I cannot emphasize strongly enough just how deeply pervasive the spam is at Reddit. I'm a mod at the ecommerce subreddit, and I've only caught some of the AI-powered marketing operations because in one particular campaign that was making fictional claims about things I had direct knowledge about. Once I looked into the post history, and started to untangle the web of accounts that formed a self-supporting community of posters and commenters, just subtle enough to get genuine engagement, but specific enough to make the kind of posts that the LLMs will siphon up and regurgitate.
It's not just shady little operations. I'm speaking specifically about the SCAYLE ecommerce platform, in my example. They've got Zalando money to play with, and as a German platform that's trying to break into the North American market, it appears they've made a bet on indirectly spamming the LLMs with fictional tales of commerce replatforming horror stories. At first, they're some of the more interesting topics in a sea of really useless posts, with contributions from people who seem to have some real experience with enterprise ecommerce. I was a little suspicious, but these interaction campaigns were spread out enough that I didn't put the pieces together for months. Of course, to go back on what I said at the top of the paragraph, maybe SCAYLE is shady, and I'm giving them too much credit.
The good news is, some of the AI powered tools that mods have access to are getting better at surfacing suspicious patterns of behavior. However, I still find I have to manually address these campaigns.
In the cat-and-mouse game with these marketing jerks, I'm always reluctant to surface what's working and what isn't. This is an interesting post, but it's going to make things worse. Ah well.
I would be surprised if Reddit was selling tools like that directly. Rather than just look the other way - because uncovering modern bot operations is a thankless threadmill, and user engagement metrics from fake users are still user engagement metrics.
to be fair, i once accidentally ended up on shreddit or new reddit or whatever they call it nowadays and i think there's something for managing your posts on reddit and seeing analytics about that or whatever
> uncovering modern bot operations
this significantly overestimates how sophisticated the spam waves are compared to like ability. the 80% of spam filtering basically never was really done as far as i can tell.
> a thankless threadmill, and user engagement metrics from fake users are still user engagement metrics.
The flip side of this is that for many years it's been basically impossible for a real person to convince Reddit to let them have an account. They track so many signals and if they don't like a single one or a combination, you get shadowbanned - I've tried it a few times since then on different computers on different networks with different email addresses, and I concluded they must have an extremely specific idea of what a new user does and everything else is spamming. For example if I post a few comments within a few hours of signing up, I was always shadowbanned. Because that's what a new user does, you see.
I stopped trying to have a Reddit account in about 2024 when the platform was too obviously enshittified, with no content of any value whatsoever remaining on it.
For the last several years, I’ve created a new Reddit account, posted heavily, and then deleted it when I felt I needed a social-media break. Rinse and repeat. I’ve never had problems creating those new accounts or having them banned. You just need to verify your signup with some new email address, at some domain that isn’t already a known throwaway-email domain, and accept that some subs won’t show your comments until your account is a couple of weeks old.
But I definitely agree with you that the platform is finished now, even smaller subs that aren’t drawing so much surreptitious spam. The problem is that even if one uses Old Reddit, the vast majority of other posters are using the app. That tends to discourage substantial discussion or community, in favour of daft 140-character shit comments.
Once Discord started taking off I was much happier returning to the chatrooms I started with (on IRC), without any algorithm attempting to maximize your engagement. It's much less useful as a resource that grows over time, but the value of something like that has been slashed and burned by LLM's anyway.
In the end the biggest hurdle to getting an account on Reddit at this point is why you'd bother.
I remember reading years ago about some corrupt mod in one of the image subreddits - he or his friend had started some image hosting site and had six different Reddit accounts that he used to upvote posts that used his site and downvote all other posts. It took people a long while to notice what he was up to.
iirc it only got noticed at the time because of an argument between him and Ecka6 which led to the somewhat famous "here's the thing you said a jackdaw is a crow" copypasta
Reddit must have some mechanism specifically for non-spamming bots that isn’t covered in this article. I wonder how it works. I imagine the mechanisms are more complex and opaque than anti-spam (with various levels being exposed to the hierarchies of Reddit and government backdoors). These days, I’ve noticed an almost forcing-function that operates to put the minimum spin needed on posts and comments to turn signal to noise. It seems smart enough to not only generate noisy comments but create comments to amplify existing organic noisy comments. I’m sure these systems are decentralized, emergent, and split across numerous nation-states and actors. I’m also fairly certain what we have now is a tenuous balance that has emerged from all these actors and Reddit policing actions as well.
