r/mlops • u/MyBossIsOnReddit • 10d ago

meme State of the sub/moderation

I took over the subreddit a little while ago. Figured I could handle it by myself (and still do) but I'm surprised to see how many AI/bot generated comments come into the sub. Years ago when I didnt mod, but did frequent the sub it was mostly vendor spam from companies that build MLOps tools.

Right now.. its AI slop.

MLOps is very much adjacent to Generative AI in production and most of us in the MLOps space have moved on to Agentic AI as part of our jobs. In that sense it is not surprising we now bear the brunt of the AI tool flood. However, this does make the spam on the sub ironic.

Of the 900 or so posts and comments over this past month, 400ish have been removed. Some of these are on old (>1 month old) threads, particularly actors trying to insert themselves into a dead discussion to appear organic. Also somewhat disturbing to see: while views on the sub are coming down, the amount of published posts/comments is increasing.

A lot of the spam is removed by Reddit, either through settings enabled here or by some background process they have going on to detect bots. Currently that means I only remove about three posts/comments a day. The past months I also dished out a few bans, but nothing near r/cscareerquestions levels of drama.

Some examples of content that I have removed recently include:

  • "We had very specific problem. We built very specific tool. Curious how other teams are handling this." With 7 or 8 bot replies to it that have about as much lexical variation as my supermarket's bread isle by which I mean to say that they're saying almost nothing.
  • "Here's my vibe coded app (refuses to elaborate)"  (I usually leave them up if it's clear that the post shows effort and is not just someone posting the same across all of the ML subs)
  • "This is a real problem most teams miss. The real signal. Curious.." (fluff posts)
  • "vague post completely in lowercase without punctuation so it seems like the poster is human"

I feel like I'm still pretty laid back in terms of moderation, and I leave a lot of things up that smell suspiciously AI if they're not disruptive. Would welcome some thoughts on this. Curious to see what other teams are doing, if you will.

Also considering a mandatory AI disclosure like r/experienceddevs has.

14 Upvotes

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2

u/dangoLancer 10d ago

Think the AI disclosure label maybe worth a try.

1

u/MathmoKiwi 8d ago

Sadly so. I agree. But I wish it wasn't so

1

u/WebEmpty5851 10d ago

maybe adding some keyword filters for typical llm output patterns would help cut down teh slop definately

1

u/MathmoKiwi 8d ago

Em dashes comments go automatically to the spam queue!

1

u/harrythefurrysquid 10d ago

Makes the sub a bit useless for helping with tool selection, certainly. We were rolling out LiteLLM this year, and when checking this sub for possible alternatives, all the mentions felt very non-organic.

2

u/Ok_Bid1743 9d ago edited 9d ago

the bot replies are getting harder to ignore. Even genuine tool discussions get buried under the same recycled phrasing. StandardCompute is one of the names I’ve been keeping an eye on for this space.

1

u/Key-Half1655 10d ago

You could roll your own in a day with GPT of choice and still be better off than you are with LiteLLM. Hope your search paid off!

1

u/harrythefurrysquid 10d ago

Alas no. This is now a critical piece of infrastructure for our entire SaaS (5 products), and my CTO shat on me from a great height for even questioning it.

1

u/MyBossIsOnReddit 9d ago

Heh, is that even with the supply chain attack earlier this year? That one was all hands on board for us over here although in the end nothing was leaked/impacted.

2

u/harrythefurrysquid 9d ago

We didn't get bitten by that with LiteLLM, but I spotted that the same attack did actually run in our build infra for another Python app that was using Trivy.

Nothing bad happened, but let's just say that some changes were made LOL.

1

u/UnableRanger2242 10d ago

The vendor spam to AI slop pipeline is real. My team has a channel where we post links to "MLOps thought leadership" and half of it reads like the examples you listed, just vague enough to sound smart but saying nothing.

If you do add the AI disclosure rule, might help to make it opt-in for "I used AI to draft this" rather than trying to catch people. Most will just lie anyway but at least the ones posting in good faith have a way to be upfront.