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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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'm sure you love Reddit's decision to allow users to hide their post history.
I'd be surprised if Reddit wasn't selling tools specifically aimed at seting up and managing operations like that
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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.
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.<p>In case you didn't realise, a <i>massive</i> portion of content on reddit now is LLMs.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>He was a cancer on Reddit and I’m sure he still exists under different monikers. But now there are 100s of gallowboobs.
> He was a cancer on Reddit and I’m sure he still exists under different monikers. But now there are 100s of gallowboobs.<p>Yep, for example: If you mention the name "TurboStrider27" on /r/Games, your comment gets shadowbanned.
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.
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.<p>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.
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.
"Anti-Evil Operations" is a pretty grandiose name for spam filtering. Also I liked the House of Leaves reference
Can't you just append ".json" to the end of any Reddit link and read all sorts of these fields?
what's going on with this post? It was posted days ago and now its back on the frontpage again?
My guess would be the second-chance pool (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/pool">https://news.ycombinator.com/pool</a>, explained by dang at <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308</a>)
Damn, maybe I can finally find out why my 10+ year account was globally (and retroactively) shadowbanned, even though the appeal was allegedly granted.<p>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.
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I swear I read this article 2 or 3 days ago and the comments on that post were also same as this post. Am I missing something here?
You're missing the second-chance pool <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/pool">https://news.ycombinator.com/pool</a> which allows certain posts to reappear as if they were new.
That doesn't show for me unless I click the link.<p>How does it work?
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.<p>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.
wait what the heck yeah, this is the same post as from a few days ago, i guess the comment and post timestamps got glitched??
That'a thing HN's second chance pool does. If you mouseover the "3 hours ago" or whatever on a comment, it will tell you the actual post timestamp.
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 :)
My friend got shadowbanned for posting a youtube link, part of a interview with Sascha Riley (the one where the explains the thing with the tent peg):<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84PHEMLab6g&t=2807s" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84PHEMLab6g&t=2807s</a>
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