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Comment by BitwiseFool | Hacker News Reader

Good for Reddit, but I'm becoming increasingly disillusioned with the entire site and how it's managed. The astroturfing isn't even subtle and the same few dozens of accounts dominate the front page day in and day out. The content on the frontpage, r/popular, r/all is starting to congeal into screenshots of tweets.

The mods of the biggest subreddits don't seem to care if the content that gets posted actually lives up to the title and purpose of the subreddit. At this point I'm convinced Reddit's platform is being used as a propaganda tool, with the goal of bombarding users with the same views in every major subreddit.

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As a non-US citizen, the amount of US politics content is frankly way too much. It affects subs that should have been apolitical, like r/pics, r/science, r/coronavirus. I hoped things would calm down a bit after US elections- it did, but not nearly enough.

Truth is, I personally wouldn't mind political content, I regularly read NYT, obsessed over every update in last US election. My problem with Reddit is that there really isn't interesting political content, same old DT-bad-AOC-good over and over again.

Some niche subs are exception, but they won't ever make front page, and will be heavily brigaded if they ever do.

To be honest, I don't think the forced political content on Reddit is going to decline in any meaningful way going forward. I think the people who are constantly pushing the political content realize how powerful of a reach they have and there's no reason to slow down. You're already seeing new subreddits like "MurderedByAOC", despite the fact that AOC tweets always get posted to every major subreddit.

There's no way murderedbyAOC isn't run by her staff. It only costs about $50 to buy enough upvotes to get on the frontpage of reddit (less once people start subscribing and upvoting organically), that's probably some of the cheapest advertising-per-eyeball you can get.

r/science absolutely sickens me now. I hate how its now just cherry picking, p-hacking, statistics skewing data to fit some narrative that a persons political affiliation results them in being some "measurable" % worse than the opposite party.

Well you can thank some really well organize political action committees for that. Once reddit gained so much popularity it pretty much was co opted. Its not difficult to mount an organized attack on a particular subreddit including brigading from both directions; this includes reporting en mass

Think of it like talking points. You get your daily site and subject list and with reddit it means voting on specific postings.

How could /r/coronavirus be apolitical given the state of America? on a US centric website?

And yeah, I wish we could stop reporting on how Trump is bad and corrupt, but that would require to stop doing bad and corrupt things.

Maybe you are mistaking views you disagree with as bias even when they are firmly grounded in reality?

> At this point I'm convinced Reddit's platform is being used as a propaganda tool, with the goal of bombarding users with the same views in every major subreddit.

It's not even subtle anymore. You can predict with 99% accuracy the ideology of any political statements in content on the first 10 pages of r/all. It's a 52M daily user echo chamber.

And anyone with a dissenting opinion is chased off of the site. I had to stop using it over the staggering amount of groupthink and censorship.

Didn't they champion themselves as the bastions of free speech at one point?

> Didn't they champion themselves as the bastions of free speech at one point?

Didn't liberals too?

No one has a right to a private platform.

Facebook banned QAnon, so did Youtube. They can, frankly, fuck off.

Public good is a consideration.

This is how I'm afraid free speech dies.

The internet becomes privatized, and therefore - free from those pesky free speech laws.

Really? Because there is site moderation on hacker news too. I am sure if you breach them enough, you will find yourself unwelcome.

QAnon is free to start their own website and say whatever loony shit they want.

and then there will be calls for Cloudflare, AWS, GCP, Azure, Fastly, Digital Ocean, ICANN, etc. to ban them.

Which, unfortunately, would only further reinforce their narrative and confirmation bias.

That's not my problem. Seems worse to force companies to do business with groups like QAnon.

Freedom of Speech vs Freedom of Association, which do you support?

I support free market with oversight. I believe shadow banning should be made illegal, but that companies should be free to decide if they want to block certain viewpoints. If a company blocks something like QAnon, then that is part of free market to create a new niche for people that are into fringe conspiracies that allows those viewpoints. Additionally, if a company wants to block liberal ideas then a market can exist for those who share similar ideas. The idea that these companies have to allow all speech is ridiculous, and I don't see people trying to enforce the same idea of free speech in other places of business like grocery stores, restaurants, etc where someone could start shouting some conspiracy about Democrats eating babies in the basements and not be asked to leave.

