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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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