[steelframe]

I'm the sole active moderator of r/electricvehicles, and you wouldn't believe the amount of self-promotion spam that I have to deal with on that sub. It's gotten to the point that I've written a custom Python app to use the Reddit API to pull all of the analytics on any new post and present it to me in a digested form: How old is the account? How much organic-looking activity has the user done across other subreddits? What is the actual content? Has the user posted the same URL to multiple subreddits? Has the user's activity received user reports? Fortunately I have some faithfully diligent reporters on my sub who will flag newly posted suspected spam in a matter of minutes.

If the post doesn't pass my sniff test, my script will remove the post, mute the user, and permanently ban the user with a single keystroke -- do not pass Go, do not collect $200.

I can't just rely on user reports alone because a few of the members of the community are overzealous about what they'll report. I need a variety of metrics to make the call, and it's much easier to use the Reddit API to collect, process, and report those metrics than to try to click around in Reddit's horrible moderation UI to get the information I need to make a reasonable decision.

Confession time: I started writing the script about 5 days ago, and since I'm waiting to start a new job, I've actually made this script into a bit of a hobby to kill the time. By now it's morphed into a multi-threaded Mutt-like Reddit moderation tool, where it displays all mod queue content via a curses interface that I navigate with VIM key bindings, and keystrokes issue commands onto an asynchronous queue that another thread consumes and acts upon via the PRAW package. For example, the keystroke to approve a submission will immediately delete the post from the curses view because I love wicked-fast and responsive UIs, but the deletion on the backend could take another couple of seconds, especially if I'm rapid-firing 5 or 6 approvals in a row, and I just let that happen on the queue. Maybe if I refactor so that Python experts' eyeballs won't bleed when they see my code (e.g., I'm manually grabbing and releasing locks on stuff that's shared between the curses interface code and the async queue code rather than using more elegant synchronization capabilities in Python) I might consider releasing some source.

[dhimes]

Many years ago I got banned by a moderator on a sub for answering someone's question. I did have a product but didn't pitch it directly except in paid ads on the sub. My username was the website.

I emailed the mod for clarification as to what line I crossed because it seemed arbitrary. She never replied.

So be careful with your metrics. What happened to me was definitely not cool. And, I quit my paid advertising there to boot.

[gpm]

I'm a big fan of the idea that it's ok to be a person with an account and a company, but not a company with an account. The dynamics of the latter situation feel very wrong - the goal should be to make online interactions as human as possible.

Obviously I don't know the details of the situation and certainly don't know the mods reasoning, but from your description if they banned you because of your username that sounds ok to me.

Your paid ads are irrelevant, an interesting consequence of reddit not paying moderators is that moderators are also not going to be biased because you are paying reddit.

[dhimes]

Please see my response here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25211102

My username was a handle like most others (almost nobody comes in under their real name). It never occurred to me, for instance, to go to gpm.com— likewise, almost nobody made the connection on the site.

There was one time that somebody was asking about a gpa calculator or something so I threw one together on my web page. I don't recall telling them that it was available because the conversation would have been over. I made my calculator so that you could triage your studying- so given some guesses about how much you thought you could increase your grades in your classes, it would tell you where to spend your time. I can't recall if I was banned around this or not, but that was as close as I came to being "spammy."

As I said in the sibling comment, I thought I at least deserved a conversation.

[derangedHorse]

Why would their username being the same name of their website be a ban worthy problem? Sure it may feel "wrong" but I don't think it should be a ban-able offense

[xavier_]

Reddit is for people, not for brands (except ads). Like many other forums, it's better to speak as a person.

I feel like it's the same on social media

[dhimes]

I always spoke as a person. Somebody would have had to think to go to xavier.com to find out my handle was also my website.

[DoreenMichele]

And for a third perspective:

I run a sub called r/ClothingStartups and the day I took it over -- it had been dead -- people began self promoting. I decided to embrace that and set rules about how often they could do that.

I made that decision in part because I was homeless for a long time and while homeless I participated a lot on Metafilter where people would squee at me for "caring" about them and giving everyone good advice for free, but no one was willing to help me solve my biggest problem which was that I needed to develop an earned income adequate to get back into housing. And they ultimately banned me for supposedly "self promoting."

People there were promoted all the time. You just had be in good with the right people and your crap could make the front page constantly.

And on r/ClothingStartups, a lot of people posting appear to be people of color and appear to be trying to start something while out of work during a pandemic. And they do all kinds of stupid, ham-handed stuff that looks really lame.

And as long as you don't have all caps in the title or violate the self promotion guidelines, I don't care.

This idea that you have to be adequately smooth in your self promotion techniques is a hardship for a lot of minorities and marginalized peoples who have no business experience, no money for ads, etc and no one will give them a break.

