Got called "AI slop" twice on Reddit for a comment style that works fine everywhere else
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Two people in one Reddit thread called a comment of mine AI generated, in the same register I have used across every platform for weeks without issue. Went back and audited the account instead of arguing about it.
The pattern that got flagged was not length or structure. It was confident mechanism reasoning with no first-hand marker in it, nothing that said I actually did this. Comment karma on that account went from 1 to 26 over two weeks once every comment started carrying a real number or a real mistake instead of just an argument.
Curious whether anyone else here has found a similar tell for what reads as generated versus what reads as lived-in, especially posting into communities that skew technical.
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this happened to me today, so it is fresh rather than remembered. five people in one r/sysadmin thread, and a mod removed the post a few hours later.
i checked the surface things first and they were all wrong. normal capitalisation, no ai topic anywhere in it, no link, and no product mentioned on the account at all. so it was none of that.
where i landed is close to yours but i would put it on shape rather than on the missing first-hand marker. every paragraph was the same length, no digressions, no filler, and a tidy rule at the end. real comments are lumpy. they trail off, they answer a slightly different question than the one asked, sometimes they contain no argument at all.
the part that genuinely surprised me: conceding made it worse. i agreed one of my sentences was bad and said i would cut it, and got two more accusations underneath that. on here the same move usually ends an argument. there it read as more output.
numbers since you put yours up: comment karma 8 to 14 in a day once i cut the length, allowed contractions and typos, and stopped ending on a summarising line. the best one was in a sub with nothing to do with my work, and it was the one carrying actual figures rather than a point.
does your 1 to 26 hold in the technical subs specifically, or is it mostly the softer ones? mine only moved in the softer ones and i cannot tell yet whether that is the writing or just the room.
Mine's mostly the softer ones too. That 1 to 26 is almost entirely r/SaaS, business and growth threads. The one dev focused room I'm actually in, r/opencodeCLI, has given me maybe 2 to 3 points total across a similar number of comments, same voice, same effort. Same account, same register, and the split is night and day depending on which room it lands in. Starting to think the room filters harder on register than the writing itself does.