Yup, basically anything either left or right of center is kicked off the platform. And even then they're very pick and choosey over that stuff.

Reddit has increasingly become the 21st century equivalent of a tabloid: nudity, misinformation, and sensationalised bullshit

> At this point I'm convinced Reddit's platform is being used as a propaganda tool, with the goal of bombarding users with the same views in every major subreddit.

There's an entire cottage industry dedicated to doing reputation management for brands on platforms like Reddit. I don't think Reddit cares that they aren't using their ad platform directly, because the companies that manipulate Reddit buy awards for their posts and what not.

> because the companies that manipulate Reddit buy awards for their posts and what not.

that was a real stroke of brilliance but also of pure evil. When combined with the downvote button and aggressive moderation against 'undesired content' and 'misinformation', they've ensured themselves to be quite a powerful totalitarian bubble with a large army and outsized influence on internet culture.

Advertisers posting and commenting to an audience of other advertisers.

The biggest subreddits have always been awful. The best way to use reddit is to subscribe to niche subreddits, unsubscribe to the big ones, and avoid the temptation to see the /popular or /all pages.

what temptation is there even? all and popular are the shittiest parts of reddit

Some good memes :)

r/all/rising is a good way to discover new communities.

That doesn't really solve it though. You have to continuously try and find the new subs for your niche because they all go to crap.

This is the internet of 2020s. It’s a lot of work to find good quality content. Everyone knows how to take advantage of everyone or every platform. Any new hot platform will be coopted once it gets traction. Recently made the conclusion so many other people realized is that google search is just searching through paid ads or paid seo. It just sucks frankly. DDG better but still painful.

There are no answers at Reddit, and even if there were, the interface would hide them under the fold of the post, and take several seconds to expose. If I stumble on some terms that have been SEO'd by them, and their posts are at the top of my search results, I add "-reddit -site:reddit.com" to my search, and carry on. I wish I could just block reddit from google results, like you could in the old days.

All internet communities will be overrun with new users (eternal September effect), tend toward popular/sensational posts, attract trolls, have people post illegal content, run the risk of bad moderators, be astroturfed or have paid posts, etc etc. It's a living ecosystem, so it'll keep changing.

Then Reddit goes and deletes all those subs en mass.

I've been using reddit since the big Digg 2.0 migration. It is disappointing to see the popular/frontpage subreddits become such a bubble. In r/pics, for example, most of the top pics have a clear political slant. I'm not sure how much of that is intentional propaganda versus just what happens when content is based on how a majority of its users vote. I miss the days when it was mostly harmless advice animal memes.

Oh it's most certainly propaganda combined with karma farming. Ever notice how there is a steady steam of anti-trump content, contrasted with pleasant photos of Obama with a title harkening back to the good old days of his administration? You'll also notice that these posts get savaged in the comment section and yet still have 80% positive upvote ratings?

If you see something you suspect is propaganda on r/pics, just ask yourself, what is the user who submitted it trying to make me feel? What associations are they trying to form in my mind between the subject of the photo and the title?

The most noticeable switch happened in 2015 before the election; it was like night and day. Propaganda companies were hired and went to town and all the default subs were taken over. Elections are every 4 years so they are on permanent hire now.

It certainly is a propaganda tool. I don't have concrete proof just yet, but I suspect subs like /r/blackpeopletwitter are being heavily manipulated. Comments deleted en mass and rabid vote manipulation are a regular occurrence.

Not to mention censorship. I used to participate in a large community for a popular moba, and posted proof of the gaming company having lied to users to generate views/access. After 8h the post had thousands of upvotes and comments demanding explanations from the company. As soon as it gained traction, the mods deleted the post and banned me from the subreddit. They refused to give an explanation for doing so. That convinced me that big subreddits are just an advertisement platform for specific purposes, in this case, the moba’s products.

