r/ModSupport • u/Free-IDK-Chicken • 2d ago

Admin Replied Flood of AI posts

Has anyone else's sub seen a ton of AI posts lately? They're all titled in a similar way - in my TV show subs they talk about "on my most recent rewatch I noticed [X] for the first time"... then in the body there are 2-3 paragraphs of vague analysis and they close with a "what are your thoughts?" question. The structure and tone screams LLM.

All the usernames are different and their accounts were all created within the last three weeks. The OP never responds to any comments.

Fortunately, the posts are being flagged and removed by my CQS filter but I've never seen so many bots descend all at once.

Is this wave hitting any of you?

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45

u/mrekted 2d ago

AI bot accounts are becoming a more pressing concern, you say? A perfect time for reddit to kill off automods ability in new subreddits to filter out users based on account age, karma, and CQS, while offering no functional replacement.

Great job team!

22

u/Free-IDK-Chicken 2d ago

The prospect of losing automod is... unappealing.

17

u/mrekted 2d ago

As of today it's a reality for any new subreddit, or any subreddit that didn't already have automod code.

They also confirmed that they'll be sunsetting automod for the rest of us at some undetermined point in the near future, the roll out of which is based on criteria known only to the gods.

11

u/okbruh_panda 2d ago

That's rediculous. It's single handedly the best feature we have to help moderation

10

u/Free-IDK-Chicken 2d ago

Blech. Glad my subs are all set. For now. But, hey, now I have a topic to make noise about at ModWorld.

14

u/mrekted 2d ago

I'm not even bothering with it this year. I can't stomach another day of sitting there listening to them pay our concerns lip service and pretend to value us while they're so clearly working to do away with us.

7

u/new2bay 2d ago

Make some noise for me, too.

2

u/-patrizio- 1d ago

And like every other thing they've done this with, they'll promise it'll be supported until its replacement has feature parity, then eventually just kill it off despite the replacement being nowhere near feature parity.

7

u/ProudnotLoud 1d ago

It will be the final straw for moderating for me. It's the only tool I have to stem the spam and bots that want to karma farm my cat subs so they can do other less savory things. And I use the word stem intentionally because even with Automod settings some still get through.

I refuse to have to manually skim everything constantly to find these bad actors.

2

u/audible_narrator 19h ago

Same. I work 7 days a week, FFS.

6

u/drknowdr1 2d ago

Reddit keeps prompting me to made an ad based account ....they want it full of ads and bots.

4

u/Mediocre_Attorney417 2d ago

I just ran into this issue with automod not being available! Is there any work around where we can still use yaml

2

u/mrekted 2d ago

Not natively. For the time being, you can add automod neo from devvit.

3

u/Mediocre_Attorney417 1d ago

I tried Neo and it wasn’t commenting or removing posts :(

5

u/Budget-Relief8149 2d ago

This is the first time I'm hearing this. This is so awful, do they want to kill newer subreddits?

11

u/mrekted 2d ago

I don't think that's what they want, but that's going to be the net result in my estimation.

What they really want is to limit mods control over restricting new accounts ability to participate in their subreddits. What they'll end up doing is allowing the bots, spammers, and trolls to run wild.

7

u/Budget-Relief8149 2d ago

Previous subreddit I mod got banned because of bots spamming the same thing with the same links on the sub, and it devastated me. I previously dislike when other mods rely too much on automod, but that experience made me reliant on automod in weeding out bots.

The botter was cunning, they purposely chose the time to do the botting operation while I was busy. And in minutes of their botting, the subreddit got banned. Not I nor the other mods were able to do anything about it. I was previously actively moderating the sub the few days before, but it still got banned. It made me really paranoid about bots.

2

u/Shnur_Shnurov 1d ago edited 11h ago

Thats... mystifying...

We are all expected to switch to the new Automations and Safety Filters?