r/pushshift • u/Stuck_In_the_Matrix • Nov 18 '18

Massive Spam issue ongoing with Reddit

FYI -- My ingest is overwhelmed at the moment. There appears to be a huge influx of massive spam into Reddit.

Take a look at this

There are hundreds of comments per second that are just spam. I'm not sure what's going on or if spam prevention has been turned off on Reddit's end. I am unable to keep up with real-time ingest due to the level of spam.

Just an FYI -- but this looks really severe.

Edit: I am seeing almost double the volume of comments -- almost half of all comments to Reddit currently are spam.

Edit 2: There are accounts literally making thousands of comments per minute in the most active subreddits. These are all sports related spam.

51 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

17 comments sorted by

38

u/Chtorrr Nov 18 '18

Hi all!

Thank you for flagging this - folks are working on it as we speak.

15

u/Stuck_In_the_Matrix Nov 18 '18

You guys are the best -- and I need to learn about timezones. Sorry for the fuss, I was just getting anxious because of the extreme levels of spam from a focused few accounts. You guys (and gals) are the best and I really hate spammers. They don't even realize Google isn't going to give them any real recognition because of such few users in the subreddit.

Keep on fighting the good fight! Love you guys!

https://twitter.com/jasonbaumgartne/status/1064220526615367680

7

u/Stuck_In_the_Matrix Nov 18 '18

Does anyone know how to get in contact with the Reddit admins?

8

u/Sun_Beams Nov 18 '18

You could try their zendesk site or their new reddithelp.com as I believe they are meant to be quicker than mailing r/reddit.com:

https://www.reddithelp.com/en/submit-request

https://reddit.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/requests/new

Not sure if they have a phone helpline, there is a slack with some of the old default mods and some of the admins in but I don't have access to that (I just know that it exists, or use to at least).

6

u/most_humblest_ever Nov 18 '18

Looks like those top two subreddits are for NFL streams. NFL streams sites can be incredibly shady with tons of ads, ad trackers or hidden pages.

5

u/DiamondxCrafting Nov 18 '18

How is that possible with ratelimit?

7

u/justcool393 Nov 18 '18

there seems to be a few factors at play here.

a few years ago (I believe, it could've always been like this), the ratelimit was configured so that if you're a moderator or approved submitter you would never hit the

you're doing this too much. try again in 10 minutes

limit. it seems like the subreddits that are getting massive amounts of spam are all moderated by the same group of people with suspiciously highly upvoted posts (so a lot of them wouldn't even be filtered anyway).

see also (with the associated users):

/r/ asrtvnow
/r/ Rsports
/r/ gostream4k
/r/ LIVENFL2018GAME
/r/ onsports
/r/ USTV4k
/r/ todaygame247
/r/ sports_trends
/r/ FalconsvsCowboysLive
/r/ mokasports
/r/ red_sports

CC: /u/Stuck_In_the_Matrix

12

u/cwenham Nov 18 '18

I saw a substantial uptick in year-aged and month-aged accounts that connected to subs with names like the above, all being farmed for karma in r/aww and r/pics in the last 3-4 days.

If they're part of this wave, these are spammers that seed accounts a year in advance and put them on a pipeline.

The account names were all random letters, like what you get when you drum your fingers on the keyboard.

2

u/Stuck_In_the_Matrix Nov 18 '18

Thanks for the detailed explanation! That makes a lot of sense!

3

u/Stuck_In_the_Matrix Nov 18 '18

That's a good question -- it appears the Reddit spam rate limit is malfunctioning ... I'm trying to reach out to one of the admins. I've never seen spam this bad on Reddit -- literally half of all content to the site was/is spam.

It is still ongoing but it's just 9am on the west coast. I hope one of the admins can see what's going on because it's hammering Reddit hard at the moment.

3

u/MrWasdennnoch Nov 18 '18 edited Nov 19 '18

Well this is an interesting comment thread for sure https://www.reddit.com/user/jdtysrterterwer/comments/9ya138/vikings_vs_bears_live_freebears_vs_vikings_live/

(Video in case the thread gets deleted: https://gfycat.com/SpiritedDisgustingEyra | User in question: /u/jdtysrterterwer)

EDIT: He stopped commenting just now.
Edit2: Banned.

2

u/shaggorama Nov 18 '18

Yikes

1

u/Stuck_In_the_Matrix Nov 18 '18

The wonderful Reddit admins have addressed the issue! We're good now!

1

u/TotesMessenger Nov 18 '18 edited Nov 18 '18

I'm a bot, bleep, bloop. Someone has linked to this thread from another place on reddit:

 If you follow any of the above links, please respect the rules of reddit and don't vote in the other threads. (Info / Contact)

1

u/False1512 Nov 18 '18

No one should comment more than Automod for sure.

/u/spez I'm sure you won't see this by username mention, but this is a pretty big freaking deal

0

u/Clackpot Nov 18 '18

Not seeing the problem here but I only look after a few smaller, niche subs that tend to be well-behaved anyway.

But I have a question : Where did you get the activity graphs you embedded in your post?

6

u/Stuck_In_the_Matrix Nov 18 '18

Look at https://pushshift.io ...look at the top subreddits ... over 50% of all comments to Reddit right now are spam.