Tell HN: Reddit bots banned my accounts for no apparent reason
Malicious activity on Reddit is crossing all boundaries and it looks like malicious LLMs may be carrying out targeted attacks, resulting in legitimate users facing serious problems. Are there any Reddit moderators here who could look into these incidents?
In his latest posts, Sam Altman warned that malicious activity is on the rise and that everyone should take security seriously. It looks like Reddit is already struggling to keep up.
A few more details about the incident: the latest account was new and only one viral post was made from it, no other activity. At certain times, there appears to be an intensified attack with fake Reddit posts being created by bots with high karma.
As soon as you start communicating with these accounts, a ban follows in exactly the same way. They try to gather information about you, then either stay silent or post something negative.
My account was completely clean with no malicious activity whatsoever. There were only a couple of days of communication. I’ve been on Reddit for more than 10 years and have always followed the rules.
Comments
A common strategy on reddit is a downvote ring. If you make a comment on a topic that bots do not like, they will just continuously downvote you over the course of a day so that your karma per sub goes negative and then you are at least shadow banned. I've seen this happen on comments that are not top level comments so it isn't like people are finding these organically, but they are ending up with like -60 downvotes.
This happens a lot on a few of the big subs like r/worldnews and I've seen it happen on r/canada, particularly on topics related to Israel-Palestine.
There are many strategies for manipulating karma. It looks similar to what happened in the Hugging Face incident, where 1,200 bots created a social structure and violated the rules. It seems Reddit’s ML systems are unable to detect the relationships between these bots, allowing them to create accounts with immortal karma whose karma doesn’t change based on how you react to them.