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Comment by rockbruno | Hacker News Reader

There was a thread the other day about how every community is bound to lose its identity once it gets big enough, and it likely can be applied to this. Once Reddit caught the attention of the advertising world to the point where people with high karma were being asked to sell their accounts, the entire platform devolved into people reposting each other's content to farm karma.

In the last couple of months people have even been spotting "organized bot groups" that not only repost old popular content, but also immediately populate said reposts with the popular comments of the previous thread.

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Well, at least this place has the kind beatings into submission thing going for it. That's the advantage of having a paid moderator vs. group moderation. I think it builds a healthier culture.

Reddit hired more paid moderators, to whom being mean to racists and other people they like is “hate speech” while actual racists and nazis run amok being shitty to actual protected groups. Reddit is turning into the next stormfront.

The bots these days really put you in the point where you wonder what percent of people you talk to are real.

I've seen a few popular comments bots give themselves away accidently by posting the same comment under a thread under different user names. Go and look at the accounts, and they are all the same comments, but generally in different threads. Because they seem to have been human comments at some point in the past, they seem to be much harder to detect for the average user.

Those are comment repaste bots.

They look for highly voted comments which typically have more upvotes than the comment they are responding to, but they're stuck under an ultimate grandparent comment which isn't the highest voted comment, and then the bot posts that comment in the comment chain under the top comment trying to farm karma.

They're now truncating the comment so it isn't a perfect match, which often results in "am i having a stroke?" comments under it as they mangle it.

I guess you do that and even if 99 accounts get banned the 1 account that gets a pile of karma can be sold off to social media companies / troll farms to push whatever their agenda is.

The reposts are what made me the most frustrated. I got really tired of seeing the same stuff keep cropping up literally every two or three days

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