A peek into Reddit's anti-spam internals

gallowboob in particular was an interesting case because he was very much a real person. and oh hell did a subreddit I mod know that way all too well

i think the guy had a like a keyword alert on his username because like one of my co-mods on a subreddit would talk about the guy and then we'd get reports for "It's targeted harassment against me" (which are reports that are sent to the admins) like a few hours later. much to the dismay of him, we had a chat with the admins later and it was like "as long as you're not saying to do vote manipulate or harass the guy it's fine."

i think a lot of it came from the fact that so like if you're modding a subreddit, a lot of people spend their time in the modqueue view rather than the comments so you see the targeted harassment reports on "xyz is a meanie head" and just click "remove" because it already is on the edge at best for most subreddits. this is how context gets lost. so people would see "unfavorable treatment" (not that it didn't happen, gallowboob's company's domain was soft-banned on reddit yet his subreddits had automod rules set to approve them) when if more people were as trigger happy on the report button a similar thing would happen

the admin problems with this are much worse because the comments tend to be looked at in isolation so saying "i'm gonna kill you", in isolation, looks without context pretty bad, but might be part of a joke chain or song meme that reddit likes to do every so often. take into account the fact that admins get whiny sometimes if your AEO removals are too high. then take into account the AEO guy's Tarot card reading and whether Mercury is in retrograde and you get a lot of mods who are a bit trigger happy, esp when people've gotten banned for approving stuff the AEO removed for dumb reasons

this somewhat led to a bit of an inflated ego with regards to reddit but eventually from what i see he left... at least under that username anyway.

My takeaway:

> My test account (5 years old!) got banned immediately, and all of its post history got wiped too. RIP

I want to know the real string of the event I ever want to delete my account and content. This would be much faster than using a browser script to manually delete.

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

Why would you need an LLM to automate that?