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):
A peek into Reddit's anti-spam internals
11–20 of 88 posts
Re: A peek into Reddit's anti-spam internals
#12[flagged]
Re: A peek into Reddit's anti-spam internals
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That is insanely bad borderline hostile UI.
Re: A peek into Reddit's anti-spam internals
#14Can't you just append ".json" to the end of any Reddit link and read all sorts of these fields?
Re: A peek into Reddit's anti-spam internals
#15Can't you just append ".json" to the end of any Reddit link and read all sorts of these fields?
No, the API will not return the admin-only removal reason. The code path that causes this is in the post.
Re: A peek into Reddit's anti-spam internals
#16I 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?
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??
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 :)
Re: A peek into Reddit's anti-spam internals
#17Damn, 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.
Is it still shadowbanned? If you go to reddit.com/appeal what does it say?
Re: A peek into Reddit's anti-spam internals
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That is insanely bad borderline hostile UI.
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.
Re: A peek into Reddit's anti-spam internals
#19I 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.
Re: A peek into Reddit's anti-spam internals
#20Based 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.