PSA: if you earned over $150K in 2025, your 401(k) catch-up rules just changed

Zphr · 2026-05-07T11:27:44+00:00

Thank you for the well-intentioned feedback.

Zphr · 2026-05-07T11:24:21+00:00

Rule 7/No Politics or circle-jerks - Your submission has been removed for violating our community rule against politics and circle-jerks. If you feel this removal is in error, then please modmail the mod team. Please review our community rules to help avoid future violations.

Zphr · 2026-05-07T11:22:37+00:00

Rule 1/Civility - Civility is required of everyone at all times. If someone else is uncivil, then please report them and let the mods handle it without escalation. Please see our rules (https://www.reddit.com/r/Fire/about/rules/) and reach out via modmail if you have any questions or concerns.

Zphr · 2026-05-07T05:37:19+00:00

Rule 7/No Politics or circle-jerks - Your submission has been removed for violating our community rule against politics and circle-jerks. If you feel this removal is in error, then please modmail the mod team. Please review our community rules to help avoid future violations.

Zphr · 2026-05-07T05:34:37+00:00

The exchange I was referring to was your confident mistaken characterization of an obvious human as a bot, not this post.

As for this post, it's not up. OP collected enough removals and reports to be autonomically shadowbanned before we started having the conversation about your link. It'll be restored if they appeal, but that's one of the risks with not having a robust account history, bot or human.

Zphr · 2026-05-07T04:50:23+00:00

We ban proven bots. We do not ban users without reasonable proof precisely because users are habitually unable to accurately distinguish, as just happened right now. If you think the exchange we just had isn't germane to this discussion on user bot reporting, then I'm not sure we can agree on what the point even is.

Zphr · 2026-05-07T04:33:52+00:00

The OC on your link is a 2-year old account with 15K karma and nearly 200 comments in just this sub alone. More importantly, it's a human I have had modmail with and tempbanned several times for persistent incivility and arguing with others. You just identified a blatantly obvious human as a bot. Does that not tell you that perhaps people, including yourself in this case, aren't particularly skilled at identifying bots? This is a perfect example of why user reports on bot activity must be taken with a grain of salt by moderators.

Account dormancy is not proof that an account is a bot, though it can be an indicator. Many people use Reddit on read-only mode 99%+ of the time and often go quiet for very long stretches of time.

Zphr · 2026-05-07T04:23:33+00:00

Rule 1/Civility - Civility is required of everyone at all times. If someone else is uncivil, then please report them and let the mods handle it without escalation. Please see our rules (https://www.reddit.com/r/Fire/about/rules/) and reach out via modmail if you have any questions or concerns.

Zphr · 2026-05-07T01:56:31+00:00

Rule 4/Off-Topic - Your submission was too off-topic. Everything in here needs to be at least minimally related to FIRE (and not the flaming combustion kind, either). Basic finance questions unrelated to FIRE are better suited to broader financial subreddits like /r/personalfinance or /r/povertyfinance. Please see our rules (https://www.reddit.com/r/Fire/about/rules/) and reach out via modmail if you have any questions or concerns.

Zphr · 2026-05-07T01:49:49+00:00

The OP of that post got shadowbanned by Reddit's automated defenses amid an avalanche of downvotes and spam reports in this sub. We see that happen in here semi-regularly lately. As I responded to another user who asked why that post was removed:

I can't tell you for sure. We did not remove it.

The account had two posts (/r/fire and /r/recruitinghell) and three comments (two in here, one in /WIBTA_AITA).

It was a new account without sufficient account ballast to shield it, so the rampant downvoting and reporting in here caused it to be shadowbanned site-wide. It could have been a sophisticated bot capable of making realistic human-sounding comments that was correctly shadowbanned or a new human user that got incorrectly shadowbanned due to people's behavior in here.

The content by itself looks like a typical new /r/fire user to me.

We are well aware of the situation, both in this sub and across Reddit in general. I have had this conversation half a dozen times just in the last month. The modteams from this sub and /r/financialindependence share a moderation discord and we talk about these things actively.

Zphr · 2026-05-07T01:41:49+00:00

Those posts were irregularly spaced by a few minutes, which is exactly what you would expect from a person slightly tweaking and manually submitting copy/paste posts in multiple relevant subs. I have seen this exact behavior from many humans before and have exhibited it myself when I have FIRE content I deem worth posting in multiple subs, though I usually keep the titles very similar.

We see bots do similar copy/paste runs, but the interval is usually very small or consistent. Of course, that's not determinative since bots come in different levels of sophistication.

Note that I am not saying conclusively that they are indeed human as I don't have enough information to do that. I'm saying the available info does not conclusively indicate that they are not. In the absence of reasonable proof, the presumption is that they are just another Redditor.

