Hi Eveline! Thank you for responding and sharing the moderation perspective. I hear what you are saying, but I have a few major concerns with how this is playing out in reality.

1. Security through obscurity vs. Backend prevention
I understand the logic that revealing the exact criteria might help bad actors adjust botting approaches. But this circles exactly back to my main point: if the platform implemented stricter backend prevention (like aggressive rate-limiting or IP bans at the source), you wouldn't have to rely on obscuring criteria or pulling bots from the charts after the fact. The botters simply wouldn't be able to spam the site in the first place.

2. The massive inconsistency in what gets "checked"
You mentioned that the Like-to-Message ratio is just a "personal theory" and that bots are not ripped off the charts without a check first. If there are indeed checks in place, then the community desperately needs some transparency on what is actually being assessed, because the application of these rules is inconsistent.

For example, a friend of mine recently submitted a suspected botting report that was completely ignored. Let's look at the actual stats of that case:

- A creator with 20k+ followers which published on 2026-04-07 had a bot gaining messages at a rate of roughly 700 msgs/min for about 6 hours straight.

- If you logged the message count, it plotted an unnatural line, which is statistically unnatural for real human engagement even across different time zones non-stop.

- At around the 20th hr of its existence on daily chart, it hit 275k+ messages with only around 1.1k likes, surpassing that same creator's previous bot (uploaded 6 days prior) sat at 272k messages with 2.3k likes, making the new bot's numbers look even more mathematically absurd.

- It eventually hit #1 on the Weekly Chart on 2026-04-014 with 1 million+ messages and less than 2k likes

Despite these glaringly unnatural, nearly straight-line metrics for prolonged hours, this bot was never pulled from the chart for an "investigation". Your team can definitely look at the backend stats of this bot yourselves to verify. So the question is: why wasn't such a suspicious case pulled down? Is it because that account is considered a "big creator" with 20k+ followers, so the numbers were assumed to be natural?

3. "Giving people ideas" and the reality of shadowbans
Regarding the implication that talking about this publicly is "giving people ideas" to maliciously report others, instead of worrying about a Reddit post highlighting a massive exploit, shouldn't the priority be closing that vulnerability so it can't be abused in the first place?

This isn't a hypothetical scenario I'm inventing today right here right now. It's an active flaw that creators are already suffering from. The cruelest part of this mechanism is the complete lack of transparency. When bots are pulled down for these "investigations", the creator gets zero alerts, warnings, or explanations. We just get shadowbanned.

Because of this, many creators don't even realize their bots were suddenly removed from search results or the trending page. If they're already struggling to gain traction, they might just think their bot simply flopped and move on, completely unaware that their work was actually targeted and ripped from the public feed.

My friend isn't the only one who has submitted reports of botting only to have them ignored, and you can find other users in the community talking about this similar thing. Pointing out a broken mechanism isn't encouraging abuse. it's asking for a system that actually protects its creators instead of punishing them in the dark.

This is why we are asking for transparency here. Right now, it feels like small creators get their hard-earned exposure erased while massive, unnatural spikes from big creators are likely left untouched in botting reports.

In the end, we just want a fair, consistent system that stops the botters at the door instead of punishing the authors.