Comment by DanBC | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanBC | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure what "hidden" means in the title. See, eg, (http://www.reddit.com/r/proana). There are a bunch of these closed groups.

The author's work seems really useful for detecting spam. There are some people / bots who post a lot of specialist content. They only ever post links to content on domains that pay when visitors click links. These domains have a lot of ads. There's no other interaction on the site.

_NOT SAFE FOR WORK_:

This user (http://www.reddit.com/user/walfa2) only posts content from sites which pay when viewers see the images. The domains have heavy ad content, with popups etc.

Here's an example domain:

(http://www.reddit.com/domain/img1.picfoco.com/)

Once you find one user you can find a bunch of these domains, and the other users posting to those domains, and thus find a few more domains.

With a bit of tinkering you could should a colour coded chart of spam domains; of users that only post content from those domains; and users that never make replies but only make top level comments.

That could be run once a week and (with human oversight) used to remove content which is not good for reddit.

That's a cool idea.

In the original title, 'Hidden' was 'Latent' - communities that de-facto exist even though they are not explicit. 'Latent' would have been a more precise word, but 'hidden' is more accessible.

It's not entirely obvious that posting from a domain that incentizes traffic is a bad thing.

If the posts are upvoted by the community, then it should be seen as a good and not a negative.

One of the oddities of reddit as compared to other social sites is that content owners and traffickers are looked-down upon simply because they can profit from attention.

> It's not entirely obvious that posting from a domain that incentizes traffic is a bad thing.

I agree. To me it's not a problem. But unfortunately some of these posts leak into unsuitable subreddits. In a NSFW porn subredddit it's not much of a problem when someone links to a site heavy with horrible porn ads; but when that link is posted to a non-porn subreddit it's more of a problem.

And, really, Reddit is better as a community rather than a dump for links. So people who have no interaction with the site other than dumping links can be a problem. Being paid when people visit those links can make them more of a problem. They have no interest in Reddit.

Some of these issues seem like they could be addressed by in-house people at Reddit better than people on the outside - and I'm pretty sure they're already doing some stuff. One could identify clusters of users who 1) usually only vote for one another's stuff, 2) Vote up things most users vote down, and 3) Link mostly to 'bad' domains and rarely comment. These users could then be screened by hand, and hellbanned. This is the sort of thing that I would start with aberrant voting data though - and that is probably not public for the malicious bots.

> when that link is posted to a non-porn subreddit it's more of a problem.

I think that's a seperate concern. Moderators delete bad posts, and the spam filter operates on a per-subreddit basis.

> Reddit is better as a community rather than a dump for links

I'd agree its certainly different as a community than say Digg, but I'm not sure if its for the better because reddit freezes out content creators from using Reddit to syndicate their content.

People posting links to stuff copied onto a pay-per-click image sharing site are pretty far down the food chain. What worries me is that essentially content-creators can't use Reddit without becoming a part of Reddit's community and 'paying their dues' as it is.

Reddit's mods and users have banned or severely punished even major newspapers who wanted to just post their articles on Reddit, and not become Redditors themselves.

> What worries me is that essentially content-creators can't use Reddit without becoming a part of Reddit's community and 'paying their dues' as it is. > Reddit's mods and users have banned or severely punished even major newspapers who wanted to just post their articles on Reddit, and not become Redditors themselves.

A lot of those content creators toe the line between marketing their content on Reddit, and spamming it.

I have a moderately high karma on Reddit, and sometimes get private messages asking me to help people get submissions upvoted in r/politics, and other subreddits. It almost always sounds shady, and I almost always reply with the same thing - post quality content relevant to the subreddit with good titles.

Newspapers trying to post content to reddit without "paying their dues" is like trying to get free advertising. If you have to pay for ads with money, what's wrong with paying for reddit views with "dues" and becoming part of the community?

Essentially the only way to pay your dues in Reddit is to post content apart from your own, and make bunches of comments to prove that you are 'real person'.

That's problematic because content creators don't want to help the competition, and they have real jobs making stuff so don't want to make reddit their part time job.

Advertisement comes with certain guarantees---pay X amount and you get Y amount of impressions or clicks. Becoming part of a community has no guarantee of success, and even once successful Reddit can always turn against you if they view your posting 1 article per day as "spam" because you work for the newspaper who makes the article.

> If the posts are upvoted by the community, then it should be seen as a good and not a negative.

The problem with this thinking is that vote fraud runs rampant and is sometimes nearly impossible to detect.

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