SLAZE

no AI, OSS, Fixes dead internet theory, Community First, Reddit+X, better mental peace

Comment 1

Hello guys, how's the judging journey been so far? AI this AI that, must be tiring hahaha, don't worry i'm a safe place.

TLDR

Slaze solves the dead internet theory, for users and for mods, while being open source, deterministic, and secure. Normal users benefit the most. Moderators spend less time reading garbage, more time enjoying life. Built end to end with polish.

Yapping starts now (for those who don't have Acute Wall-of-Text Syndrome)

So yeah, Slaze. Slaze was born from the collective frustration of mine, and many many more people on reddit and other social media, and the problem is: The Dead Internet Theory. In short, TDIT means most of the content on the internet is generated using AI or automation tools, more like in a way to get engagement or something for profit, without respecting human to human interaction.

You must have seen this too right? On reddit, many fake posts claiming "Oh I used these 7 tricks to earn a million dollars", or something more provocative like "I couldn't [states a problem], and then i found this" and it's basically an AI generated ad or something.

I get it ayush, what's your solution to this problem then?

Ahh, i'm glad you asked. So in the first place, Slaze was being built for normal people to use daily and i also had planned something for moderators too, but it was against Reddit's TOS. But i found a way to help both sides of the world, and my solution is a browser extension (currently awaiting approval from Google and Mozilla btw)

What does Slaze do?

A browser extension ayush? I know I know, i am supposed to showcase a mod tool, but hear me out. Slaze is unique in its way of working.

  1. So imagine yourself scrolling through the reddit feed (Slaze works on Twitter/X too). You follow a specific subreddit of your interest, you click on a post out of mystery, you read it, and there are specific phrases like "The Hard Truth", "Something Nobody Does", "So i use this to..." and you realize you've been baited into opening an AI slop post.

  2. You wish "only if i had a label or something that would show me if its a bait post or a slop post or an AI slop". And there you go, you install my extension (manually for now, sorry)

  3. As soon as you install it, you start seeing flairs on the top right side of every post (near the 3 dots), and they are quite unique and different for each post. One says "Deceptive Ad", another one says "Rage Bait", another one says "Genuinely Useful" and so on. There are 122+ unique flairs available. But ayush where do the flairs come from?

  4. The flairs come from the "Slaze It" button on the right side of the share button. Click on it and you can see 9 ways of voting on a post. 3 positive votes: Genuine, Helpful, Wholesome. 6 negative votes: Ad & Promo, AI Slop, Bait, Brainrot, Misleading, Rant. A user can vote (only after login) a maximum of 3 votes per post, and my backend engine handles all the scoring and stuff from there.

Sounds fine i mean, but we already have upvotes and comments. Why should we trust Slaze?

Would recommend getting one of your software engineers for this one.

My verdict engine, which converts votes to flairs, has extremely detailed documentation of an engine that i have custom built from scratch to be bulletproof against all edge cases, and it's battle tested too. No AI, no machine learning, no breaking under 5000 spam accounts trying to manipulate votes. I am serious about this:

But okay let me actually explain WHY you should trust it, in plain english.

Every single vote passes through 8 trust gates before it counts for anything. Dwell time (did you actually read the post or click in 200ms?), account age, voting history, consistency with past verdicts, and more. They're all multiplicative, meaning every gate you fail, your vote's weight just keeps shrinking. A rushed click from a brand new account carries about 3.5% of the weight of a thoughtful vote from a trusted long time user. Same vote, very different impact. And if you're voting at 6 votes per minute, you get a 90% penalty. A thousand bots voting at the same time? Their combined influence is basically rounding error.

Also here's a detail i find kind of poetic: the "Genuine" category has a 1.25x prior advantage built into the math. It's basically Hanlon's Razor encoded as a Bayesian prior. Most content on the internet IS just normal human stuff, so the system starts with a gentle lean towards genuine and requires actual evidence to overturn it.

Also Slaze covers a much wider range of posts, something the default upvote system just cannot do.

Okay but nerdy stuff real quick, i promise it's cool

The wire protocol for sending votes is zero JSON. A vote payload looks like this: v026p1u3t8d5000 (18 bytes). A standard JSON vote request would be ~500 bytes. 10x smaller, per vote, every page load, for every user.

The batch read protocol that fetches ratings for all visible posts on a page? Binary application/octet-stream. 30 Reddit posts in a single request = 451 bytes. The JSON equivalent would be ~1500 bytes. Over millions of daily users this starts mattering a lot.

Also the verdict for each post is stored in the HTTP ETag header itself. Which means CDN caches it natively, and if the verdict hasn't changed since your last load, the server returns a 304 Not Modified with zero body. No parsing, no bandwidth, nothing. Because for old posts that haven't been voted on recently, that's almost always the response.