My sub is growing at several people a day and it has more than just self promotion, though it does have a lot of that. It also has discussion about "Where can I find a manufacturer?" and so forth -- which is exactly what it's for.

I don't know how much value it has for people to self promote there. I don't know if people are really turning that into an income. I don't have data on that.

But when I was homeless, I was surrounded by well-heeled people who were happy to benefit from my expertise for free and accuse me of "panhandling the internet" for having donation buttons on my websites. What I knew as a former mom is stuff people expect women to do for free out of the goodness of their hearts and it was an abusive expectation because they expected me to care about them but no one cared about me. No one cared that I was homeless and going hungry and was making an honest effort to figure out how to establish an earned income in spite of my medical situation.

So I think we need more spaces on the internet where they cut you some slack for being new to business and having no idea what you are doing.

Upper class people who know how to do the smooth thing and promote themselves everywhere in the socially acceptable fashion and are pro UBI are the same people that then have some problem with people doing something overly blatant like using their company name as their account name on Reddit.

It's a "Fuck you, got mine" policy masguerading as faux compassion. UBI is not about helping the poor. It's about actively treating them like parasites and actively turning them into parasites while slamming all other doors shut in their face because you can only self promote if you have a Harvard education and know how to do it the right way in accordance with the sensibilities of other Ivy Leaguers.

And that boils down to "Fuck all y'all currently poor people. We are not only pulling the rope ladder up behind us, we are burning it in front of you and pointing and laughing at your predicament."

[webdev4ever]

Reading your post was very cathartic for me, so thank you for that.

[allenu]

I posted recently on a large subreddit to promote my app. I read the rules on the side of the page that indicated which day to self-promote and what flair to add, etc. I still got banned a few minutes later, and the post taken down.

I asked the mod why and they directed me to yet another page with a huge list of rules that weren't referenced in the self-promo rules I had seen. I understood the intent and it's their rules, but it did leave a bad taste in my mouth, having tried in good faith to follow their instructions.

[markdown]

Would you mind sharing a URL to the "huge list of rules"?

[matkoniecz]

> My username was the website.

So every post you made WAS an ad.

> I quit my paid advertising there to boot

Note that operator of subreddid and moderators receives no benefit whatsoever from that.

[dhimes]

My user name wasn't clearly an ad. I use that same username on, for instance, the Coral City webcam chat. I remember one person on the subreddit getting an "aha" as s/he was asking something and I wouldn't direct him to my site, but I said this information was available on the web.

I tried very hard to not be spammy. I always offered information.

I think I at least deserved the opportunity to discuss it.

The mods don't receive benefit directly from the ads, but I bet somebody at Conde Nast (or whoever owns them now) cares.

[random_visitor]

Haha, can relate to that. After a certain point the Reddit tools become really inadequate. I used to mod a super popular subreddit (the kind that are always on the r/all) and we had 3 bots and two dozen moderators and still the mod queues was always filled.

I'm about to graduate so I've stopped all that except for helping a moderately popular sub. Overall it's given me plenty time I needed in other parts of my life, but I miss the small joys that came from my little python scripts improving the day for 20 or so people. That was the first time when something I created made impact on another person's life.

[intended]

All those little pieces of code, are what keep millions of subs from just not collapsing.

Say whatever anyone wants, I think reddit is the future of human moderation (millions of experiments), over FAANG and their army of invisible workers and rules.

[reitzensteinm]

That's a tough sub to moderate. It seems like half the users are there because they genuinely like EVs, and half see it as the no man's land cold war between RealTesla and TeslaInvestorsClub, depending on whether they're short or long.

A while back there was somebody that was only posting VW press releases. They were promptly called out by somebody, who themselves turned out to only post pro Tesla articles and a handful of VW FUD.

The comments themselves are generally pretty based, though. Bad actors are quickly downvoted. It's one of the few places on the internet that gets just as excited by the Model Y launch as they do the ID.3. I read it daily, thank you for your work!

[layoutIfNeeded]

You have a SaaS product in there.

[xavier_]

Probably yes :)

I discovered with this thread that the mod tools are not unified on Reddit!

[papreclip]

>How old is the account? How much organic-looking activity has the user done across other subreddits?

these kinds of policies are the death of the throwaway account. many subs don't even allow you to post in the first place now if you haven't ground out a posting history in other subs that do allow new accounts. maintaining anonymity for anonymity's sake has become increasingly difficult over the years on the site

[xapata]

> manually ... releasing locks

You might like `contextlib.ExitStack` if `with lock` doesn't cut it for you.

[moetsi]

would be interested in seeing whatever you release ill be on the look out for a link if you're still keen

[syspec]

Does this count as self promotion?