Reddit does not have this ability, and that is why moderating is warfare.

Reddit is absolutely insane in the way they attempt to handle and mitigate spam. The evolution of reddit's position on blog spam and intolerance of anything original has gotten so blown out of proportion.

It used to be that blog spam was defined as the content that bloggers write that basically take an article or video, add a sentence or two of their own bullshit, and link to the original article at the bottom. The value of what the blogger is contributing is minuscule, especially when compared to the amount of page views and ad dollars they could get from a single successful reddit post. The real content was in the original content - sites like wired or nytimes or some guy on youtube. That is where the link on reddit should take you.

The misunderstanding and overuse of this term evolved quickly over time. Even though the official reddit policy is the same (10% can be your content or whatever) the way the users and individual mods view original content has changed. Now anything not hosted on a reputable site or blog is almost universally downvoted.

About a year or two ago a debate was started about webcomics being rehosted on imgur and sometimes a failure to even credit the original artist. The debate was mostly between people who desired to instaview the image (using RES or hoverzoom) versus supporting the comic artist and actually clicking their link. However, some people were openly against clicking on an artists page because of ad dollars. While this argument varied a bit from the blogspam argument, it still shows the progression of how paranoid and overprotective reddit users had gotten. They go out of their way to avoid being "taken advantage of" which basically means downvoting any content if it is hosted off reddit and not on a "reputable site."

Recently both The Atlantic and Business Insider and RT were banned (the first two temporarily site wide, RT only in /r/news). Adage created their own subreddit to post their own content and got banned. Memegenerator was called out for having one of their own moderating /r/adviceanimals and letting those posts get more upvotes than others.

It's just a fucked world out there on reddit regarding spam, blogspam, not spam, submitting your own shit. Gaming reddit has become something of a fun challenge that a large amount of people are trying to do. Their success rate is probably far higher than any of us know. There is even a blackhat SEO tactic that involves overly post your competitors site to reddit to get the domain permabanned and then allow you to focus on other SEO tactics and not worry about reddit.

It's gone too damn far. The only domains allowed are reputable ones. And even those can lead to a massive conspiracy like memegenerator.

I would normally say that users don't need protecting from evil gaming blogspammers, but today, on reddit, they might. The influx of absolutely astoundingly immature people who probably don't know or care to learn what blogspam is and why it matters has changed reddit completely. Plus the knowledge that a frontpage hit on reddit can get your millions of clicks makes the number of people who want to do that much larger and much more determined. Moderators and reddit admins are sinking quickly and I don't think there is any hope in saving them unless they have a massive policy shift. The reward of a gaming reddit is too valuable.

I'm just glad hubski has a good group of people who have brains, support each other, and know how to silently ignore the fuck out of spam.

ps: KB I have been trying to find a comment from probably 3 years ago and it might have been you who wrote it. It was a really awesome comment on blogspam and what is and isn't blogspam and how it was originally defined and all sorts of wonderful stuff. For some strange reason I think it was on a post about steve martin. I don't know but now it's bothering me.