Leadership1 publisher3 min readPublished
Reddit withholds suspected spam from the home feed while it reviews it
Reddit says holding suspected spam out of the main feed during review cut home-feed spam by 28% in testing, and it will also stop recommending accounts that were asked to prove a person is behind them and have not done so.
The Board Room · Leadership desk
What happened
- Reddit told CMO Insider it will keep content it suspects of being spam out of the main home feed for as long as that content is under review.
- Reddit said it uncovered 485 coordinated accounts tied to businesses that produced more than 44,000 pieces of content, much of it about work and productivity.
- Reddit stripped the karma and votes those accounts had accumulated through the manipulation, reversing the reputation they had built.
Compiled by The Board RoomSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- exposure A brand program can now lose most of its reach without ever seeing a removal notice, because a post under review stays visible in its community while sitting out of the home feed.
- decision Any agency running scheduled or AI-assisted posting has to choose this quarter whether to verify accounts and register automation, since non-compliance alone removes a post from recommendations.
- constraint Karma accumulated by undisclosed brand accounts is not a bankable asset if Reddit can claw it back after the fact. A growth team can promise less from account seeding.
- contradiction Agencies say compliant brands are unaffected, while Reddit's own appeals process exists because the classifier sometimes flags content that is not spam.
The change that matters most to a brand team is the one that leaves the post up. Content Reddit suspects of being spam stays visible while the review runs, moderators can still review and approve it for their own communities, and the company said it operates an appeals process to correct false positives [13][14]. During that review the content does not enter the main home feed, and Reddit said search results are the next place it will test the same hold [1][5].
Reddit used one network to illustrate the problem. It said it found 485 accounts that produced more than 44,000 pieces of content, much of it about work and productivity [10]. That is an average of at least 90 posts and comments per account [1]. The accounts presented themselves as ordinary users while being connected to businesses, which breaks Reddit's rule requiring marketing activity to be disclosed [11]. Karma is Reddit's reputation score, and the company said it removed the karma and votes the manipulation had produced [12].
Marketers have commercial and recent reasons for pushing this hard. Reddit went public in 2024, increased advertising on its forums and signed partnerships with OpenAI and Google [15]; brands want their Reddit presence to surface in AI search, where Reddit is heavily cited [16]. The detection firm Pangram reported in July that 3% of Reddit's short-form content was flagged as AI, the lowest of five platforms it measured, against 30% on LinkedIn [17], ten times Reddit's rate [2].
Agency executives who spoke with CMO Insider said brands that use Reddit as intended will not be touched by the crackdown [22]. "The brands that win will earn participation by being transparent, useful, and native to each community, while giving customers genuine reasons to talk about them," said Joe Gagliese, co-CEO of Viral Nation [19]. Reddit also said it will not recommend posts or comments from accounts that were asked to verify they are human or register their automation and have not done so [7]. For an agency running scheduled or AI-assisted posting, verification and automation registration now determine whether a post gets recommended.
Reddit supplied the percentages itself. It measured a 28% drop in home-feed spam in testing, an 11% drop in user reports of spam in the feed and a 7% drop in push notifications carrying spam [2][3][4], and it did not publish the size or duration of the test. Its July tooling was reported the same way: Reddit said those tools caught 23 million spam views per day and cut user exposure to spam by about 20% between January and March 2026 compared with the prior three months [18].
"What's made Reddit really unique over the last 21 years, and special, is the humanity that you see on Reddit every day," said Adam Collins, Reddit's chief communications officer [8]. Brian Yamada, chief innovation officer at VML, said the sugar rush some brands got from manipulating Reddit would be short-lived, and that the supply of slop is not a single platform's problem [20]. "The flood of generative AI slop is likely to continue as brands or companies are looking for shortcuts or cheats to get visible," Yamada said [21]. Reddit also plans to start telling users why it suspects a piece of content is spam instead of showing only "Removed by Reddit" [6]. If the review hold reaches search, the suspicion that keeps a post out of the home feed will also stop it appearing in search results [5].
What to watch
- Whether the review hold moves into search results, and whether Reddit publishes a comparable reduction figure for search as it did for the home feed.
- Whether Reddit discloses how many accounts have been asked to verify a human or register automation, and what share complied.
- Whether the next coordinated network Reddit removes is larger than 485 accounts and 44,000 posts. A larger one would indicate displacement rather than deterrence.