Comment by leviathant
6 days ago
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'm sure you love Reddit's decision to allow users to hide their post history.
What I do love is that when you're a mod, that post history isn't necessarily hidden.
I don't think this covers comments (...on subreddits you don't mod)
It's definitely been a lot harder for me to uncover sockpuppetry
The same as youtubes removal of dislikes and more recently they disabled search results with newest results first.
Now I ignore a user based on other criteria (account age post/comment karma + a 50 times compressed repost)
They still let Google crawl, so [site:reddit.com "username"] can be instructive.
I hate that change. arctic-shift.photon-reddit.com still works, at least with comments before the change. Not sure about current comments.
It hasn't been working for about a week now.
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I can't even fathom how mods now handle all this. I was a mod for one of the top subreddits and it was hard back then, a few years before LLMs, and I only had to deal with URL submissions, not comments.
I also help moderate a forum and I noticed the spike in new user signups for spamming has sharply risen over the last two years or so. The majority are most likely using LLMs to automate this. So now we put new registered users into a shadow account where they can post and interact, but it's only visible to them and no one else on the forum for a probation period. It seems to work for now.
I'd be surprised if Reddit wasn't selling tools specifically aimed at seting up and managing operations like that
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.
that's probably it tho
How did you manage to uncover the operation? Is there any things that tipped you off? Is it like, accounts only posting on a precise subset of subs, or how much a network of accounts reply to each other? Or too much linking/references to products, or perfect spelling/identical consistent typos?
I'm curious because it feels like it could be built into a tool to analyse - even if it does become a bit of an arms race.
It's harder now that post history is hidden but I did something similar in the past.
Start with a single comment you think is a shill. Maybe 80% of their post history is vague inane generalities (like "aww so cute" in r/cats, or a reply to a top rated post that only paraphrases the existing context without adding anything new). You can use an LLM to identify every comment or post from that account that mentions a product or service. Take note of everyone who replies to that comment as well as the parent comment. Then use an LLM to identify every post from that original account asking for recommendations (hey r/bidet, what's your favorite bidet), and look at who responds. If you build this graph, draw directional edges based on who replied to who. The accounts with edges both ways across different posts are bots. Rinse and repeat by examing the post history of THOSE accounts. You will end up with a graph with a few loosely connected nodes (maybe false positives) but a tight web of spam accounts that frequently engage with each other.
That's your bot farm. This would be relatively trivial for reddit to implement, if they cared about reducing spam. I got a POC working in a few hours, back before they limited API access
It's a good idea. But this would no longer work now that Reddit hides post history, right? Or does the API still provide a user's post history?
You'd basically need to be pulling all the data for all the subreddits, and then recreate a user's partial post/comment history from that.
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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.
the Unidan incident?
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
According to Reddit lore, that was coincidental. The jackdaw/crow thread was simply his last pre-ban comment:
<https://old.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/2cmdiq/whats_...>
Unidan doesn't fit the description. It must have been a different incident.
And now automate and scale that with Claude/OpenAI/Gemini/whatever. It's insidious and terrible.
Why would you need an LLM to automate 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.
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.
In the end the biggest hurdle to getting an account on Reddit at this point is why you'd bother.
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.
When I become a dotcom^H^H^H^H^H^H AI zillionaire, I'll start a web-only platform that blocks mobile user agents. (If you can work around that, you've passed the entry gate.)