Posts with a period in the title got flagged 80% more often

A few decades back, I was running moderation for a community with over a million monthly active users.

Threads were getting out of hand. We needed to figure out which ones would turn toxic before they did. But we couldn't manually review everything. This was long before AI, before any of the smart content moderation tools we have today.

So we started looking at patterns. Not in what people said... but in how they said it.

Posts with periods in the title? Flagged 80% more often. Threads that started without a capital letter? Red flag. Certain word combinations kept appearing in threads that needed intervention.

We built a scoring system. Over 100 tiny signals. None of them obvious on their own. Together they were surprisingly accurate.

It wasn't perfect, but it worked. We caught most problems before they exploded.

I've been chasing these hidden signals ever since

Years later at another job, I was looking through hundreds of thousands of financial profiles spanning 30 years. Started digging around out of curiosity, looking for quality signals we might've missed.

Found something weird. People who wrote their names in all lowercase? Their profiles had different patterns. Not saying it meant anything causal, but the correlation was there. A tiny detail that signaled something about data quality or user behavior that we hadn't thought to look for.

Most validation is obvious

Check the email format. Verify the phone number. Make sure required fields aren't empty.

But sometimes the signals are quieter.

They're in details you wouldn't think matter. How someone capitalizes a title. Whether they use punctuation in unexpected places. Patterns that emerge when you look at thousands of data points and ask "what do the problem cases have in common?"

I'm not saying these signals are always reliable or that they work in every context. But when you're drowning in data and can't manually review everything? Sometimes these weird little correlations are all you've got.

What odd patterns have you found in your data that turned out to be useful? The kind of thing that sounds silly when you explain it but actually works?