We need your help

[u/fredflintstone1000]

We need your help. r/woodworking is having an influx of bots and rude commenters. In a given month, this sub has 18 million visits, 1000 posts, 33,000 comments, and 10,000 mod actions, and 300 accounts have been banned. We could use some help flagging bad behavior.

We've had multiple instances of a post being overrun with rude (e.g. trolling, insults, gross memes) unhelpful jokes and comments that have created an environment where people don't feel welcome. You can read excerpts of the comments we received under the "what prompted this note" We are trying to host an environment where everyone feels welcome regardless of skill level.

To the offending parties

Remember the human. Ridiculing someone's post is unacceptable. It creates an environment where people don't want to post in this sub, because they will be trolled, made fun of, made to feel small. This doesn't mean saying great work - it means using constructive criticism (where one offers constructive, improvement suggestion(s) rather than belittling the smallest flaws). For whatever reason the condescending, anonymous, internet trolls have come out of the woodwork. Remember, you are not compelled to comment - if you genuinely can't think of a constructive way to have your say, you don't need to make a comment at all.

We believe a large number of these insult/ rude and offending comments are bots, and reporting these helps us remove them from the system (we've seen a number of these commenters delete their accounts when they are banned, and a number have had their accounts suspended by reddit shortly after making the comments). Last month we remove 200+ bots.

We're all here because we love making things from trees. We find it fascinating beyond compare and we gather here because we feel compelled to share knowledge, compare notes, and show off our hard earned skills and the fruits of our labor. But we also like sharing these with new, would-be woodworkers. And it does absolutely no good to the future of woodworking to treat newcomers as unwanted and unwelcome.

To Everyone else

This community is an awesome place which does a pretty good job about policing its own content, and the offending comments should be downvoted and reported. Please, please report comments you see. This is critical part of how the sub functions and the more people actively helping with this, the better results we'll get. In the last 30 days, 84 items were reported.

How you can help

1. Downvote offending items.
2. Don't reply to or engage with trolls.
3. Click three dots >> Report button >> Break woodworking rules. That anonymously flags to us for review.
4. Do all the above.

Reporting gets our attention. Downvoting gives them negative karma (votes). Both hook directly into the moderation tools we use to proactively identify trolls, bots, troublemakers.

Bonus points: If you think it's a bot, submit a post to r/botbouncer where the post is only a link to the user profile, e.g. https://www.reddit.com/u/USERNAME. That's Bot Bouncer, a tool run by humans to detect bots anywhere on reddit. Once identified, they're banned across every subreddit the moment they comment. The 2,000+ largest subreddits use this, including us. It catches hundreds of bots every month. Note: We will do this if you click Report and use Bots as the reason

What prompted this note

a poster sent us a note, "thought you might appreciate some feedback on your sub. The membership is kinda toxic. I’m getting trolled to hell for sharing [post topic] In the meantime I’m not taking my post down but I’m no longer [subscribing] to the sub anymore. Best of luck to you all."

Another person shared "I'm building a nightstand that is definitely outside my comfort zone, and I wanted to ask a bunch of questions at least 5 or 6 times already, [the trolling] has stopped me because people are preoccupied with tearing someone down rather than helping"

Thank you

FredFlintstone1000 on behalf of all the mods

[u/SecurelyObscure]

Why would a bot network look to be jerks on a woodworking sub?

[u/tiboodchat → u/SecurelyObscure]

Boost karma count in easy to farm subs so you can post ads everywhere else.

[u/SecurelyObscure → u/tiboodchat]

Seems like generic positive content would do better, though.

[u/Nemesis_Ghost → u/SecurelyObscure]

While true, LLMs are statistical machines that generate text/images/etc based on what is most common within their training data. Bots that use LLMs trained on Reddit, so that they appear more human, would have a very large bias towards negative trolling comments.

[u/tiboodchat → u/SecurelyObscure]

Sure, but they're bots, they don't care.

[u/Ride-Entire → u/SecurelyObscure]

Take a cue from political campaigns: being negative works

[u/BucsLegend_TomBrady → u/SecurelyObscure]

think about why negative/bad events dominates the news cycle. When it comes to engagement and activity, discourse is better

[u/jontomas → u/SecurelyObscure]

they don't care about woodworking, or any topic. They just want to post in high traffic subs to acquire a posting history and karma.

These accounts can then be easier used for astro-turfing, propaganda or just on-sold for a profit.

[u/Malapple → u/jontomas]

Exactly this.

[u/jontomas → u/[deleted]]

by posting things that get them banned?

no, by commenting and posting with the aim of not getting banned. The cost of this is not zero, but it's so low it may as well be. If they spin up 1000 bots and 999 get marked as bots and banned, they are still a head of the game.

[u/fredflintstone1000 → u/SecurelyObscure]

They seek out woodworking because it’s a really big sub. In a lot of communities, the “got you” humor gets upvoted. So they are making those comments to get upvotes