Why are posts on reddit starting as spam?

Question

So, I just started a reddit.

Since I'm pretty new at this, I first made it private and played around with the buttons to see what each did (e.g., how are remove and delete different?).

I then added some people and they could post normally and their posts would appear immediately. Once I figured things out better, I went public.

Now, however, I'm getting reports from people that their posts do not show on the reddit's homepage, although the post permalink showed nothing wrong.

Here is a live example: I now approved his post.

• Homepage, showing 3 posts
• A post on the same reddit not showing on the homepage
• His user profile

The kicker is that when I, with my mod access, click on the post permalink, I see the post is marked as "[removed]", with two buttons: "approve link" and "confirm link removal."

When a mod removes a post, it is shown as "[removed by xyz]". I thus assumed that the author self-deleted his post -- but he didn't.

The only place where I could discover his post is in the Spam page (/r/gamerec/about/spam/). WTF?

What's going on? Did I fumble with permissions? Is this by design? If so, is there some way to disable this "approval" process?

Answer 1

I'm one of the guys that runs reddit.

What is happening is that our auto spam filter is marking it as spam. Since we get a lot of spam, we try to help you out.

The spam filter is Bayesian, so it learns from your actions. By either approving the link or confirming the ban, you are training the filter. Over time it will get better and you'll have to do less and less training.

If you just go through your spam queue and mark every link as approved or confirm the ban, that should almost be enough training that you won't have to worry about it much anymore.

Answer 2

Clearly this is a false positive of the spam detection algorithm. Nothing to fret. Just approve it manually.

Reddit developers don't share the internals of the spam detection algorithm to prevent abuse.

Hopefully with a couple of manual approvals of the user's stories, the spam detection should get better.