/r/undelete is a must-have subreddit for me for this reason.

There are so many stories like that that I'm convinced that this is Reddit's actual business model: game the site in the interests of people who are paying them, but make it look like it's organic.

If this article is to be believed, reddit may simply be continuing its founding tradition:

https://www.themarysue.com/reddit-fake-account-origins/

"...when Reddit was first started, it was populated almost entirely with content submitted by fake users."

do you ever see how often “chinese harvesting organs” posts make it to the top? that’s pure Falun Gong propaganda. The only reputable evidence for forced organ donation is from legally executed prisoners, a practice which has been stopped. All other sources on the net lead back to Falun Gong propaganda sites.

Interesting tidbit is that the Falun Dafa believe their rituals improve their organs so they have the most desirable organs to have harvested.

As a counterpoint, almost every single news story about China, Taiwan or Hong Kong is flooded by users from r/sino and accounts with suspicious histories all using whataboutisms, ad-hominem attacks or just plain old disinformation to change the narrative into a China friendly one. As others have said, the astroturfing is not even subtle.

As a counter-counterpoint, anti-China voices seems to have calmed dramatically right after the US election ended. Suggesting there was much more anti-China astroturfing around election season. Which is expected considering Trump's entire platform was anti-China, and there's much more anti-China shills than pro-China shills.

I too have noticed more pro-China voices on worldnews, but I've monitored and tagged via redditprotools and from my observation these pro-China regulars have been participating for a while, they just used to be more drowned out (suppressed by downvotes) by relatively more dominant anti-China voice. For example, the amount of anti-China users who also actively posted in /r/hongkong has dramatically reduced - hundreds of thousands of low effort HK virtue signallers lost interest. The conversation is balanced now or returned to pre HK drama / post tradewar balance, where pro-China views occasionally get positive reception, whereas before they'd be lucky to be downvoted but controversial.

There's still handful of anti-China HKers/TWers making substantive posts, but mostly indian nationalists or generic anti-China-lifers shitposting now. Bluntly, most anti-China voices are low-effort, ignorant haters with poor boilerplate China-bad rhetoric. Pro-China voices are typically Chinese national, or diaspora or adjacent, they have actual experience and knowledge on Chinese related issues from Chinese perspective. At the end of the day /r/50k sino users can't out astroturf 500k /r/hongkong, 200k /r/china and comparably numerous india nationalist. But they do have better rhetoric and are more invested in the debate compared to lol chinabad tier commentary turned persecution complexes because their debunked GFW banned words copypasta didn't cost 50c shills social credit points. Being anti-China isn't immunity from being unhinged.

>But they do have better rhetoric and are more invested in the debate

For anyone unfamiliar with r/sino:

They believe the Tienanmen Square massacre was justified

They believe the Uighur concentration camps are justified

They believe an invasion of Taiwan is righteous, and there is generally a lot of extreme vitriol directed at Taiwan and the Taiwanese

They believe in and spread a lot of misinformation concerning the HK protests, and there is generally a lot of vitriol aimed at Hong Kongers

You are banned if you question the CCP at all, with a most ridiculous ban message.

They are just as bad as r/t_d was.

Being anti-ccp is also not being an ignorant hater. Looking at their actions, it is a pretty reasonable stance.

Also, should be of note to other HN users, there is a reddit account with the name "dirtyid" which has a pro-CCP bias and a very strong anti HK democracy stance.

Well duh, that's me. I'm pro-CCP on policies I agree with and anti-CCP on policies I don't. You know... the kind of nuance reasonable people reserve for their own governments, but can't seem to generalize outside their tribe.

Sino's an unfortunate echochamber because 50k pro-China voices can't withstand brigading of vastly numerous anti-China voices. It's understandable to adopt siege mentality, plenty of other places soft/hard ban pro-China opinion. Also you list a bunch of pro China views that are consistent with pro-China interests like... that's a problem? Regardless, I don't care much for Sino, at minimum they do good counter-propaganda work. I'm more partial to china_irl which is gated by Chinese fluency.

