Reddit Thinks I’m a Spammer

When I published my post about else statements in Python, I got lots of comments and a score of over 400 on reddit.com/r/programming (okay, I realize I’m “bragging” again, but this actually is a part of the story). My several following posts got measly viewership although I posted them on reddit as well. I was surprised to discover they weren’t showing up on the New page at all. I thought I just wasn’t seeing it for some reason, but now I contacted a moderator and, well, here it is:

You’re not banned, but the spam filter has identified you (quite accurately) as a spammer. You have essentially only submitted your own domain, and have only commented on your own submissions. This is exactly the kind of behavior that the spam filter looks for, and accounts very much like yours get submitted to /r/reportthespammers all day long.

Please see Identifying Spammers 101 for some insight into what mods look for to identify spammers, and how you might be able to “legitimize” your activity on the site.

Well, I can’t blame the moderator as that’s their policy, I just have to wonder if they shouldn’t put some weight to the acceptance of “spam” posts by the community. Surely, I’m not posting cat photos from wesindicatecatphotos.com, am I?

Reddit thinks I’m a spammer, and in a way they’re right. It shocked me a little to discover this, as I consider myself a lawful citizen of the Internet. While I respect their need to protect their community and try to maintain members that are active in the community as a whole (as opposed to utilitarian parasites like me), I’m not sure if I’m going to try to legitimize myself for their spam filter. My main go-to technology articles site is HackerNews, and I don’t think I’ll abandon it for reddit (even though reddit is responsible for most of my viewership).

Gathering the Comments of the Web

My recent post about the else keyword in Python was a tremendous success (relative to my other posts), reaching 20,000+ unique visitors within about 24 hours. It was especially successful in Reddit’s /r/programming, where it got over 400 total upvotes and 130 comments. However, in the post’s own Disqus thread, there were only 3 comments (one of them was mine). Now, I get that people like to comment in the community where they came from - Reddit folks want to comment on the Reddit thread, HackerNews people want to mingle among themselves, people want to post their comments as twitter responds, etc., but as a blogger, I want people coming in from anywhere to see that there are 100+ comments on my post.

A friend of mine told me that he saw the post (which I also posted on my facebook wall) and that he didn’t know where to respond - on my wall, on my twitter account, on the Disqus thread - so many options!

It got us thinking together on how to solve this issue. Obviously we still want to maintain the separation of comment threads on their respective sites, but as a site owner / blogger, I would like my website to show all of them. So the solution is quite simple: a comment system like Disqus, which allows users to comment as usual on the thread, which is also tabbed with different communities. When you finish reading, you can see immediately how many comments there are in different communities. There was already a post I saw in HackerNews that used the HN API to display HN comments in your blog. I suggest taking it a step forward and creating a dynamic tool which works (with plugins, I imagine) for different communities.