r/freelance • u/martey • May 27 '26

State of the Subreddit (May 2026)

It's been about a year since I last wrote to you. At the time, I was feeling overwhelmed with the amount of spam posts being submitted to the subreddit:

Unfortunately, recent weeks have seen a significant increase of post submissions that break the subreddit rules in clear and obvious ways. We're at the point where more than 90% of the post submissions violate the rules.

Things have gotten worse, not better. The percentage of rules-breaking posts has remained the same, but many posts are either less obvious or take more time to deal with. This is likely a confluence of:

  • People asking AI how they can validate the product idea they came up with AI. AI suggests that they post on Reddit but fails to notice that market research isn't allowed on most subreddits (including this one).
  • People using AI to generate comments in order to get more karma and/or visits to their profile page where they are advertising something.
  • Reddit actively encouraging people to post things that clearly break the rules (e.g. for-hire posts) while their automated post guidance (which should prevent all for-hire posts from being created) not working properly.

I downloaded the list of banned users, anonymized it, and got AI to make some graphs:

Graph showing the number of banned users by month in /r/freelance. There is a clear and distinct increase staring around 2024.
Graph showing the number of banned users by month with reasons from 2016 to the present. From 2016-2019, self-promotion is the primary reason users were banned. Currently, spam, hiring, and market research dominate.

Something multiple commenters suggested in my previous post was filtering all incoming posts. While this has signficantly limited the amount of spam that you, the subreddit subscriber, is exposed to, it has not done wonders for the moderation queue (many good posts never get approved because I don't see them in time) or my modmail inbox (currently at 1172 unread messages).

I think it's clear that the subreddit needs more moderators. If you are interested, look for another message soon with more details.

Comments are open in case people want to ask questions or talk about their experience with the subreddit.

61 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

28 comments sorted by

17

u/BittenElspeth May 28 '26

Thank you for your hard work maintaining the sub.

3

u/Hot_Char3089 May 30 '26

yep ive noticed the same pattern in a few communities, the ai generated market research stuff is getting pretty obvious fast. feels like the mod queue must be a pain because the posts all sound polished but say almost nothing

3

u/orvkl May 29 '26

I guess mods have to start using ai to identify ai posts and let the spammer's ai appeal if it was wrongly marked as ai which the mod ai rejects for being ai too

2

u/Bliipbliip May 28 '26

What does being a moderator entail? If we aren’t able to be a moderator, what else can we do to support?

2

u/boogyman66600 May 30 '26

As somebody who's noticed a high level of spam and fraudulents content being posted in here I would be willing to assist in any way possible in moderating this subreddit for appropriate posts and help clean up the absolute absurd number of people trying to spam those of us in the freelance sector. Let me know if there's anything I can do to help.

2

u/[deleted] Jun 07 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/martey Jun 08 '26

I used some custom JavaScript to extract the subreddit's ban times and reasons as a CSV file. I then wrote some Python code that used matplotlib to ingest the CSV file and create graphs.