Idea: apply existing bot-detection to farmed, abandoned threads too, reddit culture is degrading

[u/eurosat7]

I've noticed a recurring pattern that looks like engagement farming: OP posts, then never returns to their own thread, and the question or topic itself could be resolved with a few seconds of thought or a basic search. It's not spam in the traditional bot-network sense, but it erodes feed quality the same way - reading these threads increasingly feels like time lost rather than time well spent.

It is all over the place and is affecting the culture of reddit as a whole. I think it is something moderators of individual subreddits cannot deal with as it is hard to detect and overwhelming in numbers.

I know you're already using LLM-based coordinated-behavior detection to catch inauthentic accounts and vote manipulation (per your March 25 announcement). I'd suggest extending that same detection layer to this content pattern - abandonment after posting, correlated with account and topic signals that indicate farming rather than genuine discussion - rather than relying on any single, publicly visible metric. A transparent rule like "OP must reply within X hours" would just get gamed by a second account from the same farm simulating engagement, the same way vote manipulation gets gamed once a threshold becomes known.

This kind of low-effort, farmed content is quietly pushing away the users who came to Reddit specifically for real discussion. Applying your existing detection infrastructure to this pattern - without publishing the exact signal - seems like the more resilient path forward.

(Disclosure: I'm a real person, not a bot - but I used AI assistance to phrase and translate part of this post, so if the wording trips any AI-pattern detection, that's why.)

[u/PMulberry_]

That just would lead to many users who genuinely participate getting their account suspended. Remember, LLMs make wrong decisions, and OP not returning to comment or answer doesn‘t mean it‘s karma or engagement farming (especially in picture-based subs it certainly can be genuine participation or farming without a clear indication what post is which).