You can still spot them, but you’d have to comb through the history more thoroughly.
https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=reddit+account&_trksid=...
0: interestingly, I posted so many articles from a small amount of sources that people started to assume I worked at those sites. I had to correct people on this repeatedly. Super easy to get trust and once an idea gets out there it's hard to get everyone to forget it.
Here are some samples:
https://www.reddit.com/user/SereneKingdom36
https://www.reddit.com/user/EnviousEditor41
https://www.reddit.com/user/active_manufacturer6
https://www.reddit.com/user/RemarkableCracker71
If anyone at reddit is reading this, it'd probably be pretty trivial to identify the 50 other accounts I made like this :)
Doing this on an account that you personally use is probably the easiest way, but that doesn't scale well for obvious reasons. Getting past time gates (must wait a month or more to post in certain areas) and karma gates takes time. This kind of makes me want to go back and try this again but there are moral/ethical issues that give me pause.
Create your own subreddit and seed it with content directly copied from other subreddits then have your bots all upvote each other.
This is all theoretical, of course. I've had a think about running a botnet on reddit for a while because I detest what the place has become. I can literally see the obvious botting that takes place across the entire frontpage and it annoys the hell out of me. It's mass social engineering.
Time and time again I see people on reddit really intensely screaming 'go no contact with your parents, abandon your family for the slightest difference of opinion' and such a toxic viewpoint is not only heavily upvoted but applauded by others that jump in with 'I did the same, it's totally normal, everyone goes no contact with their parents these days...'
I really think the place is being weaponised to disrupt society in a fundamental way. I mean, genuinely trying to break down the bonds of society and turn people against each other by creating this alternate reality. You go outside and talk to the average person at work or in a bar about opinions that, from reddit, you'd suspect are mainstream and they look at you like you have two heads. It's so artificial. I just pray that too many people don't fall too deeply into the trap.
I can't prove this, but I strongly believe that it comes from Active Measures troll farms, that it's part of a directed effort to disrupt society.
There have been government studies on this as well, like "Containment Control for a Social Network with State-Dependent Connectivity" in cooperation with the Air Force Research Laboratory out of Eglin AFB in Florida: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.5644.pdf
…which coincidentally was outed as Reddit's "Most-Addicted City" in 2013: https://web.archive.org/web/20160604042751/http://www.reddit...
I think this has already been done with r/politics. I've created new reddit accounts to argue with people on there a few times and find them being banned within a few weeks for the most trivial of infractions, simply comments like 'I find it hard to believe someone would express that belief in good faith' get you banned, and as you don't get a ban without a report someone has to be reporting comments that no reasonable person would report.
I came to the conclusion - after a while - that it's a secretly walled garden, that basically 100% of the content is automated, probably by bot-runners aligned with the moderators, and that users that stray into it are intensely surveilled until a plausible reason exists to ban them. There is zero metacommentary allowed and making a post 'about the moderation of this subreddit' gets you banned for metacommentary. You now also aren't allowed to question user activity, so if someone's account history is 100% botlike you get a ban for pointing it out.
I haven't worked there in over a decade, but if I worked there now, I would definitely be scraping eBay and all the other sites and closely monitoring all the accounts that I see for sale. I'd probably even buy a couple of them to see if I could find some patterns in the sellers.
I think if you did that you would rapidly be asked to leave, because it would expose how few genuine users the site still has. I don't get the feeling - when I use reddit - that a majority of the comments or posts are genuine.
I'm not claiming it's impossible, but it's very easy to fool yourself in this territory. A good mark is the one who thinks they know the game.
Maybe we should pay herds of people to flag the bullshit, since google won't do it anymore.
Basically, shilling has become so pervasive that positive reviews are automatically untrustworthy regardless of source or apparent trustworthiness. It wouldn't even surprise me to find that companies are generating fake negative review content without ever endorsing their own products, but it's at least a tiny bit harder to fake genuine modes of failure to report on.
Example: https://old.reddit.com/r/eero/comments/mk0l1w/eero_vs_orbi/
This entire thread dumps on Orbi Wifi devices and praises Eero. Maybe Orbi is inferior to Eeero, but the one-sidedness of the discussion is a bit unsettling.
The top comment was created by a poster who almost exclusively posts on the /r/eero subreddit over the span of one year. Many of their comments are specifically in praise of Eero devices.
Take that terminaldude for example. Ok, ten months ago they didn't have problems with Eero. Well, I guess now they do? https://old.reddit.com/r/eero/comments/pq6mvg/chasing_ghosts...
Of course, this only hilights that user reviews are hit and miss. It's not so uncommon for something to work well at start but then you discover problems later on.
This is where a good social network is useful. I'd trust my friends more than any random web site. Unfortunately I don't have a huge network to call on, so it would be nice to trust my friends friends and so on, but the trust quickly drops. We need a way to improve a simple network with some user-controlled measure of authenticity and trust.
You have to pay for quality journalism.
Like, I'm hoping to find a specialized community discussing products relevant to that hobby or interest, often posting images or discussions of data gathered.
For example I am starting a container garden on my patio using fabric pots and have searched reddit for a wide variety of gardening products. Perhaps I fell for shills but I looked for people posting images of their gardens and discussing opinions and results, so if companies reselling chinese factory sourced fabric grow containers are hiring people to literally make home gardens and shill online about products, then so be it, thank you for the content? And even then, I don't think I saw anyone specifically pushing any brand at all, and even calling the top brand (SmartPot) overpriced . Everyone seems to use a different brand and they all seem to do fine.
I think that's a strength on reddit. It's harder to shill in a specialist community than it is in an Amazon review or personal blog.
Another reddit community I would look at often for opinions and brands is chef knives and knife sharpening tools. I really don't think there's a lot of shilling there that gets upvoted and promoted.
The small group of GYW brands seem to at least be generally aware that a community of enthusiasts exists on Reddit and that's probably enough to start being skeptical of positive reviews.
However, even before Reddit, StyleForum was great, and their original darling was Viberg.
Reddit is great for a specialized user. Not only is there shilling, but you also find hyper-specialized people who go too deep.