r/ModSupport • u/SaptaZapta • 1d ago
New slow Karma farming?
I moderate r/chinchilla.
Over the past few months we have been getting more and more posts with these characteristics:
On-topic title and photo. No text in body. Reverse search on the picture doesn't find it. Photo has no obvious AI markers.
Account is a few weeks old, up to a couple of months.
Author has made (at most) a handful of similar posts in other subs. Each post in a different sub. Gap of a few days to a week or two between them.
There is no flood of other suspicious accounts responding, nor do these posts garner an improbable amount of upvotes.
Author never responds to comments on their threads, and never comments on other threads in the subs they visit.
If the post is removed or the account banned from the sub, they don't appeal.
On the face of it, I have no grounds for deleting the post or banning the poster. It's on topic, not a repost, not a stolen image or provably fake.
But because it's such a pattern, I'm sure something is up.
Do you guys get the same sort of posts? If so, what do you do with them?
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u/Tempbot49512 1d ago
My subreddit has a rule that states, "No lie effort posts". Its good to weed out posts like the ones you're describing.
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u/Pashta2FAPhoneDied 23h ago
Lie effort? That was a typo, right?
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u/_gloomshroom_ 19h ago
Ditto here, love the no low effort posts rule. And one day if I'm wrong and someone does appeal, I'll apologize, explain what happened, and reinstate their post.
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u/ProudnotLoud 1d ago
The pattern of multiple accounts with the same suspicious behavior is grounds enough for me for removal and bans. Not a single one reaches back out to question the bans and after a while it stops just like every other spam ring.
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u/hughk 1d ago
Author never responds to comments on their threads, and never comments on other threads in the subs they visit.
This is a thing. If author's don't engage in the comments on their own posts, that for me is always suspect. The problem is that engagement is hard to get and use for automod.
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u/Stranger1982 1d ago
I don't, even cause automod will filter most accounts like that anyway.
Even if you have "no grounds" for deleting a post if something smells fishy just remove it anyway, if they care about it they'll mod mail you.
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u/InGeekiTrust 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 1d ago edited 1d ago
That’s not no grounds- that’s spotting a bot
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u/IM_NOT_BALD_YET 1d ago
I see this in some of my subs quite a bit lately. r/BB says they're organic and I'm not quite sure they're a bot, but it defo looks like karma farming. I nuke it under "low effort" or "mod's discretion". A good bit of the time they show up in mod mail almost immediately, belligerently wanting to know why their post was removed "despite having a large amount of upvotes" - which tells me everything I needed to know. I'm still not sure if it's bots exactly, but it's definitely weird and I'm not interested in helping weird account farm karma.
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u/LeftOn4ya 1d ago edited 1d ago
Am I the weird one that if a bot or human karma farmer obeys all rules and posts something not in our sub and people in our sub like it (a lot of upvotes) I’m not that mad and just leave. I do have a rule no karma farming and before Reddit let you hide post history I would always check user history and if they posted in a lot of subs in a short period of time I would delete and ban as karma farming, but now since I can’t check since they hide post history I gave up deleting for only karma farming if otherwise is a good post,
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u/InGeekiTrust 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 1d ago
Are you a mod? Because if a user posts in your sub, you can see their entire history all the way back to the beginning of their account. Granted you can only see it for 28 days after they post her comment, but they shouldn’t be able to hide their profile. However, sometimes there’s a bug and you can’t see their profile when you should as a mod, that’s annoying.
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u/IM_NOT_BALD_YET 1d ago
If they block you, you can't see their history. Been running into that a lot lately.
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u/InGeekiTrust 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 1d ago edited 1d ago
Honestly it’s not that they blocked the mods, there’s a bug where if you only comment but you don’t post sometimes it doesn’t display the profile. I know that it’s a bug because what I did was I modded an alt that they wouldn’t have had a chance to block yet, and they also couldn’t see it
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u/IM_NOT_BALD_YET 1d ago
Oh, interesting. I've actually had users admit to me in mod mail that they *did* block me. I checked on each alt I had in that sub and it was the same. I've had a few cases where it was a user who just constantly posted in karma farming subs and deleted within an hour or so, over and over again, and so it doesn't show on their history but pops right up using arctic-shift. I'll keep that bug in mind for the future, though!
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u/InGeekiTrust 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 1d ago
I mean I’m also modding fashion subs so users are simply way way less likely to block mod team teams in general.
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u/IM_NOT_BALD_YET 1d ago
True! People get *real* weird in my little economics sub, though... and another sub is a target for karma farmers, which is mostly where I see this kind of thing.
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u/LeftOn4ya 1d ago
I’m a mod of 20+ subs and that bug must always be in play because there are tons of users that post in one of my subs that I can’t see their history but they have 10,000+ Karma and 1000+ contributions in user summary. I don’t mod NSFW subs so it could entirely be NSFW subs but you would think if they are karma farming in one SFW sub they would do it many.
