First, let me say that I'm a fan of the Reddit community. I've used it to learn tricks about all types of topics, including home improvement and video game secrets. I've also answered SAS questions in some subreddits. However, over the past several months we've seen many old Reddit topics that are copy/pasted into new threads here on the SAS Community.
This isn't Reddit's fault and has nothing to do with the original authors of the topics. Instead, it's an approach by spammers to create what seems like a legitimate topic on the forums, get some credibility for their profile, and then follow it up with other replies that link to unrelated commercial sites.
The trick they use is to select some of the more provocative topics on Reddit, like "why is SAS so difficult" or "Should I learn SAS instead of Python, what do you guys think." We have no objection to authentic questions like these from community members, but we do not allow this inauthentic approach to generating engagement for misleading commercial purposes.
Ours is not the only community that experiences this. Many of our industry peers who manage other communities are reporting that they see the same thing on their forums.
When we spot cases like these we take action. We mark the topic as Spam (to remove it from view) and then we ban the user account that posted it. How can we tell the content came from Reddit? There is a trick you can use with Google search: copy a unique phrase from the post and paste it into a Google search field in quotation marks to find the exact phrase in other internet sites.
In a recent example, a thread contained the phrase "SAS seems astonishingly unintuitive and overly rigid". A search for this exact phrase yielded a single result: a Reddit thread from 2019. That's all I needed to confirm that this was not an authentic post for our community, but an effort to leverage the popularity of our site for an unrelated purpose.
If you see a community post that seems provocative like this, think twice before you respond. Many community members are quick to jump in and advocate for SAS and encourage the original poster to stick with it and learn more...but we'd hate for you to invest time in a reply that gets deleted because the topic was not genuine.
If you see/suspect spam topics like these, use the Report Inappropriate Content menu item on the message to let us know. We can investigate and then take action as needed.
As always, thank you for your advocacy and for helping fellow SAS users on the community!
