It took longer than I thought, but I came up with a promising approach for throwaway accounts. The bot can’t use the same parameter set to accounts with only a few interactions as it does for normal accounts, without getting it either too loose for the new accounts or too strict for the old accounts. I had to make a special stricter setting for any account that only has a few interactions in its recent history.
1.3% of users have enough interaction data to judge for sure that people have problems with them, and they get banned just like before. 2% more users on top of that will trigger the stricter filter if they try to post, and get a polite message that they need to interact more before they can participate. 97% of users don’t need to worry about any of this, just like before.
I think that approach will work. It’s not done yet but I have the parameters in place for it. I think the bot is doing a good job. I was expecting it to get it wrong a few times, and I have found a couple of users it made mistakes on, but it’s doing better than I thought it would.
That’s exactly the solution, yes. If you’ve never posted before, and you make a comment that gets a few downvotes, your comment is removed, and you get a polite note saying that you don’t have enough interactions to be able to post yet. A lot of subreddits do exactly the same thing, for exactly the same reason.
I still don’t have that part of the system worked out, because it’s only come up a couple of times. It hasn’t even happened enough to give a good test run to the code. I’ve been tweaking the code every time it comes up, because it’s not quite right yet, but it’s been happening so rarely that it’s not even really an issue. It would have been easier to moderate the throwaway comments by hand, to be honest.