I imagine Reddit has a high-level of insight into this and a certain level of permissibility it grants, both to inflate user counts and to steer public discourse and insight into less productive mean (or productive to certain interest groups at the expense of the people). I think is also an effect that Reddit has become more global and consensus of the USA people is very antagonistic to the consensus of the people of the world so that doesn’t help (+ access to LLMs to make English writing no longer a barrier to entry).
There is some sort of wink wink nudge nudge agreement going on with certain spam accounts. You will see them post article spam with hidden history, and if you look up their posts either via google or any other reddit crawling tool, they are posting all over various subreddits that same article maybe dozens of times. If they comment it is really basic and formulaic and found all over their post histories as well.
I feel like reddit enjoys it as these posts (often political in some way) usually get good engagement which is in line with reddits own incentives for courting advertiser money.
This practice was perfected by gallowboob years ago.
He would spam a link/pic/post and monitor, if the post didn’t gain traction, he would delete and post again as to not trigger protections against the same link being posted.
He was a cancer on Reddit and I’m sure he still exists under different monikers. But now there are 100s of gallowboobs.
gallowboob in particular was an interesting case because he was very much a real person. and oh hell did a subreddit I mod know that way all too well
i think the guy had a like a keyword alert on his username because like one of my co-mods on a subreddit would talk about the guy and then we'd get reports for "It's targeted harassment against me" (which are reports that are sent to the admins) like a few hours later. much to the dismay of him, we had a chat with the admins later and it was like "as long as you're not saying to do vote manipulate or harass the guy it's fine."
i think a lot of it came from the fact that so like if you're modding a subreddit, a lot of people spend their time in the modqueue view rather than the comments so you see the targeted harassment reports on "xyz is a meanie head" and just click "remove" because it already is on the edge at best for most subreddits. this is how context gets lost. so people would see "unfavorable treatment" (not that it didn't happen, gallowboob's company's domain was soft-banned on reddit yet his subreddits had automod rules set to approve them) when if more people were as trigger happy on the report button a similar thing would happen
the admin problems with this are much worse because the comments tend to be looked at in isolation so saying "i'm gonna kill you", in isolation, looks without context pretty bad, but might be part of a joke chain or song meme that reddit likes to do every so often. take into account the fact that admins get whiny sometimes if your AEO removals are too high. then take into account the AEO guy's Tarot card reading and whether Mercury is in retrograde and you get a lot of mods who are a bit trigger happy, esp when people've gotten banned for approving stuff the AEO removed for dumb reasons
this somewhat led to a bit of an inflated ego with regards to reddit but eventually from what i see he left... at least under that username anyway.
There have been incidents where users who reported certain spambots were themselves banned for "report abuse". It's speculated the operators of those spambots pay money to Reddit to not be banned.
I have a 16 year old account and received my first account warning, ever, for reporting a user's comment (to reddit, not the sub) a single time and the admins disagreeing that it violated the guidelines.
I have screenshots somewhere, but it basically said if I continued to abuse the report feature my account would be banned.
Reddit is a publicly traded company and I sincerely doubt the company is taking some organized racket money on the side. But there is some serious conduct issues with admins, and I won't speculate about their motivations.
A lot of what they are doing now is around AI comments and posts, I know this because in some of my subreddits I have various automod filters that align with the way AI writes, I see it all the time where my automod removes something and reddit removes it again after (some kind of race condition), as well as tons of these accounts getting site wide bans.
In case you didn't realise, a massive portion of content on reddit now is LLMs.
I'm not a massive fan of how reddit has played certain hands in the last 5 years or so, but I do hope they win the war on dead internet theory.
Neat rabbit hole. Reminds me of having to deal with email spam - it was a similar deal with rule-based filters, ML scores, domain bans,IP filtering, browse fingerprinting etc and mishmash of ever evolving scripts surviving org and personnel changes. Glad i dont deal with it anymore as the frontier seems to be 2 fronts now with human and agentic spam.
Based on the current status of my shadowbanned account (I suspect a competitor in our space retaliating), it looks like `banall` only flags posts from the last 6 years.
Of course, nobody can view my profile anymore anyway (I'm waiting on appeal), but on my account, only posts from the last 6 years have the "Sorry this post was removed by reddit filters" message.
