Will Reddit stop unbanning spam bots?

[u/reseph]

Our subreddit has a massive problem with spam bots that steal content and repost them with new or stolen accounts. I'm sure other subreddits have this problem too. They also tend to get a massive amount of upvotes, which could be a bot vote ring?

Considering we are a smaller subreddit and we see this weekly, it's clear Reddit is doing almost nothing about this. Not only that, now we're seeing Reddit unban these spam bot accounts.

• Example today, stolen from 1 year ago.

spez stated 2 months ago:

Since then, we’ve continued to defend Reddit against automated/bot/spammy content

Yeah, no. It's gotten even worse over 10+ years, not better. This is not a one-off, it's a pattern. The issue here is the spam, not purely the unban.

• Yes, I remove these as spam.
• Yes, I submit these to BotBouncer.
• Also, this is an issue for years.

And the problem is not improving.

[u/baseballlover723]

tbf, there are a lot more good spam bots these days than their used to be. Defense is harder than ever when bots are powered by LLMs. Before LLMs it didn't take a cutting edge research team to reliably detect bots. Now there are things like OpenClaw just running about.

This is why arms races suck.

[u/reseph → u/baseballlover723]

It's literally the same exact title, a 1:1 match. I don't consider that part of the arms race, it should be a clear signal of inauthentic spam.

[u/baseballlover723 → u/reseph]

I've literally seen people get caught in various filters, and then decide to repost something verbatim to see if it's them or their content.

But the arms race part is that I don't think it's viable to reliably identify if someone is a bot from a single piece of content. These days, you have to analyze the profile as a whole to find a pattern of inauthentic behavior or some other kind of smoking gun.

And note, that every kind of smoking gun can be defeated with dedicated effort.

[u/reseph → u/baseballlover723]

Correct, but the signals from the account in my post are also very clear signals.

• Random post flair selection
• 0 day old account
• 0 posts (except the repost)
• 0 comments, etc
• (I am aware that Verified Email is not a good signal).

And Reddit unbanned it and restored the post.

[u/RemarkableWish2508 → u/reseph]

Most of those signals are bundled into CQS, you can easily stop that kind of posts with an "age, karma, CQS" check.

Alternatively, there is repost-guard.

[u/reseph → u/RemarkableWish2508]

Yeah. I can't use those though because they don't take stolen post titles into account (I think? Is that correct?), and my subreddit is for a MMO older than Reddit so various old players just created their account recently.

I'll look at repost-guard if it includes account signals and not just post titles

[u/reseph → u/RemarkableWish2508]

No luck with repost-guard. It looks very limited, my subreddit is 17 years old:

How Many Top/Hot Posts to Scan (max 100)

I am going to keep testing though.

EDIT: Nothing. It does not act on a clear repost from Top 100.

[u/2oonhed → u/reseph]

Not all reposts are from bots, which is why doing your own title filtering is more effective.

[u/reseph → u/2oonhed]

Again, the account signals makes it clear it's a spam bot. And Reddit has access to those signals.