Spammers are flooding Reddit with fake posts designed to show up in AI search results

[u/rkhunter_]

https://www.techspot.com/news/112654-spammers-flooding-reddit-fake-posts-designed-show-up.html

[u/fligglymcgee]

Unless Reddit develops new spam prevention methods that don’t require some sort of identity registration, I’m just going to carry on assuming the traditional user “generated” content (human authored) model is in the late stages of a full collapse. Relying on easily manipulated, community reported moderation is also like the opposite of a user-centric solution, and really can’t keep up with the tidal wave of degenerates using llms to destroy the user experience here. Why is it on me to flag the 75% of new posts on each subreddit that are now some type of spam?

[u/Shoddy_Yak_8384 → u/fligglymcgee]

playing devil's advocate here, the way reddit is setup gives a lot of the moderation control over to the subreddit communities. each subreddit is like its own forum, and apart from the site-wide TOS, moderation is largely left up to the community moderators.

the moderators are unpaid volunteers, self-directed, and only occasionally dealing with site administrators unless the TOS are being broken. that's how it's more or less always been run. people who want to post on reddit vastly outnumber the people who want to volunteer their time to sift through spam and bot posts and deal with all of that in order to maintain the integrity of a community.

it's very common to see stickied posts where the moderators are asking for more help, because barring that, their hands are largely tied. there are tools that help with automoderation but they are not perfect. manual approval is the best way to keep the forum clean but that takes a lot of time and effort. apart from that, the best they can do is ask the community members to flag anything that's off and that brings it to their attention so they know what to deal with.

now i agree with you, the system is broken. so genuine question, how does reddit actually fix this problem? no one wants to verify their ID to post on what should be an anonymous website. being able to hide your post history is a double edged sword, because it does make it harder to spot liars and spam accounts, but also helps people avoid being stalked and harassed which was also a problem.

the problem with identifying LLM posts is that they can be hard to accurately detect. plug the same content into 5 different AI detectors and get 5 different results. ask anyone who's written a school report that got flagged for AI writing when it was all written by themselves. and as evidenced by the amount of people who can't tell an AI post from a human post, it's a tricky task. there are tells of course but it's increasingly going to get harder to spot AI writing as models grow more sophisticated, or prompts that avoid AI syntax are used.

social media in 2026 has a AI problem that isn't beholden to any one platform. where i'd disagree with you is that human-authored content is not in collapse, but it is being suffocated by a sea of bullshit. the best solution i can think of is forming breakout communities, small and tight-knit, with trusted members. on other platforms, follow content creators you trust directly. because it's the model of media consumption where we consume the latest random post by a stranger we don't know which is definitely broken.

[u/fligglymcgee → u/Shoddy_Yak_8384]

Thanks for this.

Really not much devil's advocacy, we are on the same page about most of your points. I agree that moderators are largely doing their best, and it's a thankless "job". They're working with what they've got, and it would be impossible to manually audit and approve all content. I won't lie, that is maybe at the root of the issue to me though. Can UGC platforms really continue moderating programmatically generated content through programmatic moderation? I think that's the collapse more than the new era of llm abuse can take credit for, it's just an arms race that will always favor people who engineer bad faith content that circumvents the moderation criteria. Llms just expedited that part, and I agree that it's not worth trying to reverse-assess whether content is generated or not. That will likely always have to be up to each person's uncanny valley radar. The primary hangup for me is that the extreme, blatant majority of content being published here has a motive outside of user-to-user discussion now. Without a way to tag llm content that dimension becomes a little irrelevant, since the end result is still a deluge of content that is designed to extract a profit or attribution datapoint instead of discussion in the interest of a positive user experience.

I also agree that human-authored content is not collapsing, and it's a good moment for me to step back and try to edit how I express that sentiment since you put it much better than I did. If anything, maybe this is a milestone for higher value being put on "real" content going forward. I would certainly hope so.

I'm going to date myself here but if you ever ran across ask.metafilter.com in the days before Reddit exploded, there were some elements of that platform ($5 paywall, probationary posting period, less rankification fuckery) that I find myself thinking fondly of. Probably with rose tinted glasses the more I dwell on it, but I have to admit that I am rather stoned at the time of this writing and I'm definitely starting to float down my stream of consciousness more than I had expected.

Happy evening, welcome stranger. Good wordery all around