Hacker News Reader

Comment by KirinDave | Hacker News Reader

If you're ever curious how the folks at reddit's r/the_donald maintain control of the sub and why they so often disable moderation, services like this are both how and why. Intermediates who sell upvotes are happy to run jobs for both sides of a given debate.

This site is really expensive compared to some options I've seen sold.

I think my favorite part of all this is the billing screen. "Doesn't have to be your real name."

View on HN

I don't use Reddit much, and I've never moderated a sub, so can you explain more? Why would the mods need vote bots to control their own sub? Can't they just moderate it?

The bots (if there are any, I don't know) were designed to upvote the posts enough that they'd flood the "all" page, which is an aggregation of many subreddits.

Didn't Reddit remove them from /r/all? I saw mods saying that they were among the ones removed from /r/popular at least.

No, reddit made a special rule that their "stickied" posts wouldn't show up on /r/all because the mods would sticky things to "slingshot" them to the front page one at a time. And the users of the sub knew to upvote anything stickied.

They still will show up on /r/all of the post was never stickied.

Huh, I thought they were mainly using bots.

There are unique groups there and it's hard to tell their origin. Many more seem like they're not exclusive to the_donald. Much of the pro-trump digital infrastructure is quite mercenary in origin.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com