Spotting Astroturfing on Reddit

One of my takeaways from this blog post highlights the on-going glaring issue that Reddit needs better user and mod tools.

Their simplistic spam filters are trivially easy to bypass especially when the problem is one of networked relationships. This is all left up to subreddit moderators who often lack the YAML/PRAW/API skills needed for advanced filtering and are left fighting a losing battle or are part of the problem themselves.

It seems like a fairly straight-forward proposition to create a User/subreddit/post/commet label propogation relationship and create a trust score highlighting the top or mostly likely botnets.

I've worked with the PRAW API enough to know that it could be possible to create a tool for this kind of filtering, maybe it's time to find a way to make a browser feature.

Or just go back to Digg (or usenet), ha.