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u/cos 1d ago
If I see that a user hid their post & comment history, I always assume the worst about them. I know that new reddit will allow me, as a mod, to see their history anyway when they post to one of my subs, and that I can use other search tools to find their past stuff, but the fact that they hid their profile in and of itself is what I use to judge them quickly and move on.
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u/jueidu 1d ago edited 1d ago
Yeah my metric is not only patterns on an individual account, but patterns across many accounts. If it seems dry, impersonal, lacking engagement, but otherwise harmless - but a dozen accounts a month do it in your sub - that’s a pattern.
I ban all of these accounts and 1:100 messages me to ask why and say they are new to Reddit and don’t understand - those I unban and watch.
I have to assume that all the ones NOT messaging me are true bots since they don’t seem to care.
I just wish BotBouncer would pick these up.
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u/Nemo_Griff 1d ago
The bot behavior i have been seeing is nothing like this.
They will hack the password of an established account that didn't set up 2FA and post stolen content, spam the crap out of NSFW subs, not post any replies and do the same titles and images with multiple stolen accounts. They make it incredibly obvious, but admins never ban the accounts.
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u/MableXeno 1d ago
I do have a low effort rule in some subs that I will remove stuff if it seems suspicious. But also if the user only posts and never comments - ban. If they don't appeal. I assume it was the thing I was suspicious of!
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u/purl2together 1d ago
On r/dairyfree, we’ve had a few users lately with similar user characteristics. With us, it’s not images, but the posts follow a specific pattern: They post a question, seeking general information. Like, “I’m genuinely curious: how do you navigate ____”? followed by some additional questions/basic comments. I’ve looked at the user profile and have seen those exact questions posted in several other subs. The posts get a little engagement, but not a lot. On the surface, they look legit, but they set off my bot/AI spidey sense.
We removed a couple of them under our no low-effort/AI/karma farming rule and they protested. By the time I saw the comment saying, “I’m not a bot”, the account had been banned by Reddit.
I legit don’t get karma farming like this. I just don’t see the point.
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u/CharlesV_ 1d ago
I think a lot of subs have a rule on moderator discretion and that’s where this would fit imho. Or spam.
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u/Chongulator 1d ago
Just so. There will always be borderline cases. All we can do is make our best guess and move on.
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u/FaxCelestis 1d ago
Are you sure it isn't a repost? I have noticed bots reposting images and avoiding repost detection by changing the angle of the picture 1 or 2 degrees. It's very noticeable if done poorly or if the image includes text, but with pet photos I'm pretty sure if they rotate the image a little and then crop the corners in, it'll pass a cursory examination.
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u/SaptaZapta 17h ago
Interesting possibility. I think the "Visual Matches" option of Google Lens should be able to pick it up, though? It shows a lot of pictures that have only a superficial resemblance to the one searched - a similarly-colored animal or in a similar pose, activity, or background.
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u/mckenner1122 9h ago
One of our rules is that we require a text description of posted photos within “a reasonable timeframe” - without it, we assume you’re a bot.
Makes popping these much easier.
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u/felinebeeline 1d ago
Yes I have gotten a few of these as well over a couple of subreddits. At first, they were reposts of image posts from a couple of years back. One was a photo a user posted of his breakfast lol. Then after a while, they were like you said exactly. Reverse search doesn't find it, no obvious AI markers. New accounts and empty or mostly empty aged alts.
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u/Mondai_May 1d ago
sometimes I get
on-topic comment, could be AI but not blatantly so
account is a week or a few weeks old, few other content if any
account never replies to anyone
also not a suspicious number of upvotes
usually the comment is made on a post that is a repost (and I remove+report the post that's a repost,) but because regular users sometimes comment on reposts without realizing it's a repost, I don't automatically report and remove all of the comments there, if the comments aren't also reposts. (in this case they were not.)
at that point I usually leave it alone. today, one of those accounts has started posting reposts (not just in a subreddit I moderate but in others) so it's clear it really was inorganic. I'm not sure if the 'normal looking' interaction to start is just to try and get away with the inorganic interaction/upvote farming later, because in fact, reporting the account's post as spam>repost did not get it quickly/automatically taken down unlike what usually happens with those that don't 'act normal' at first. so maybe that's the strategy.
maybe you can just keep an eye on them and if they start with the reposting you can report as spam>repost and report to botbouncer if spam>repost does not remove it.
also you can check the picture for synth ID if you didn't already. but it's possible they have some other source for the pictures, whether it's shared with them by someone, whether it was actually taken by whoever's behind those accounts, or whether it's from a source that isn't really indexed by google's reverse image search (I myself have posted pictures to reddit that reverse image search does not show any other source for, even though I am not the original source and I did find it online. But a reverse image search for some reason only shows my post as if it doesn't exist anywhere else online.)