On Reddit if you have a new account that wasn’t five years old and had over 9,000 upvotes you’d be de-facto banned from 90% of all subreddits by AutoModerator removing everything you posted. Even then if you didn’t use proper bracketing or whatever you’d get removed as well.
Part of me thinks this was intentional to get people attached to their accounts that conveniently had their life stories, writing styles, beliefs, likes and dislikes all in one place.
Automoderator was really introduced to reduce loads on moderators. As such, how strict the filters were was mainly down to them.
The reason many moderators used it was to reduce spam from brand new accounts/sock puppets and to enforce community-defined posting rules. On the sub I co-ran, you only needed +5 comment karma in order to be allowed to post.
the mastodon spam that’s mostly died down… we’ll see how that ends up. we saw similar things where admins got told to turn on approvals for all new accounts… which isn’t super scalable.
Anyway, Fediverse is finally important enough to send spam to, we’ll see how well devs can make solutions for spam on a federated platform.
But yeah generally agree, there’s no conspiracy here, it’s just fighting spam is hard… and having an account with X amount of Karma is hard for a bot to pull off (without leaving a really obvious paper trail of bots upvoting each other)