Damn, maybe I can finally find out why my 10+ year account was globally (and retroactively) shadowbanned, even though the appeal was allegedly granted.
In the past, those post removals didn't even exist in the moderation log, so perhaps a reason could give me a clue... On the other hand, I'm taking a kind of emotional damage just remembering.
There's basically only one result you can get from an appeal which is "we have reviewed your account and we will not be lifting the suspension at this time."
The appeals process exists to fill a checkbox that says there must be an appeals process, not to actually unban anyone.
banned_by true is more accurate to say "admin or automatic". in "admin mode," you can see these although not sure the UX for these nowadays now that it is spewing a gazillion lines of text into them).
Anti-Evil Operations removals (nee Trust & Safety) are generally human(-assisted) actions (although these actions can be applied en masse). there's some more information nowadays in the API which was really nice. it also helped because people stopped blaming "the mods" for removals when the spam filter slopped all over the place. this was also annoying because previously you had to previously guess from the API how it was removed even if you were a mod.
the 3 ways to remove a post/comment (i.e. in reply to: train_spam):
- remove not spam: removes it but doesn't train the spam filter, obvious
- spam: removes it and trains the spam filter, obvious
- confirm spam: only happens when you remove after removing for any reason, *does not* train the spam filter
- reinforce spam: trains the spam filter even if the spam filter already caught it. *does* train the spam filter. you can do this by doing `action: spam` in automod. not sure if there have been any more in the last few years
also you can tell the legacy of "removals", back in the day stories were "banned" instead of "removed" by moderators and administrators.
also also also... you can see a lot of the stuff from this article in the `approved_by` side of it as well. if you hover over a checkmark of someone who has been unshadowbanned, you'll see it says "approved by Reddit (shadowban removed)"
if an admin manually unspams someones stuff (say someone who got accidentally shadowbanned and got hit with an overzealous spam filter multiple times >.>), it'll say "approved by <username> (all)". there are some consequences to this. it approves stuff that has been "filtered" (as AutoMod filtering is a weird hack where it removes something but keeps in the modqueue).
> spammit
i believe this is the thing that is "pretty similar to a naive Bayesian classifier"[1][2] that reddit used. /u/Deimorz iirc was a reddit dev at the time and it was somewhat public info. i say somewhat because you kinda had to be both interested in the this and probably be around the metasphere
iirc from some other comments i pieced together there are also per-subreddit spam filters. in the olden days sometimes they'd get way out of whack and you could ask an admin to reset it for you... or something idk
> em
guessing em in this case btw refers to /u/hueypriest, who was reddit's GM at the time
> would’ve been catastrophic for Reddit’s spam issues
the thing that surprised me at the time was just how bad reddit's spam filtering is. i did a small little thing at the time where i'd just look at stuff following some basic spam filtering rules (like stuff you'd probably get out of an artisinal spamassassin ruleset) and even that deluge was amazing to see.
like the ML stuff is cool and all but seriously 90% of this could probably still be solved with some basic rules. the profile hiding stuff didn't help either but that was way after my time.
Once again expressing my opinion that this is the worst anti feature of the site. Threads are like commenting in the void because most people are not going to be looking for replies to comments they made days or weeks ago. I see the true datestamp of the comment I replied upon upthread was not 3 hours ago, but 3 days ago.
The fact that they change the timestamp is also very stupid (yes you can hover and still return the datestamp, but this is by definition a dark pattern). These posts should preserve the timestamp vs masking it and even should be flagged as [Second Chance] in the title imo.
Before we started doing it this way, the threads would fill up with far more off-topic comments ("why is this 3 day old post on the frontpage?" and so on). That was a much bigger problem. Relativizing the timestamps to reflect the re-up time was our attempt to address that. Overall, it has worked ok—that is, while it does still lead to offtopic confusion and complaints in the threads (boo) there is far less of it than there was before (yay).
I'm open to suggestions of how to do it better! But you also need to consider the cost of adding explicit details to the UI. If we did that every time something like this came up, HN would have become an unreadable mess a long time ago.
I guarantee you've thought more about this than I have, but the first impression I had of the "second chance" pool was that it would essentially be a repost of the top-level post and not the comment threads. I think part of the reason people bring it up is because they see the same post PLUS the same comments with new timestamps and feel disoriented.
maybe just adding something like (revived) to the timestamp, or a [?] link that explains what happened to the date? If you want to avoid adding info to the ui it will inevitably create confusion
That's the status quo ante, which didn't work, plus a UI element which most people wouldn't understand. My guess is this would lead to even more offtopicness.
