Why Reddit Changed Their Approach to Spam

jolamo

Junior Member
Joined
Jun 26, 2023
Messages
118
Reaction score
101
Reddit has a massive achilles heel - the entire business model relies on unpaid moderators working everyday.

Last Summer a significant amount of moderators rebelled. The unhappy mods closed down subs, or deleted content, or took subs private, or switched subs to nsfw all of which caused a big hit to the advertising business model. Reddit admins know they need to become less reliant on volunteer mods.

Reddit admins have introduced machine learning to identify and remove spam/free promotion. They look for patterns. Same URLs used by banned accounts, same phrases in reported posts, same IP addresses associated with banned accounts, etc. Wouldn't be surprised if certain subreddits have become honeypots - like posting too often in known karma farming subs and your account will become suspect.

This reduced the workload for the volunteer mods so they will be less angry and less likely to rebel. Makes it easier for Reddit to replace any veteran mod with a user with no prior moderating experience. This is about taking control away from mods and giving it back to the admins so Reddit isn't vulnerable to another mod rebellion.

Read the modnews subreddit and you will know what mods know. You will see they have been kept in the dark with much of the recent spam changes BHW has spotted.

You can still profit from Reddit but it is much harder and will be even harder soon. You want to appear as much like a typical human as possible. Avoid things that might be caught by AI looking at spam patterns.
 
It is a public company now, that's the root reason.
 
Reddit has a massive achilles heel - the entire business model relies on unpaid moderators working everyday.

Last Summer a significant amount of moderators rebelled. The unhappy mods closed down subs, or deleted content, or took subs private, or switched subs to nsfw all of which caused a big hit to the advertising business model. Reddit admins know they need to become less reliant on volunteer mods.

Reddit admins have introduced machine learning to identify and remove spam/free promotion. They look for patterns. Same URLs used by banned accounts, same phrases in reported posts, same IP addresses associated with banned accounts, etc. Wouldn't be surprised if certain subreddits have become honeypots - like posting too often in known karma farming subs and your account will become suspect.

This reduced the workload for the volunteer mods so they will be less angry and less likely to rebel. Makes it easier for Reddit to replace any veteran mod with a user with no prior moderating experience. This is about taking control away from mods and giving it back to the admins so Reddit isn't vulnerable to another mod rebellion.

Read the modnews subreddit and you will know what mods know. You will see they have been kept in the dark with much of the recent spam changes BHW has spotted.

You can still profit from Reddit but it is much harder and will be even harder soon. You want to appear as much like a typical human as possible. Avoid things that might be caught by AI looking at spam patterns.
I did a thread on this 2 weeks ago

Reddit is planning on taking mods completely out of the spam moderation business

any spam reports will go direct to the ADMINS. mods will not be allowed to approve spam anymore

this means no longer undrhanded stalth spammers controlling big subs since they have no control on if its deleted by admins

i got your pm on the home connection stuff. i got banned doing that though which has worked for years so seems reddit has tightened that too

not giving any tips out to anyone though anymore everyone is now on their own so no one pm me
 
Reddit has a massive achilles heel - the entire business model relies on unpaid moderators working everyday.

Last Summer a significant amount of moderators rebelled. The unhappy mods closed down subs, or deleted content, or took subs private, or switched subs to nsfw all of which caused a big hit to the advertising business model. Reddit admins know they need to become less reliant on volunteer mods.

Reddit admins have introduced machine learning to identify and remove spam/free promotion. They look for patterns. Same URLs used by banned accounts, same phrases in reported posts, same IP addresses associated with banned accounts, etc. Wouldn't be surprised if certain subreddits have become honeypots - like posting too often in known karma farming subs and your account will become suspect.

This reduced the workload for the volunteer mods so they will be less angry and less likely to rebel. Makes it easier for Reddit to replace any veteran mod with a user with no prior moderating experience. This is about taking control away from mods and giving it back to the admins so Reddit isn't vulnerable to another mod rebellion.

Read the modnews subreddit and you will know what mods know. You will see they have been kept in the dark with much of the recent spam changes BHW has spotted.

You can still profit from Reddit but it is much harder and will be even harder soon. You want to appear as much like a typical human as possible. Avoid things that might be caught by AI looking at spam patterns.
i have noticed that no one in the mod folders know anything about hte recent spam changes. i haven't seen one person complain about their links getting removed.
 
