Hacker News Reader

Comment by Semaphor | Hacker News Reader

For those wondering why the sub went private for a time:

> We have grown to the kind of size we only dreamed of in the time it takes to get a bad nights sleep. We've got so many comments and submissions that we can't possibly even read them all, let alone act on them as moderators. We wrote software to do most of the moderation for us but that software isn't allowed to read the Reddit new feed fast enough and submit responses, and the admins haven't given us special access despite asking for it.

-- https://old.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l6j4r9/wher...

View on HN

"We blocked all bad words with a bot, which should be enough, but apparently if someone can say a bad word with weird unicode icelandic characters and someone can screenshot it you don't get to hang out with your friends anymore"

For numbers, r/wsb had around 2.3m yesterday morning (Wednesday 3 am) and now has 4.3m members, so that's a jump of 2 million new in less than a day.

A big chunk of that are simply bot accounts. There has been a surge of new accounts spamming the sub and trying to manipulate people into selling.

This is very much not suspicious or illegal, and not being reported anywhere

Cannot they have two or three bots moderating?

The issue is really that the entire feed went buggy from all the comments, even the inbuilt too, which they are probably using called AutoModerator has delays of over 10 minutes and more instead of being instant.

Reddit limits API usage mainly for IP, so you need multiple IPs to avoid this issue.

It's not impossible to have multiple instance of the same bot running in parallel, but there are too many race condition and it became too much to handle.

But then the onus is on Reddit to slacken these restrictions; WSB threads get 100K responses, which is the amount of engagement many social media can only dream of. If Reddit doesn't lift the limits and helps the WSB team out with moderation, they're shooting themselves in the foot because Reddit HAS to act if the WSB team can't moderate effectively.

It's why Twitter held off on banning Trump for so long; not so much because of public interest, but because Trump alone kept the platform up, running, active and profitable. Social media loves controversy like that.

All they had to do was set a higher minimum karma requirement to comment. Takes a few seconds to find and set that. They didn't have to shut the place down.

The Limitation isn’t really the bots but Reddit’s garbage api

It’s quite restricted so you need to do all sorts of hacky stuff to get live info out of it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com