When a viral post gets hit by a thousand users at the same time, only one database query runs. The rest wait and receive the same result. singleflight coalescing. The thundering herd literally cannot touch it.

The verdict engine runs inside the Postgres transaction on every vote write. The label stored is always consistent with the counts because they're updated atomically. A reader can never see a stale label with fresh counts.

Looks robust enough. How is it relevant to this hackathon?

So far the browser extension has been the MVP. But if we have a look at our brave and hardworking moderators, i see them benefitting the most out of Slaze, and i have built a mod tool using Devvit just for them.

Okay but what does the mod tool actually look like

Glad you asked again.

The Dashboard: A mod opens the tool and immediately sees their full post feed with Slaze verdict badges inline on every post. Not just "good" or "bad", actual phrases. "Karma Bait", "Solid Advice", "AI Slop" and so on, right next to the title. There's also a hero section at the top that summarises the subreddit health in the last 6 hours, most common verdict, how many posts are CLEAR vs SPLIT vs DISPUTED and stuff. One glance and you already know if today is a quiet day or a mess.

Post Detail: Click any post and a modal opens. Left side shows the full Reddit post, author, score, top 5 comments all in one place. Right side shows the full Slaze breakdown. Which of the 9 categories is dominant and by how much, a vote timeline showing how community opinion shifted over the life of the post, and a risk score. The risk score is a weighted sum of the negative categories so a post that's 80% Misleading looks very different from a post that's 80% Rant, because misleading is actually dangerous and rant is just someone having a bad day. Mods can see all of that at a glance.

Mod Actions: And then right below all of that, actual buttons. Approve, Remove (with a confirmation so you don't accidentally nuke something), Lock/Unlock comments, and Ban User with a full form: reason, optional message to the user, and a duration selector from 1 day all the way to permanent. All of this hits the real Reddit API directly, server side, no shortcuts.

Analytics Page: A whole separate page with charts. Verdict distribution as a donut chart showing CLEAR vs SPLIT vs DISPUTED vs Unrated. A trust quality gauge showing what percentage of votes actually passed all 8 gates. A leaderboard of the most common verdict phrases your subreddit has been getting. Content health trend lines over 7, 30, or 90 days. Category averages showing which of the 9 categories your subreddit leans towards over time. It's soo much data and it all makes sense the moment you look at it.

There's one more thing i want to talk about

So while the Slaze API domain is waiting for Reddit's approval (pending, not approved yet), the mod tool doesn't just sit there and do nothing. It runs in Demo mode, which means it fetches your real subreddit posts through Devvit's Reddit API and overlays them with seeded fake Slaze ratings, so the whole thing looks and feels completely real. Every chart works, every breakdown works, every modal works. The only thing that's fake is the Slaze ratings themselves.

And the moment the domain gets approved, the app polls every 60 seconds, detects the live API is now reachable, and switches automatically. No reinstall, no code change, nothing. The mod just refreshes and it's live. I thought that was a pretty clean detail honestly.

So what did i build here

  1. A mod installs my tool to their subreddit.
  2. They get to know in under 2 words what the entire community feels about any particular post. If it's "AI Slop", it becomes easy and actually more verifiable, based on the verdict of soo many trust-weighted votes, to get rid of that post.
  3. Now instead of enforcing rules and trusting strangers and then waaiting for the community to tag something, or go explain in comments about how they feel, and then also read all of that and stuff... long process right? i just solved it by providing the same high level signal at the ease of fingertips.

Where do you see Slaze being used on reddit?

My aim is for entire reddit coverage eventually, but the subreddits where it matters most are the ones where people share something they've put real effort into, where income or respect or attention is involved, or where human to human manipulation tactics and provocative media run unchecked.

I'm just trying to bring back the clear, distraction free, user to user, real community based reddit that didn't have to lure strangers for someone else's benefit.

Okay how do i actually try this thing

Glad you asked one more time.

Browser Extension (Chrome / Chromium)

Store approval is pending so it's manual for now, sorry again. Here's how:

  1. Download the Chrome extension zip from here
  2. Unzip it somewhere you'll remember
  3. Open chrome://extensions in your browser
  4. Turn on Developer Mode (toggle at the top right)
  5. Click Load unpacked
  6. Select the unzipped folder
  7. Done. You should see the Slaze icon appear in your extensions bar

Works on Chrome, Brave, Edge, Arc, and basically any Chromium based browser.

Browser Extension (Firefox)

  1. Download the Firefox build from here
  2. Open Firefox and go to about:debugging#/runtime/this-firefox
  3. Click Load Temporary Add-on
  4. Select the downloaded .zip file directly, no need to unzip
  5. Done

Note: "temporary" means it unloads when Firefox closes. This is a Firefox limitation for unsigned extensions. Store approval will fix this.

