A peek into Reddit's anti-spam internals

[](/lyrahai) 5 years ago, back when I still used Reddit, something unusual happened. My app of choice, Relay for reddit, was bombarding me with a bunch of weird notifications about removed spam .

Getting these notifications wasn’t unusual in and of itself - I was a moderator of a few fairly small subreddits that’d from time to time get posts automatically removed for spam. However, when I went to actually look at the removed spam , I saw something I was never meant to see.

I saw Reddit’s anti-spam internals. [](/txt! "also hi! yes, we have ponymotes ^^")

so that's about it. Removed: spamurai (*Removing potential spam content from unproved user*: comment `t1_ pupp13 ` (0.7294469 perspective spam) by u/ GoodBoyBacon (0.06 days old, spammy: 11, hosted: false, -1 karma, 4 reports, org: `ComcastCable`, email: gmail.com) in r/ GoodBoysOnly (guest) posting nil from `oauth.reddit.com` via `nil` from UA: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/95.0.4638.54 Safari/537.36 Edg/95.0.1020.30, RHS: oc:ac:kT:lw:bV:aX:af:a6:l5:y3:aT:m9:pt:f3:hZ:az:aR:aQ, LANG: en-US,en,q=0.9, TLS: j7bXVc3l/qer8FRj2aEiqOrx1ro=DDZ0TViWlY5HYgOPw1SZqDxwiO8= - referrer: https://www.reddit.com/, thumbnail: `` - ) • GoodBoyBacon • 1 points • 27 min You see u/ BadGuy67 ? He's the same guy as https://www.reddit.com/r/ ReallyBadGuys /comments/ qw3rt1 / if_ur_a_bad_guy_post_here_please / Removed: Reddit (shadowban applied on 10-27-2021) • GoodBoyBacon • 0 points • 1 hr I'm not the same guy as that other guy please read my comment

How Reddit moderation works

So Reddit is a site comprising of smaller sub-communities, which are called subreddits. For example, /r/mylittlepony is a subreddit for fans of My Little Pony. These subreddits can be created by anyone, and they are moderated by a group of community moderators appointed by the creator of the subreddit.

If we go on /r/mylittlepony we can see the list of moderators on the sidebar:

[](/hellohuman) These moderators can remove posts, ban users, manage modmail etc, but they are just normal Reddit users.

If you’re a moderator you can see who removed a post or comment:

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