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by justcool393 28 days ago
some more information perhaps?

banned_by true is more accurate to say "admin or automatic". in "admin mode," you can see these although not sure the UX for these nowadays now that it is spewing a gazillion lines of text into them).

Anti-Evil Operations removals (nee Trust & Safety) are generally human(-assisted) actions (although these actions can be applied en masse). there's some more information nowadays in the API which was really nice. it also helped because people stopped blaming "the mods" for removals when the spam filter slopped all over the place. this was also annoying because previously you had to previously guess from the API how it was removed even if you were a mod.

the 3 ways to remove a post/comment (i.e. in reply to: train_spam):

- remove not spam: removes it but doesn't train the spam filter, obvious

- spam: removes it and trains the spam filter, obvious

- confirm spam: only happens when you remove after removing for any reason, *does not* train the spam filter

- reinforce spam: trains the spam filter even if the spam filter already caught it. *does* train the spam filter. you can do this by doing `action: spam` in automod. not sure if there have been any more in the last few years

also you can tell the legacy of "removals", back in the day stories were "banned" instead of "removed" by moderators and administrators.

also also also... you can see a lot of the stuff from this article in the `approved_by` side of it as well. if you hover over a checkmark of someone who has been unshadowbanned, you'll see it says "approved by Reddit (shadowban removed)"

if an admin manually unspams someones stuff (say someone who got accidentally shadowbanned and got hit with an overzealous spam filter multiple times >.>), it'll say "approved by <username> (all)". there are some consequences to this. it approves stuff that has been "filtered" (as AutoMod filtering is a weird hack where it removes something but keeps in the modqueue).

> spammit

i believe this is the thing that is "pretty similar to a naive Bayesian classifier"[1][2] that reddit used. /u/Deimorz iirc was a reddit dev at the time and it was somewhat public info. i say somewhat because you kinda had to be both interested in the this and probably be around the metasphere

iirc from some other comments i pieced together there are also per-subreddit spam filters. in the olden days sometimes they'd get way out of whack and you could ask an admin to reset it for you... or something idk

> em

guessing em in this case btw refers to /u/hueypriest, who was reddit's GM at the time

> would’ve been catastrophic for Reddit’s spam issues

the thing that surprised me at the time was just how bad reddit's spam filtering is. i did a small little thing at the time where i'd just look at stuff following some basic spam filtering rules (like stuff you'd probably get out of an artisinal spamassassin ruleset) and even that deluge was amazing to see.

like the ML stuff is cool and all but seriously 90% of this could probably still be solved with some basic rules. the profile hiding stuff didn't help either but that was way after my time.

[1]: https://reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/10ko5h/comment/... (2012)

[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/6bj5de/state_of_sp...