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Comment by maximinus_thrax | Hacker News Reader

> They don't seem to care about the spam, or they're completely inept

They don't care, at least that is the conclusion I've reached after repeatedly reporting content farms. I think they drive engagement anyway so it's good for business at the end of day. I did not do a thorough study like you apparently did, but anecdotally from the popular subreddits, I've spent enough time on Reddit (unfortunately) to recognize rehashed content that's reposted periodically to 'mine' karma. At some point, Reddit will be just a bunch of spam bots talking to each other and upvoting each other's content while humans will be spectators, or their content will be buried. Either way, this will be great for Reddit as it's good for business (ad impressions). It will be bad for Google as they're training their AIs based off spam and they will notice..

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> Either way, this will be great for Reddit as it's good for business (ad impressions).

They probably have a slush fund to pay the spammers to boost traffic numbers

I’m not much of a Redditor. Why do spammers want to “mine” karma? What makes it valuable?

Couldn’t Reddit solve this simply by making karma worthless, like HN?

See https://www.reddit.com/r/KarmaBotKillers/wiki/index/

> Couldn’t Reddit solve this simply by making karma worthless, like HN?

Why would they solve this? These bots create engagement. Until some bot farm is weaponized to organize some sort of IRL 'bad thing', I bet nobody at Reddit actually gives a fuck.

Thanks, but after reading that I still don’t get it. What makes an account with 10,000 karma worth money as opposed to one with 100 karma? Do high karma accounts get more prominent display, bolder text, or something else that’s actually worth money?

Higher karma accounts are less likely to get soft-locked out of communities ("comment/post deleted: you must have x karma to post here") and probably "look more authentic". That perception is probably still subliminally there for a bit longer.

Got it. So ironically, the subreddits are kind of causing the problem themselves by insisting on karma thresholds.

They really don't have much choice. It's likely one of the most effective ways to minimize spam from 5 min old accounts.

> What makes an account with 10,000 karma worth money as opposed to one with 100 karma

Astroturfing. Say you're on the /r/AppleWatch and you see a post asking for some watch band recommendations. People start posting said recommendations and you check to see who's posting what. You will instinctively trust the 3 yo account with 10k karma, very popular on /r/pics vs the 2 month old account with 100 karma. That's one example for why some of these accounts are actually bought and sold https://www.epicnpc.com/forums/reddit-accounts.1277/

Political activism is another scenario for these sockpuppet accounts with heavy karma. I've noticed A LOT of pro-Palestinian and pro-Russian propaganda from accounts with huge amounts of karma quickly gained from a handful of posts on mainstream reddits like /r/pics or /r/funny which are reposted content from 3-4 years ago.

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