There have been almost zero visible changes to the HN codebase in over a decade, but the one thing I would love to see them add is a little flag on the heading of the post to say it is 2nd Chance Pool to avoid all these comments every time this happens and everyone is confused :)
You get shadowbanned for almost anything these days. It's not worth trying to use that site any more - I wrote it off as a lost cause, a playground for bots to talk to each other thinking they're talking to humans.
It's not just shady little operations. I'm speaking specifically about the SCAYLE ecommerce platform, in my example. They've got Zalando money to play with, and as a German platform that's trying to break into the North American market, it appears they've made a bet on indirectly spamming the LLMs with fictional tales of commerce replatforming horror stories. At first, they're some of the more interesting topics in a sea of really useless posts, with contributions from people who seem to have some real experience with enterprise ecommerce. I was a little suspicious, but these interaction campaigns were spread out enough that I didn't put the pieces together for months. Of course, to go back on what I said at the top of the paragraph, maybe SCAYLE is shady, and I'm giving them too much credit.
The good news is, some of the AI powered tools that mods have access to are getting better at surfacing suspicious patterns of behavior. However, I still find I have to manually address these campaigns.
In the cat-and-mouse game with these marketing jerks, I'm always reluctant to surface what's working and what isn't. This is an interesting post, but it's going to make things worse. Ah well.
It's definitely been a lot harder for me to uncover sockpuppetry
> uncovering modern bot operations
this significantly overestimates how sophisticated the spam waves are compared to like ability. the 80% of spam filtering basically never was really done as far as i can tell.
> a thankless threadmill, and user engagement metrics from fake users are still user engagement metrics.
that's probably it tho
I stopped trying to have a Reddit account in about 2024 when the platform was too obviously enshittified, with no content of any value whatsoever remaining on it.
But I definitely agree with you that the platform is finished now, even smaller subs that aren’t drawing so much surreptitious spam. The problem is that even if one uses Old Reddit, the vast majority of other posters are using the app. That tends to discourage substantial discussion or community, in favour of daft 140-character shit comments.
In the end the biggest hurdle to getting an account on Reddit at this point is why you'd bother.
iirc it only got noticed at the time because of an argument between him and Ecka6 which led to the somewhat famous "here's the thing you said a jackdaw is a crow" copypasta
I imagine Reddit has a high-level of insight into this and a certain level of permissibility it grants, both to inflate user counts and to steer public discourse and insight into less productive mean (or productive to certain interest groups at the expense of the people). I think is also an effect that Reddit has become more global and consensus of the USA people is very antagonistic to the consensus of the people of the world so that doesn’t help (+ access to LLMs to make English writing no longer a barrier to entry).
I feel like reddit enjoys it as these posts (often political in some way) usually get good engagement which is in line with reddits own incentives for courting advertiser money.
He would spam a link/pic/post and monitor, if the post didn’t gain traction, he would delete and post again as to not trigger protections against the same link being posted.
He was a cancer on Reddit and I’m sure he still exists under different monikers. But now there are 100s of gallowboobs.
i think the guy had a like a keyword alert on his username because like one of my co-mods on a subreddit would talk about the guy and then we'd get reports for "It's targeted harassment against me" (which are reports that are sent to the admins) like a few hours later. much to the dismay of him, we had a chat with the admins later and it was like "as long as you're not saying to do vote manipulate or harass the guy it's fine."
i think a lot of it came from the fact that so like if you're modding a subreddit, a lot of people spend their time in the modqueue view rather than the comments so you see the targeted harassment reports on "xyz is a meanie head" and just click "remove" because it already is on the edge at best for most subreddits. this is how context gets lost. so people would see "unfavorable treatment" (not that it didn't happen, gallowboob's company's domain was soft-banned on reddit yet his subreddits had automod rules set to approve them) when if more people were as trigger happy on the report button a similar thing would happen
the admin problems with this are much worse because the comments tend to be looked at in isolation so saying "i'm gonna kill you", in isolation, looks without context pretty bad, but might be part of a joke chain or song meme that reddit likes to do every so often. take into account the fact that admins get whiny sometimes if your AEO removals are too high. then take into account the AEO guy's Tarot card reading and whether Mercury is in retrograde and you get a lot of mods who are a bit trigger happy, esp when people've gotten banned for approving stuff the AEO removed for dumb reasons
this somewhat led to a bit of an inflated ego with regards to reddit but eventually from what i see he left... at least under that username anyway.
