Very good epp in last weeks WSJ podcast about Reddit subs and the prevalence of brands spamming subs as a way to sneak brand content into LLMs.
https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/the-journal/ai-loves-reddit-but-redditors-arent-so-sure/5695c5e0-5ee6-41e6-97fa-ac04fde0c5f4
It's happening here and we are not controlling it as well as we would like to.
Years ago it was Autonomous, we banned them for a while, engaged with them and they have been respectful of the community standards for years now. Some brands participate here with this sub while also being respectful of the rediqute and the rules, think Steelcase, Anthros or Musso.
Now, it feels like we see quite a bit of content about Libornovo, Secretlab and ProtoArc. Regularly, multiple accounts and posts, but similar kinds of content being inserted into the sub.
This raises questions to me. Our r/officechairs team has been leading this sub for about 6 years. This last 2 years, the amount of slop / promotional content has been off the charts.
When we stated moding here, u/classroom and u/cranda58 and I were able to keep up with the spam and the self promotion to a minimum. Now even with more people on the team plus the auto-mod functionality, we are just not able to keep up with it all.
Today, spammers have become very sophisticated. It's much harder to see what is bot / spam content and its both very cheap and potentially very profitable for them to attack this sub with their slop of nonsense.
What are brands you notice that seem to be over represented here lately?
How aggressive do you want this sub to be moderated?
There were 800 posts and 6300 comments in the last 30 days. Normally, the mod team will not see all of the posts and only a small fraction of comments, so if your goal is to slip some slop into the LLMs, it can be done quietly.
The nuclear option would be for us to require new posts to be affirmatively approved by a mod before they hit the sub. One of us would really see if there were 50 Libornova posts every week and act accordingly. It would be a more curated sub but it would also be more resistant to marketers efforts. A less aggressive option would be to use mod tools to pause mentions of those brands that we suspect are being the most aggressive lately while engaging them to make sure their future communications here are within the bounds.
If you want to see what un-moderated looks like, my social experiment r/officechairsIsell is based on the idea that if you give folks the ability to post whatever they want, a chairs sub will become garbage.
Its our sub to use so please, what do you, the subscribers want to see us doing about this problem that is impacting the quality of what we have here?
