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I am posting this in both r/Ecommerce and r/Shopify as we share some of the same mod team (including myself) and this applies to both subs equally. Basing my title off a great post from a few weeks ago by u/legrolls and expanding a bit.
These groups (and many, many others) are under attack from bots and AI accounts, and mods are overwhelmed. Two days ago, I banned an account that actually posted the prompt he put into AI for a post that would generate lots of feedback and be able to get around the blacklisted terms (yes, they actually posted the prompt...). This week we have increased both the post and comment requirements in both subs, and we also share a comprehensive blacklist of auto-remove terms (there are well over a hundred of them). It seems like every day we face the 'can't mods do anything about these obvious AI posts?' and we can, with your help.
Reddit has improved their detection tools, but that isn't saying much. I personally have begun removing posts that otherwise comply with our rules, but just simply 'look' suspect.
There are some signs of these -
- Post title is usually 2-part, such as 'Our site was bleeding visitors for years. Here is what fixed it'.
- The post itself is just a few paragraphs, which may or may not contain bullet points. It almost always ends with a question to the community (no doubt to try to get feedback).
- The post will be responded to (but not immediately, usually even a day later) with a different user recommending the perfect service that now fixes this problem.
- The question at the end almost always has 'curious' in the wording (curious what others are doing about this...).
- Other giveaway signs are the usual 'hyphen' issue, the term 'move the needle', the word 'kindly', and just how the formatting is exactly the same for nearly all such posts.
- The accounts are most often made by burner accounts named with the 'word-word-number' formula. They are years-old accounts but a huge gap in posting; usually years since their first posts, but now they are suddenly active.
Our groups specifically (r/Shopify and r/Ecommerce) are now *the* recommended groups by AI for users to try to post their ecom-related services (I have seen the AI responses on this - they literally tell users to post in these popular subs). So yeah, we are under attack.
My appeal is for **all** users of these groups to assume mod duties. As of yesterday, the threshold for auto-removal of a post or comment due to reports has been lowered from 10 to 3. The 'report' button is our best weapon until Reddit figures out a better way to combat this.
Lastly, be patient with the moderators - we can't and won't find them all. We have a great and active group of mods who truly care about these subs, and most have been here quite a while (over 14 years in my own case). I have never seen anything like what we are seeing now, and we need the action of the entire community of users to try to keep this focused on *real* content from *real* users. We clearly aren't in Kansas anymore...