Yep, for example: If you mention the name "TurboStrider27" on /r/Games, your comment gets shadowbanned.
I have screenshots somewhere, but it basically said if I continued to abuse the report feature my account would be banned.
Reddit is a publicly traded company and I sincerely doubt the company is taking some organized racket money on the side. But there is some serious conduct issues with admins, and I won't speculate about their motivations.
In case you didn't realise, a massive portion of content on reddit now is LLMs.
I'm not a massive fan of how reddit has played certain hands in the last 5 years or so, but I do hope they win the war on dead internet theory.
Of course, nobody can view my profile anymore anyway (I'm waiting on appeal), but on my account, only posts from the last 6 years have the "Sorry this post was removed by reddit filters" message.
In the past, those post removals didn't even exist in the moderation log, so perhaps a reason could give me a clue... On the other hand, I'm taking a kind of emotional damage just remembering.
The appeals process exists to fill a checkbox that says there must be an appeals process, not to actually unban anyone.
banned_by true is more accurate to say "admin or automatic". in "admin mode," you can see these although not sure the UX for these nowadays now that it is spewing a gazillion lines of text into them).
Anti-Evil Operations removals (nee Trust & Safety) are generally human(-assisted) actions (although these actions can be applied en masse). there's some more information nowadays in the API which was really nice. it also helped because people stopped blaming "the mods" for removals when the spam filter slopped all over the place. this was also annoying because previously you had to previously guess from the API how it was removed even if you were a mod.
the 3 ways to remove a post/comment (i.e. in reply to: train_spam):
- remove not spam: removes it but doesn't train the spam filter, obvious
- spam: removes it and trains the spam filter, obvious
- confirm spam: only happens when you remove after removing for any reason, *does not* train the spam filter
- reinforce spam: trains the spam filter even if the spam filter already caught it. *does* train the spam filter. you can do this by doing `action: spam` in automod. not sure if there have been any more in the last few years
also you can tell the legacy of "removals", back in the day stories were "banned" instead of "removed" by moderators and administrators.
also also also... you can see a lot of the stuff from this article in the `approved_by` side of it as well. if you hover over a checkmark of someone who has been unshadowbanned, you'll see it says "approved by Reddit (shadowban removed)"
if an admin manually unspams someones stuff (say someone who got accidentally shadowbanned and got hit with an overzealous spam filter multiple times >.>), it'll say "approved by <username> (all)". there are some consequences to this. it approves stuff that has been "filtered" (as AutoMod filtering is a weird hack where it removes something but keeps in the modqueue).
> spammit
i believe this is the thing that is "pretty similar to a naive Bayesian classifier"[1][2] that reddit used. /u/Deimorz iirc was a reddit dev at the time and it was somewhat public info. i say somewhat because you kinda had to be both interested in the this and probably be around the metasphere
iirc from some other comments i pieced together there are also per-subreddit spam filters. in the olden days sometimes they'd get way out of whack and you could ask an admin to reset it for you... or something idk
> em
guessing em in this case btw refers to /u/hueypriest, who was reddit's GM at the time
> would’ve been catastrophic for Reddit’s spam issues
the thing that surprised me at the time was just how bad reddit's spam filtering is. i did a small little thing at the time where i'd just look at stuff following some basic spam filtering rules (like stuff you'd probably get out of an artisinal spamassassin ruleset) and even that deluge was amazing to see.
like the ML stuff is cool and all but seriously 90% of this could probably still be solved with some basic rules. the profile hiding stuff didn't help either but that was way after my time.
[1]: https://reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/10ko5h/comment/... (2012)
[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/6bj5de/state_of_sp...
How does it work?
The fact that they change the timestamp is also very stupid (yes you can hover and still return the datestamp, but this is by definition a dark pattern). These posts should preserve the timestamp vs masking it and even should be flagged as [Second Chance] in the title imo.
I'm open to suggestions of how to do it better! But you also need to consider the cost of adding explicit details to the UI. If we did that every time something like this came up, HN would have become an unreadable mess a long time ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84PHEMLab6g&t=2807s