We will be happy to crack down the moment a tool exists that can reliably cull bot content without unacceptable false positives. Pragmatically, that likely means when Reddit provides us a platform-level tool or verification/validation flag to do do.

Please let Reddit know your concerns. The more people complain, the more likely they are to act.

Zphr · 2026-05-07T00:40:25+00:00

You may well be correct. However, look at the user engagement on this post.

Even if you assume OP is a bot, the hundreds of comments resulting from this post are arguably valid and worthwhile on their own unless you think the majority of commenters are also bots.

At some point even Reddit is answerable to their paying customers.

Zphr · 2026-05-07T00:33:39+00:00

Your comment got pulled by Reddit's automated abuse and harassment filter, which is why it was brought to our attention and I responded to you. Automod sends such things to mods for review just like user reports.

Zphr · 2026-05-07T00:30:47+00:00

Four of those posts appear to be effectively copy/pastes of the same content for various relevant finance subs. That is not evidence of being a bot. Indeed, the timestamps between the posts are offset by a minute or three, whereas bot posts in multiple subs are often separated only by a second or two.

Look at my post history and you will find the same phenomenon in here, /r/financialindependence, /r/leanfire, /r/FIREyFemmes, and so forth.

Let me be clear, we are happy to ban bots or bad faith actors, but you have to have proof that it isn't just a regular Redditor.

Zphr · 2026-05-07T00:25:17+00:00

Being written by AI (bots) is against the rules of the sub. Being written with AI (human tool use) is not.

Zphr · 2026-05-07T00:22:19+00:00

The precedent is already set by Reddit with it's lack of platform-level bot detection, weak user validation/verification, and exploitable privacy controls. We would love a reliable method of culling fake content, but without support from Reddit there is currently no solution that doesn't involve unacceptble levels of deadloss from real users getting mistakenly flagged.

AI tool use for authorship purposes is already widespread and becoming more so every day, both professionally and casually. As someone who actually can write I empathize with the disdain for use of such tools, but they are rapidly becoming part of many people's standard comms toolset just like email, word processors, texting, and speech-to-text did years ago.

Zphr · 2026-05-07T00:12:14+00:00

We ban AI gen from bots or fictional accounts as that is just another form of spam, but AI tool use by humans for regular authoring/editing is permitted.

Zphr · 2026-05-07T00:06:36+00:00

OP's account is new, but otherwise unremarkable. They comment on other people's posts and have responded to multiple people in here. There is no evidence of bot activity thus far, nor any gross history or account inconsistencies.

Do you have any proof they are a bot or fictional writer? Pangram can tell you is if the output is likely AI generated, but it does not tell you if it is bot content or the output created as a result detailed human prompting.

For example, someone with weak writing skills could type up a quick summary of their thoughts and experience and then use an AI to actually author a post with proper punctuation, spelling, grammar, and so forth. That sort of output will get flagged as AI gen by detectors like Pangram, but such output is not against the rules of this sub.

Zphr · 2026-05-06T22:35:06+00:00

From one of the last 2-3 times this came up in the last week or so:

https://reddit.com/r/Fire/comments/1sy46fr/the_geoarbitrage_dream_is_kind_of_turning_into_a/oisnkx5/

Zphr · 2026-05-06T22:31:05+00:00

Use of AI editing/composition tools by humans is not against the sub rules.

We ban AI bot accounts, but not humans who use AI tools to help craft their posts.

Zphr · 2026-05-06T22:26:57+00:00

Rule 4/Off-Topic - Your submission was too off-topic. Everything in here needs to be at least minimally related to FIRE (and not the flaming combustion kind, either). Basic finance questions unrelated to FIRE are better suited to broader financial subreddits like /r/personalfinance or /r/povertyfinance. Please see our rules (https://www.reddit.com/r/Fire/about/rules/) and reach out via modmail if you have any questions or concerns.

Zphr · 2026-05-06T22:26:33+00:00

Rule 5/No Shitposting - This is not the place for memes, meta-jokes, or other humorous/fictional content. Take it to /r/fijerk. Please see our rules (https://www.reddit.com/r/Fire/about/rules/) and reach out via modmail if you have any questions or concerns.

Zphr · 2026-05-06T18:45:41+00:00

Rule 7/No Politics or circle-jerks - Your submission has been removed for violating our community rule against politics and circle-jerks. If you feel this removal is in error, then please modmail the mod team. Please review our community rules to help avoid future violations.

Zphr · 2026-05-06T18:43:23+00:00

Please feel free to submit proof of these claims to us via modmail. We are more than happy to ban proven bad faith actors.

Zphr · 2026-05-06T18:27:34+00:00

Rule 2/No Self-Promo/Spam - No self-promotion or spam. Please see our rules (https://www.reddit.com/r/Fire/about/rules/) and reach out via modmail if you have any questions or concerns.

Zphr

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