Reddit Is Being Manipulated by Big Financial Services Companies
forbes.com
forbes.com
Some filters include, "Subreddits that are large and dedicated to specific games are heavily filtered, as well as specific sports, and narrowly focused politically related subreddits, etc."
Yet, this past week, all I see on the front page are political posts & subreddits that are left leaning. Not to start a political argument, but, reddit makes it clear that they are filtering out posts that include conservative views. All I see are posts making fun of POTUS through memes, or how he caused a problem.
Politics aside, I just don't see how reddit will last if their political agenda outweighs their ability to provide a site which allows for sharing of information and discussion. I don't want the front page to consist of highly opinionated political posts, since their reasoning behind /r/popular was to "filter out" focused political groups.
If you want evidence, look at the internet archive time machine for reddit starting this past week, around the 17th of February.
And for what it's worth, I stopped using FB and stay in specific subreddits now in large part due to the politics surrounding Trump.
I'm a left leaning moderate who got really sick and tired of all the outlandish gif/memes running through FB that completely mischaracterized BOTH candidates, and then the lefts response on reddit just ... disappointed is probably the best word I can think of (I am left leaning, after all).
In truth I only ever had 13 friends on FB and I know all of them in real life (And talk to them on a regular basis) so quitting FB wasn't really a big deal as I hardly used it except to post something I thought was amusing.
And with reddit I just stick to things like /r/programming, /r/printSF, etc. Even in /r/programming I've gotten irritated when I see people take completely unrelated topics and inject politics (trump hate) into it.
I guess the long and the short of it is that I understand completely, and I think your observations are fairly accurate.
There's so much junk showing up there now that it's practically unusable on most nights unless what you really wanted to see was people complaining about Trump in shitty single image meme format.
On what they call a "leftist" site, they question how an extremely toxic alt-right subreddit could be so heavily blocked.
It's ironic that in a `dataisbeautiful` subreddit, people ignore the data.
Bias, no matter which side of the aisle it strays to, is just a turn off.
They don't even spell check, in an age where that just happens for you.
That's a special flavor of sloppy.
Given the number of grammar nazi's on reddit, what did you think would happen?
I was a part of the original mass exodus from Digg to reddit back when men were men, reddit was pissing off the lisp community, and reddit was mostly technical. That damned bar Digg introduced was horrible.
But I've always had a soft spot for Digg, I think I'll check it out again.
/r/conservative used to be a fair place for fiscal conservatives and social conservatives. Now, the rules are set up that criticizing 45 in any way or form is an bannable offense. Want to talk about how spending tens of millions a month just to transport 45 and all his family around is a complete waste of money? Ban.
So, the quality of the posts faded and therefore users who are sick of it have walked away and those subreddits have diminished in popularity. If you can have a discussion, why go to a place where someone is just going to unintelligibly scream at you?
Insular policies are to fault.
HN is a place for serious discussion, I think we should call people by their name.
People on internet message boards like to use lingo. I don't know how many times I've seen people use journalism lingo on HN, dek, graf, kicker, etc. It's not usually necessary but I think it makes people feel cool or send some signal...
This is a real problem, how to sort real users from the fake ones, and I'm not sure there is even a solution. But the integrity of our discourse, politics, and direction as a society is dependent upon finding a solution.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...
I was wondering if I could mine all users on stormfront and then perform a stylometric analysis on Reddit posts to ferret out those same users.
Same with other astroturfing groups, instead maybe running some type of classification technique to find aockpuppet accounts.
I'll probably make this an ask hn at some point to get some input.
FSB ones might be fun too. There is a certain class of grammar mistakes Russians make when writing in English. You could filter by that in addition to other stuff.
Cool, you would filter me out too. Or would you not? If my English is good enough to confuse your bot, then what stops FSB from hiring somebody like me?
Also, what stops FSB from hiring native speakers of English?
There are plenty of people on the Earth who speak Russian, but don't live in Russia and don't support the Russian government. Bear that in mind too, please.
