We analyzed 26,000 r/VanLife posts. Here is how much of it is bots and AI now.

Unless you have lived under a rock for the last couple of years, you have noticed it on Reddit, and r/VanLife is no exception. The tidy advice post that is a bit too polite and somehow empty. The "26F, just got my van, who wants to chill" from an account with nothing else on it. The build story with a dash in every third sentence. Someone says "this is AI" in the comments, and nobody actually knows.

We build an app for meeting other vanlifers, so how the big vanlife communities are doing matters to us. The person writing this also likes graphs more than is probably healthy and wanted the numbers in black and white. So we pulled every post and comment from r/VanLife for the last two years, plus all of 2022 as a "before ChatGPT" baseline, and counted.

What we looked at

We used the Arctic Shift archive, which captures Reddit posts within seconds of them going up and checks on them again about 36 hours later. That second check is what makes this possible: it records whether a post was removed, and by whom, before the sub's regulars had time to scroll past it.

• 19,235 posts on r/VanLife from 1 September 2024 to 12 September 2026, written by 11,619 different accounts.
• 6,775 posts from January to December 2022, as a baseline from before ChatGPT existed.
• 315,000 comments from the same two periods.
• For a random sample of 1,430 posts, 110 per quarter, we looked up the author's first public activity anywhere on Reddit to estimate how old the account was when it posted.

None of this tells you for certain that any single post is a bot or was written by a language model. It tells you how the mix has shifted. We explain the limits of each measure as we go, and again at the end.

1. Posts that read like AI: from under 1 percent to 6 percent

There is no reliable AI detector for short forum posts, and we did not pretend to have one. Instead we used the crudest possible signal, the one everyone jokes about: the em dash. The long dash that ChatGPT and its relatives sprinkle through everything, that almost nobody types on a phone, and that most people on Reddit never used before 2023.

We counted the share of text posts of at least 50 words that contain at least one em dash.

In 2022, one long post in 140 had an em dash. In the second half of 2025 it was one in 15. The single worst month was July 2025, at 8.9 percent.

Some real people use em dashes. Writers, people on Macs, people who care about typography. That is why the 2022 line is not zero. But those people did not multiply by nine in three years. The extra 5 to 6 points are text that was written or rewritten by a model. And the em dash only catches the models that use it. Posts that were run through a model and then cleaned up, or written by a model that has been tuned to avoid the dash, are invisible here. Treat 6 percent as a floor, not a ceiling.

The dip in 2026 is interesting and we do not fully trust it. Two things happened at once. The sub started filtering new accounts in February 2026 (more on that below), and the newer models from late 2025 onwards use the em dash a lot less than the 2024 and 2025 ones did. Our proxy is getting weaker at exactly the moment the moderation got stronger, so we cannot say how much of the drop is real.

Does the community notice? A bit. Among posts that survived moderation in 2025, the ones with an em dash had a median of 4 comments against 6 for the rest, and an average upvote ratio of 68 percent against 73 percent. They were also longer: a median of 168 words against 106. Long, polished, and slightly less liked. That matches the feeling.

2. Brand new accounts: doubled

For 110 random posts in each quarter, we looked up the author's earliest post or comment anywhere on Reddit. If that earliest activity was less than seven days before the post we sampled, we counted the account as new. This is a lower bound on account age, because someone can have an old account they never used, so the numbers below are if anything slightly too high in every period. The comparison between periods is what matters.

Every measure doubled. One post in seven in 2025 came from an account less than a week old, and one in fifteen was the very first thing that account had ever done on Reddit. With samples this size the margin of error is about three points either way, so the exact figures are soft. The doubling is not.

A new account is not a bot. Plenty of people make a Reddit account because they just bought a van and have a question. But there is no reason the share of those people would double between 2022 and 2025. The sub grew at a steady 11 to 17 percent a year in both periods. What grew faster was the number of accounts made to post one thing.

3. What the spam actually looks like

Reddit's own spam filter catches some of it. Across the two years, 2.8 percent of all posts were removed by Reddit itself within 36 hours, before the sub's moderator touched anything. Reading through those, and through the posts that survived long enough for us to see them, the same handful of families keep coming back.

• The "26F" post. On 4 June 2026 the title "that campsite chill vibe? helokeep 26f just gets it" was posted eight times by five different accounts. Reddit's filter caught two of the eight; the sub's own filter caught none, because the accounts were between three weeks and fourteen months old. It is bait for DMs and app installs, and the same network was back in September with a new product.
• Affiliate "best of" lists. On 22 and 23 July 2026, ten different accounts posted eleven near-identical "Best IPTV Service 2026: I tested 7 providers, only one passed" posts. In r/VanLife. Reddit removed one. The sub's account-age filter, which had been on for five months by then, removed none: nine of the ten accounts had public activity going back between five weeks and three years. Spammers age their accounts now.
• Template reposts. "Finished my Ford Transit Connect conversion on Wednesday" was posted by five different accounts between December 2025 and April 2026, each with a different photo. Thirty-nine distinct titles were used by three or more accounts. Some are just common phrasing ("looking for advice"); the ones with a specific weekday in them are not.
• Van-adjacent businesses. Conversion companies, mattress brands, campsite apps, rental fleets, and "looking for owner-operators" logistics recruiters. Some are honest and post as themselves. Many post a 300-word personal story that ends with a link.
• Fundraisers and crypto. A steady trickle of "my van broke down, here is my GoFundMe" from accounts with no history, and the occasional trading-course post that has nothing to do with vans at all.

