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.
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.
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.
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.
Can'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.
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.
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):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84PHEMLab6g&t=2807s
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.
I 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?
You're missing the second-chance pool https://news.ycombinator.com/pool which allows certain posts to reappear as if they were new.
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.
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.
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.