The punctuation told us which threads would explode

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.

It kept happening

Years later at another job, I was digging through hundreds of thousands of financial profiles spanning 30 years.

Found something weird. People who wrote their names in all lowercase earned 10% less than people who capitalized them. Not saying it meant anything causal, but the correlation was there.

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?"

They don't always work. But when you can't review everything manually, sometimes these weird correlations are all you've got.

What weird patterns have you stumbled on that actually worked?