Logging In

Once the extension is loaded, you'll see a small Slaze icon in your toolbar. Click it and sign in. You can use Google or email. That's it. After sign in you can vote on posts, the extension handles the rest.

Anonymous (no login) gives you 50 badge views per day. Logged in gives you 300 views and 20 votes per day.

The Mod Tool (Open Source)

The mod tool is a Devvit app installed directly inside Reddit on a per-subreddit basis. Since it's pending approval from Reddit right now, installation has to go through me manually.

If you want to test it:

  1. Let me know your subreddit name
  2. I'll install the app to that subreddit via the Devvit CLI
  3. Once installed, go to your subreddit and look for Slaze Analytics in the subreddit menu (the three dots or the overflow menu depending on your Reddit layout)
  4. Click it and the full dashboard opens as a webview inside Reddit

From there you'll land on the Dashboard page showing your subreddit's posts with Slaze verdicts alongside them. Click any post to open the Post Detail modal with the full breakdown and mod action buttons. Switch to the Analytics tab in the sidebar to see the charts and trends.

Since the Slaze API domain is also pending Reddit's HTTP approval, the first time you open it you'll be in Demo mode. Everything works, the data just has fake Slaze ratings on your real subreddit posts. The moment the domain gets approved it switches to live automatically.

Let me make it easy for you judges

i read the criteria. going through them one by one, fast fast.

Community Impact

mod's current workflow for a bad post: read it, scroll comments, wait for reports, make a judgment call, hope it's right.

that's minutes per post. for every post. every day.

Slaze cuts it to one glance. the badge is right there. if it says "AI Slop" CLEAR, the community already called it, trust-weighted, manipulation-resistant.

mod clicks the post, sees the full 9-category breakdown, risk score, top 5 comments, vote timeline, all in one modal. no tab switching, no reading threads. they act or they don't.

and the analytics page means they're not just reacting. they can look at a 30-day trend and see "AI Slop has been climbing for two weeks" before it becomes a wave.

and that's what i call as proactive moderation, which is the kind that actually keeps a subreddit healthy.

Polish

yeah the API domain is pending and the app listing is pending too, i'm going to be upfront about that.

but here's the thing: the demo mode uses your actual subreddit posts from Reddit's own API via Devvit, just with seeded Slaze ratings. every single feature works right now. charts, modal, mod actions, analytics, all of it.

the only thing that changes when approval comes through is the ratings become real, and that switch happens automatically every 60 seconds without anyone doing anything.

other than the pending approvals:

  • mod verification happens server-side on every API call, not just on login
  • all requests to the Slaze backend are HMAC-signed, 30-second replay attack window, secret stored in Devvit Redis, never in the client bundle
  • loading skeletons, empty states, and error states everywhere, nothing just breaks and shows a blank screen
  • confirmation dialogs on remove and ban so nobody nukes something by accident
  • dark mode, light mode, mobile responsive
  • never automates a moderation action without an explicit button click, hard TOS line, never crossed

and the Slaze backend has been running since before this hackathon.

the wiki docs linked earlier aren't marketing copy, they're the actual implementation documentation i wrote because the system needed to be explainable and auditable.

golden fixture tests. adversarial input handling. documented known limitations.

this is not vibe coded. Actually Structurally Architectured

Reliable UX

installation is: click subreddit menu, click Slaze Analytics, done.

nothing to configure. no API keys, no settings page, no setup. the app generates its own HMAC secret on first install via onAppInstall and puts it in Devvit Redis. mod never sees it, never touches it.

for scale: viral posts hit the database once no matter how many users load them at the same time (singleflight).

cache TTL is adaptive, 5 seconds for a hot new post, up to 24 hours for a 2-year-old one. 30 post ratings fetch in 451 bytes binary. CDN edge hit is ~6ms.

it's built to handle real traffic, not just a hackathon demo.

Ecosystem Impact

nothing else in the Devvit ecosystem answers the question: "what does the community actually think about the quality of this post, in a way that can't be gamed by 5000 spam accounts?"

there are queue tools, automod wrappers, flair bots and many stupid AI tools(you must have seen some hahaahha)

none of them have a trust-weighted vote engine with 8 multiplicative gates, Bayesian smoothing, statistical gap banding, 122+ hand-curated verdict phrases, and coordination attack detection.

none of them surface community quality signals to mods at the post level across the whole feed.

content quality problems exist in every subreddit. r/relationship_advice gets karma-bait dressed as vulnerability. r/technology gets AI generated misinformation. r/DIY gets undisclosed affiliate links.

every one of those subreddits has mods who currently have no way to know what the community is signaling about a post before they decide to act.

Slaze gives them that, for free, zero setup, and it works on day one in demo mode even before both approval processes finish.

that's my case. reach out if you want it installed on a subreddit to test: u/Ayush-Dhiman, contact@ayushdhiman.dev

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