FSB probably doesn't pay as many non-Russians on average. It would be expensive, risky and harder to control.
The point about grammar is interesting. Last time I heard of it was when there was discussion if Guccifer 2.0 was a Russian hacker or not. Some were saying he wasn't because his grammar mistakes were not characteristic of Russian speakers and most likely it was a native English speaker trying to talk in broken English trying to sound like a Russian.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormfront_%28website%29
Stormfront is a white nationalist, white supremacist and neo-Nazi Internet forum that was the Web's first major racial hate site.
Stormfront began as an online bulletin board system in the early 1990s before being established as a website in 1996 by former Ku Klux Klan leader and white supremacist Don Black
Any proof of this?
I am a bit skeptical of right-wing astroturfing/brigading having happened on Reddit, because it would have been a total and utter failure, given that Reddit is really left-leaning these days, even in non-political subs.
> So, social media is less and less about "an authentic conversation with real people" and more "prospect-powered advertising." And in an environment where anyone can be a shill, and their financial motives aren't known, credibility disappears.
> Which leads me to my bold prediction: that in the next decade we're going to see paid, conventional advertising in big-name venues become the most credible source of information, and word-of-mouth the least credible.
I would be very skeptical of anything I read on there.
It really does feel like Lord of the Flies
Are you sure you're not just seeing the usual flame wars over controversial subjects?
I ask because I don't think that the case against HFT is airtight, or that either side is obviously right. A lot of smart people have defended HFT to some extent (including HN's favorite finance writer, Matt Levine[0]).
I get the sense that there are a lot of people out there who read Flash Boys and assumed that HFTs are obviously the bad guys. I'm something of a contrarian, and pointing out the arguments in favor of HFT to those people is the kind of thing I would have done. (I don't remember a particular instance, but I probably did at one point.) In that situation, I wouldn't be surprised if some people assumed that I was a paid Wall Street shill (because obviously that's the only kind of person who would defend HFT under any circumstances, right?)
So while I'm not denying that manipulation does happen, I'm worried that it will give people license to discount anyone that disagrees with their personal received wisdom as nothing more than corporate puppets.
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2014-03-31/michael-l...
Very relevant:
There is a sweet spot where the subreddit has gained critical mass to sustain conversations, but haven't gotten big enough to draw in spammers and incite political arguments. There are thousands of such subreddits.
Did we not learn from our parents what is right and wrong? Lying? Making up stuff? Exaggeration?
Just because you are anonymous doesn't make it right.
Well, yeah, of course.
Do you normally expect propriety from for-profit organizations?
There's an interesting essay on the subject: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/08/business/media/sponsors-no...
> "There's always something to be done on the politics subreddit. And it's just, there's just a lot of volume. As far as stopping everything, there's nothing the moderators will ever be able to do. We can only see the user history. That's going to have to come from the admin side of things. There's just nothing we can do.”
When I read this, I get really enthusiastic about seeing what sorts of big-data analysis is technically possible.
And then...
> I presented Reddit with my findings and asked it if it’s doing enough to combat fake comments, threads and upvotes. But in a bizarre response, the company’s representative - Anna Soellner - didn’t bother to address any of these questions, instead providing a statement that seemed to be a response to my previous story.
> “In order to write your story, you and your co-author engaged in multiple levels of impersonation, violating the terms of service of Reddit. Our users recognized the stories you posted as fake and community moderators removed the links in a very short time frame. We are continuously working with our users and moderators to ensure the integrity of our site to promote genuine conversation.” Soellner said.
When I read stuff like this I get simultaneously really angry and incredibly sad at how vacuous and maliciously agenderized this incredibly popular website is.
This response is clearly a massive dodge, but from what? Why do they need to run and hide? I don't get it.
I can't help but think that Reddit (Inc.) itself is a massive, massive ivory tower, with only just enough of a connection to (and interest in) its userbase to know how to monetize it so the company can keep surviving. It's like the worst possible cyberpunk scene.
And obviously I don't want to help the admins!