None of these is a disaster on its own. Together, on a sub getting 800 to 900 posts a month, they were enough that when the moderator finally added a filter it took out one post in six.

4. The moderator pulled the lever

On 17 February 2026 the sub's moderator, who as far as we can tell is the only active one for 345,000 subscribers, pinned a short post: after several requests, Automod was now on, and new posts would require an account at least seven days old. If that did not cut the spam, a minimum karma rule would follow. It went on almost immediately. For the first two days it also blocked comments from accounts with less than 2 karma, until the moderator noticed it was rejecting legitimate comments and limited it to posts.

The comments under that post are the whole story of the sub in miniature. The top comment asks whether a panicked new vanlifer who needs help tonight can get an exception. The second asks for a formal ban on AI-generated posts too. And the moderator, alone, says they will look into it.

Here is what the filter did.

Since the switch, 843 of 4,961 posts have been removed by the moderator or Automod, which is 17 percent. The sub now shows about 580 posts a month, down from about 810 in 2025, while its subscriber count went up by 39 percent over the same two years. More people, fewer posts.

Who gets caught. We looked up the account history of 150 removed posts and 150 surviving posts from after the switch. Of the removed ones, 41 percent were from accounts under a week old and 49 percent under a month. Of the surviving ones, none were under a week and 3 percent under a month. So the filter does what it says.

But 26 percent of the removed posts came from accounts more than a year old. Those are the lurkers: people who have read the sub for years, never commented, and finally had something to ask. They have an old account and no karma, and the karma rule takes them out along with the spam. Their posts look like this: "Just bought my first van and overwhelmed is an understatement" from a four-and-a-half-year-old account. "Financing a van build for full-time use, need advice" from a three-year-old account. "Help me name my van, please," two years and eight months old. Every one of them gone before anyone answered, with a score of 1 and zero comments.

Among the posts that do survive now, 2.8 percent are from accounts under a week old, down from 15.5 percent before. That is the cleanest number in this whole piece. The filter took the sub back to something below where it was in 2022, at the cost of roughly one legitimate newcomer for every three spam posts.

5. The comments are still human

This is the part we did not expect. We ran the same em dash test on every comment of 40 words or more: 315,000 comments in total, 18,000 of them from autumn 2022.

The comment rate tripled too, but from a much lower base, and it never got above 3 percent in any single month. Posts in 2025 were four times as likely to read like AI as comments were. That makes sense: a bot's job is to post, and a spammer has no reason to write 40 thoughtful words under someone else's build photo. The people answering "what battery do I need" are, overwhelmingly, still people.

The comments per visible post did not change either: 16.5 in 2025, 17.8 so far in 2026. The sub is quieter now because there are fewer posts, not because people stopped answering. Total comments a month fell from about 13,400 in 2025 to about 10,300 after the filter, almost exactly in step with the drop in posts. Fewer questions, same answers.

Where models do show up in the comments, it is usually openly. "ChatGPT suggests:" followed by a 12-month Europe route plan with bold headings, posted by a real user who thought it was helpful and got one upvote for it. That is a different thing from a bot, and a much smaller problem.

What to do with this

If you are about to post on r/VanLife for the first time: your post will be silently removed if your account is under seven days old or has less than 2 karma. Nobody will tell you. Comment on a few threads first, wait a week, then post. If it is urgent, message the moderators and explain; the sidebar has a modmail button.

If you are reading: account age is the tell that still works. Click the username. A long, well-structured story from an account with no history is worth exactly as much as the link at the bottom of it.

If you run a vanlife community anywhere: a seven-day rule works and costs you lurkers. A karma rule works better and costs you more lurkers. A "post an introduction in the pinned thread first" rule catches most of the same spam with far fewer false positives, because bots do not read pinned threads. r/VanLife's moderator is doing this alone; it is not surprising they went for the blunt tool.

Method, limits, and the data

• Source. The Arctic Shift archive of Reddit, queried on 12 September 2026. Posts are captured within seconds of submission and re-checked about 36 hours later, which is where the removal data comes from.
• Removals are only counted if they happened within that 36-hour window. Anything removed later is invisible to us. The 2022 posts were re-checked much later, so their removal rates are not comparable and we do not report them.
• "Reads like AI" means a text post of at least 50 words containing at least one em dash (the — character). It is a proxy. It catches some humans and misses any model tuned to avoid the dash. We also tested a list of stock phrases ("delve", "testament to", "it's not just X, it's Y") and bold-bullet formatting; they all move in the same direction but at much lower rates, so we stuck with the one everyone can check for themselves.
• Account age is estimated from the account's first public post or comment anywhere on Reddit, which is a lower bound on true age. Reddit no longer lets outsiders read the real creation date without an API key. Sampling was 110 posts per quarter, chosen at random, which gives a margin of error of about three percentage points on the pooled figures.
• Deleted accounts were excluded from the sampling. They are around 1 percent of posts in every period.
• The data. Monthly counts for everything in this article are in one CSV file for posts and one for comments.

Who we are

Vanderlust is a small app for finding other vanlifers near you on a map and saying hello. We are based in Norway, most of our users are in Scandinavia and Northern Europe, and we are not affiliated with Reddit or with r/VanLife's moderators. We ran this analysis because the health of the big vanlife communities is our problem too: when the sub gets worse, people stop asking each other things, and that is what the whole thing is for. If you spot a mistake in the numbers, email us and we will fix it and say so here.

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