You agree with some pretty awful things then. And any reasonable person would have a problem with the things listed.

OP here. Yeah I don’t necessarily think that’s a counter though. Falun Gong propaganda has no place in CCP criticism as they are a cult with incoherent policies. Those who are criticizing the CCP which IMO it rightly deserves should be careful of the reach they have as bundling their sources and arguments is not the right path. They both deserve criticism.

r/news used to have a r/The_Donald mod, and as a result, r/news would remove news articles that could make conservatives look bad even if they fit within r/news' posting guidelines.

Around the time of Cesar Sayoc's, the "MAGABomber"[1], mail bomb campaign, even Wikipedia articles like "Terrorism in the United States"[2] were banned in comments, and posts that contained it would have the AutoModerator shadowban the comment instantly.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAGA_Bomber

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States

> At this point I'm convinced Reddit's platform is being used as a propaganda tool

I've suspected this ever since 2013 when they outed "Elgin Air Force Base, FL" as their "Most addicted city (over 100k visits total)": https://web.archive.org/web/20130509130745/https://blog.redd...

Most of reddit's original userbase from the mid-2000s is gone, pushed out by changes in policy from corporate trying to make things palatable for advertisers. It's become another identity-centered (ie, posting on your own profile now) Facebook refugee settlement. I'm sure reddit corporate loves this state of affairs but it's pushed me to abandon content aggregators entirely and subsist on my own local RSS reader and email lists.

Sometimes I can’t believe what’s on the front page. It’s such blatant propaganda it makes me sad.

Correct. Reddit is ~75% (whatever) fake comments/astroturfing by hired companies and foreign operations to move policy and commercial goals. Its only going to get worse now that AI speech tools are so powerful. Entire articles with amazing context are written by computers now, they can obviously do the same with comments and probably are already in use.

One of the most weird examples of this: To this day they run a live-thread on the HK protests that's advertised in the "Announcements" part of r/worldnews

Yet there is no live-thread or advertisement like this for the BLM protests that escalated way more, not just in scale but also intensity, than anything that happened in Hong Kong.

Tbh I can't remember if that "Announcements" box ever had anything other that HK livethread in there.

As much as negative your comment sounds thats also my impression... in a bunch of /r/ that I follow i see the same accounts posting nothing else but pure propaganda the whole day and in more than on /r/ the same content. It generates an enormous hype just with a single "simple" post with an image and a "propaganda" title.

agreed, the main subs are cesspools in terms of content and discussion nowadays.

a few years ago i un-subbed everything and re-built my feed from the ground up, primarily subscribing to small interest-focused subs. the shilling and shitposting is close to zero and i'm much happier with my reddit experience.

I think the biggest existential risk to reddit is their mod structure. There is no effective mechanism for getting rid of bad mods, users just have to spin off into a new subreddit.

> users just have to spin off into a new subreddit.

Which then get taken over by SJW mods after some time any way.

Or conservative mods, or greedy self-serving mods trying to profit from their position, or mods that stop moderating entirely until it gets filled with spam, or asshole mods who want to power trip over their crumb of authority.

There are many pathological flavors of bad mods, and reddit's mod system is poor at handling all of them.

It's not really propaganda, it's a demographic shift of who uses the site and especially the major subs. Reddit always had a monoculture of sorts in the major subs, it's just new users who have a new monoculture have started using the site while those with the old attitudes (and who are frankly older) have moved to smaller subs or given up entirely.

Not a particularly surprising turn of events to be honest, nothing stays the same forever.

And the site itself is slow.

It's been remarkable to again and again see redditors 'give up' on 'main' subreddits once they're taken over by hard right conservatives, then make new ones to try to maintain some semblance of reasonable discussion. I figure most people just quit the site though.

At this point the site is one step away 4chan as a grooming ground for the far right.

/r/vancouver for example has become unreadable garbage, with constant hate speech against the poor/addicted/homeless class left unquestioned and any counter opinion downvoted to oblivion.

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