’t a bug, but that false positives in the relevant filter are bugs. Even that doesn’t seem right, though. Every spam filter will have some false positives.
This has existed since at least Feb 19 2022 (before the OP was made), since that’s the date of the earliest example post I provided with the ticket.
Indeed, the public API issue has been happening for much longer than that. My examples start on Feb 19 2022 only because that was the day I finally got around to implementing a workaround for it, which produced logs I could later search.
I’m trying to phrase this as non-combatively as possible, although I don’t feel like I’m doing very well. I’m not trying to start an argument, about this kind of website trivia of all things. Just want to make the situation clear to people.