Hello guys,
Recently I have seen and talked with other moderators that there are specific brands (both well know and not so much) that are using couple of month old accounts to mention their brand. When questioned if they are affiliated they either decline it (obviously) or they just ignore. How I notice it? Same pattern, same/ similar writing style, similar mentioning etc.
What I was thinking- how could moderators coordinate and mute/ ban these accounts from participating in subreddits? Maybe it would be noteworthy to create some kind of additional automod which shares redlisted brands and whoever mentions them and are under X karma and X age then they get banned.
Sorry if there is something similar or it would not be technically possible.
If the posts share a similar structure, target the structure and remove all posts with title/body keywords. Then make sure automod alerts the team and you can ban the account (or review a false positive).
Worked with crypto spam.
In my case they are usually comments not posts.
Even then, that would be a solution for a single structure rather than taking down the whole network after they change their structure or system.
If this phenomena is as common as you are inferring, you should be able to provide 10 or maybe 100 examples of this. Which can be pattern filtered. This isn't new, people been doing this since before gmail existed for blocking spam email. Spam email went through its reactionary adaptation of this b y p u t t i n g s p a c e s o.r s.o.m.e o.t.h.e.r c_h_a_r_a_c_t_e_r between the letters to avoid the filters. Which lead to more advanced filters which simply looked for properly spelt words over ascii nonsence.
Yes but in your mentioned gmail if enough people mark it as spam, then the domain gets blacklisted... what if we do that with Reddit?
You read my comment, and then made assumptions about it. Don't do that. Just read it at face value. There isn't any read-between-the-lines mystery here.
I don't think we both understand each other. I did not make any assumptions, I'm proposing for a "automod" which has list of bad companies that will automatically ban users throughout multiple subreddits when enough subreddits have banned that exact account for spamming their brands.. what you are offering is for each moderator to create custom filter for their subreddits. I want this filter to be in ALL subreddits.
It sounds like you're advocating for a site-wide blacklist. That'd be a system feature, not something within mods control.
yes and no. Reddit is not able to manage these things because of bureaucracy. Also, they wouldn't be interested in such tool because that would decrease their total user count (bots). This automod would also be voluntary and if mods do not wish to have it, then they won't have it and users wouldn't get banned.
I add them to moderator's notes with the spam watch icon when that happens so it's easier to spot when it happens again
I know exactly what kind of 'shadow advertising' you mean. It's always the same 5-10 brands as well, with a similar pattern.
So far, I've just reported the accounts as spam > use of bots when I see one in the wild, with mildly optimistic results (most get permabanned by reddit after being reviewed).
edit: speculative reason for the reporting working so well: seems like they use some kind of easily detectable LLM, because they're all active in AI-related subs
I'm all for creating such a blacklist. Even though the subs I mod wouldn't profit from it, reddit as a whole certainly would.
Yup, yup! Even if it isn't AI written, human brains usually follow patterns and after viewing even 5 different comments you can notice a pattern that the people are doing even though the accounts are different and might not even engage with each other.
What do you mean that reddit would profit from this?
Maybe "redddit as a whole would benefit" is a better wording. As in: reddit would become a nicer place.
The only issue I see with this is having the (quick) ability to respond to complaints on false positives. Biggest example I can give is that, unless I am trying not to, I often come across/type similarly to ChatGPT. To the point that if I am at work and asking ChatGPT to help me make a long email more clear it generally only changes one word or so. I keep joking with my mom that chatgpt makes me feel like there's something wrong with me lol.
I put a lot of effort into making this reply clear that it's actually a human and not AI slop so it's not a great example but it I'm redditing at work and then get banned because I seem like a bot , it will definitely cause some major frustration .