AITAH for banning users with scam links and other domains mostly bots use?

Hello AITAH community!

Since our head mod began recruiting efforts a few months ago, we've expanded our moderation team and increased our toolkit to try to give you the best experience this sub can offer. Our last mod announcement was unfortunately on April 1st but we assure you our efforts are not a joke. We care about this community and want to see the quality in this community continue to improve.

Here are a few changes we've implemented over the last few months since the new team came on:

Automod: We actually use it now! We're banning social media links, scam links, amazon links, anything that can be used to monetize or self-promote has been banned. We also try to filter out those oh-so-real posts about making it big on gambling sites and we continually adjust the filter on hot topics. Nobody needs rage bait, right? Additionally we get warnings if a post or comment gets too many reports. Reports are important, this will be a theme in the post.

Rules: Rules have been refined and expounded upon. You may have noticed some comments removed for name calling or incivility. Reports from users really help us find these (theme). We have put the rules in the sidebar, the new.reddit sidebar, and the wiki. No matter how you reddit, the new rules are there, you should see them and maybe take a moment to review them. If we were to undergo anything more drastic than common sense rule changes, we will announce them in a post and sticky it.

We've also added automated tools against ban evasion, bots, karma farmers, and scammers. None of these are perfect, obviously, but they have managed to catch some of the repeat trolls, lower-quality bots, and most of the "AITAH for looking too hot in my bikini? link to my OF here btw" posts. If you get caught in one of these, the initial modmail should contain instructions on how to reverse it, otherwise reach out and we will investigate.

A specific note about one of these tools: it checks links in your profile and your activity on specific karma-farming subreddits. We do not police regular subreddit usage, you will never see us ban you for posting in "normal" subreddits such as sports, your city subreddit, or even political subs. We only ban participants in karma farming or scammer-oriented subs. We also don't ban normal social links - your FB, Insta, etc. are all fine. We ban links where people could give you money - both SFW ones like Venmo and CashApp and NSFW ones. If you need these links in your profile, you can make an alt account without the links, and we will ignore Reddit's ban evasion warnings if you let us know. We can't sort out the real enterprising users who frequent this sub from those that are owners of hundreds of bots, and we won't attempt the effort or the botfarm owners would just appeal the bans. We are not anti-sex worker or anti-entrepreneur, we are anti bots. Blame the bots or yell at us and take a perma.

Report alerts (theme): We get bat-signals for reports now. Please, please use reports appropriately and not as a super-downvote. If a comment or post gets enough reports, we at least lay eyes on them and discuss internally. We have modmail, we have a chat group. We don't only look at reported posts, but reporting them makes them much more visible to us. We've seen the shittiest ragebait barely garner 3 reports on something with 2k karma, and there will be 50 comments calling it fake. We need your reports, we use them. Please report responsibly and we'll do our part, we know mods have been less responsive in the past but our mod team has grown and so has our response team. Please report personal attacks and AI slop, we hate both. A note on the custom report feature - this can be helpful to note previous posts by OP, or a link to an old post they obviously copied from, but sometimes it is less helpful. We can mute reports from someone if they make unhelpful custom reports, and if that happens too often we will disable that feature.

These automations come with collateral damage. We get people who got hacked and had those links put in their profile. We get software devs who just leave an open hand asking for a coffee if you appreciate their efforts. We get people who mostly post in local city subs looking to pawn off their wares. We get bots. Like a lot of bots. Like holy shit a lot of them. The ban to complaint ratio is still very good but every morning the moderation team wakes up to appeals because xXSweetCherryXx, an account made 19 hours ago, can't post here any more because "she" has links to OF, paypal, and/or fansly (this is not a comprehensive example, it's a lot more) on her profile. If we didn't ban them then, they'd be banned in a dozen days after making some AI shitpost and then shitting up other subs spamming their AI onlyfans content.

We put these restrictions in place to allow the most common contributor to the sub to persist. The "This is a throwaway, here is my real story" user. We can put in account age limits, but the bots use abandoned reddit profiles, the bot owners are also patient. We can put in karma requirements, but the bots karma farm in karma farm subs or no-karma-required subs. We cannot impose limitations that do not adversely affect the real contributions to this subreddit. So instead we added the automated tools. It's the best solution we have now while leaving the door open to genuine throwaways. If the community is so sick of the fake posts that you want us to try these anyway, please let us know and we will try to implement this in a way that minimizes the collateral to real throwaways.

Our final say is the tools do more good than harm, much to the dismay of our more entrepreneurial posters who are real people. We have actually been repeatedly asked by mods of other major subreddits to implement some of these tools, since they notice the shitposters build up their karma minimums here. It is the mod team's opinion that this policy is a largely net good, but we want to remain transparent as we implement broader changes to the sub.

So reddit, AITAH for adding apps to block scam links, auto-hide comments with a ton of reports, and block users who have links that are commonly associated with scams?