I guess this is what im struggling with here - https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/are-you-a-reddit-mod-please-help-what-has-changed-please-help.1591726/
 
Its a continuous process, they're always upping their detection.
 
if the dead internet theory is right the internet will be 90% bots on the web in the next few years, no algorithm is able to stop that as it is the inevitable evolution of the digital world
human generated ai stuff will be the dominant force of the internet and we as bot makers will be on the top of it, google tried fighting ai content and they are failing to do so, as for social media, ai getting better everyday they are having harder time detecting bots without affecting human users too
if the end consumer likes what he sees and ai bots keep driving engagement and ad revenue to social media companies then i guess they will came to term with and accept that quality bot content actually benefit them, now reddit implemented strict ai anti bot measure, and we will improve our ai bots with more human behavior, then they get to a point they will be actively suppressing human user to fight ai bots, which of course will reflect on their bottom line revenue
 
if the dead internet theory is right the internet will be 90% bots on the web in the next few years, no algorithm is able to stop that as it is the inevitable evolution of the digital world
human generated ai stuff will be the dominant force of the internet and we as bot makers will be on the top of it, google tried fighting ai content and they are failing to do so, as for social media, ai getting better everyday they are having harder time detecting bots without affecting human users too
if the end consumer likes what he sees and ai bots keep driving engagement and ad revenue to social media companies then i guess they will came to term with and accept that quality bot content actually benefit them, now reddit implemented strict ai anti bot measure, and we will improve our ai bots with more human behavior, then they get to a point they will be actively suppressing human user to fight ai bots, which of course will reflect on their bottom line revenue
Even though reddit updated their AI anti spam measures, reddit is still at least 20%-40% of bots (my subjective estimation so it may be more/less). Lots of russian/us/chinese propaganda comment bots are there. But other social networks are even worse for AI comments, just look at facebook or instagram comments.
 
Even though reddit updated their AI anti spam measures, reddit is still at least 20%-40% of bots (my subjective estimation so it may be more/less). Lots of russian/us/chinese propaganda comment bots are there. But other social networks are even worse for AI comments, just look at facebook or instagram comments.
i don't think so, bot activity in reddit is exclusive to photo/video reposting, which can only be true in photo/video sharing subreddits, in comments i would say less than 1% of comments in reddit are bots right now, because you can repost a video and get upvotes for it but you can't repost a comment without going out your way to adapt it to the post, which bots cannot do for you
 
i don't think so, bot activity in reddit is exclusive to photo/video reposting, which can only be true in photo/video sharing subreddits, in comments i would say less than 1% of comments in reddit are bots right now, because you can repost a video and get upvotes for it but you can't repost a comment without going out your way to adapt it to the post, which bots cannot do for you
Bots absolutely can adapt and comment like a real person these days, you cant tell which ones are bots anymore unless you dig their account and check history. It will only get worse as AI models improve.

As for photo/video a lot are bots but a lot are human karma farmers so really reddit is just mostly rare original content stuff followed by a lot of reposts, advertisement, onlyfans promotion, propaganda and bots.

The good thing is if you are on heavily regulated main subs which are in popular tab on reddit you will avoid most of bots/spam because they have auto and regular moderators looking for these type of stuff 24/7 and instantly delete em.
But go on smallers subs especially nsfw and a considerable amount of posts/comments would be either advertisement or repost made by bots.
 
Reddit has a massive achilles heel - the entire business model relies on unpaid moderators working everyday.

Last Summer a significant amount of moderators rebelled. The unhappy mods closed down subs, or deleted content, or took subs private, or switched subs to nsfw all of which caused a big hit to the advertising business model. Reddit admins know they need to become less reliant on volunteer mods.

Reddit admins have introduced machine learning to identify and remove spam/free promotion. They look for patterns. Same URLs used by banned accounts, same phrases in reported posts, same IP addresses associated with banned accounts, etc. Wouldn't be surprised if certain subreddits have become honeypots - like posting too often in known karma farming subs and your account will become suspect.

This reduced the workload for the volunteer mods so they will be less angry and less likely to rebel. Makes it easier for Reddit to replace any veteran mod with a user with no prior moderating experience. This is about taking control away from mods and giving it back to the admins so Reddit isn't vulnerable to another mod rebellion.

Read the modnews subreddit and you will know what mods know. You will see they have been kept in the dark with much of the recent spam changes BHW has spotted.

You can still profit from Reddit but it is much harder and will be even harder soon. You want to appear as much like a typical human as possible. Avoid things that might be caught by AI looking at spam patterns.
Yes, I agree that the patterns they detect affect both mods and users. If a spam pattern is detected, they will also ban subreddits. I had a couple of subs banned. Even the subs linked by the same mod will also get banned.
 
Yes, I agree that the patterns they detect affect both mods and users. If a spam pattern is detected, they will also ban subreddits. I had a couple of subs banned. Even the subs linked by the same mod will also get banned.
yep i noticed when i suddenly approved a buch of spam in my subreddit and eased up on the strictness to let anything go bam within days my 2 subreddits were banned even without anyone new replying after that and they had been up for years. the one that rarely gets comments was not banned so there wasn't much spam to approve
 
yep i noticed when i suddenly approved a buch of spam in my subreddit and eased up on the strictness to let anything go bam within days my 2 subreddits were banned even without anyone new replying after that and they had been up for years. the one that rarely gets comments was not banned so there wasn't much spam to approve
Yep, Don't approve spam or anything the automated system has flagged too often. Else risk the subreddit banned.
 
Back
Top