Hacker News Reader

Comment by talbina | Hacker News Reader

Does Reddit have the same problem?

Also, would something like this make it to the front page? And if it didn't (because of editorial input), how come it hasn't been deleted?

View on HN

Someone tried astroturfing /r/gaming last week and were called out on it.

Truly blatent spam is extremely rare - it's the stuff that's mostly legitimate that has an ulterior motive that is hard to spot.

If it provides enough legitimate content to be useful to the users, it will get upvotes regardless of its ulterior motives. At a certain point an advertisement is entertaining enough to be viewed voluntarily. cf Old Spice guy.

For a while, there was a major problem with blogspam on the science subreddit. There was a user who would ripoff content from other sites, paste it into a blogspot site, and slap ads on it. It would regularly get upvoted to the top. He's probably still at, and cursing at people in Hungarian when he gets caught. Ask the folks at /r/ReportTheSpammers about "Ralph" sometime if you'd like to know what spam on reddit looks like.

Reddit has a lot more built-in spam protection than is apparent to the average user. Faking that a vote was actually counted for new or questionable users, getting your account flagged for mass-voting a certain way, etc.

yeah, you can get something like this to the front page of reddit easily, if you and a couple of guys use a tor browser, and create fake logins, and upboat the content.

Reddit doesn't have good defenses against tor browsing. Tor browsing/hack is the best way to beat reddit defences, since you can circumvent reddit's IP logging, and cookies.

Someone tried it on HN last week.

Who? The Facebook resume guy?

Someone selling pills, I think.

Maybe it's just a new meme?

It has been deleted now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com