Hacker News Reader

Comment by raincom | Hacker News Reader

That's common. A marketing company took over r/mattress in order to get rid of any unfavorable reviews and pump up any bed in box mattress company as long as these companies pay to that market company. For more, https://www.reddit.com/r/MattressMod/comments/1c28g7b/recent...

View on HN

A happy(ish) ending: https://www.reddit.com/r/Mattress/comments/1l81nn6/and_were_...

I'm not interested in doing this at all, but how does a person take over a subreddit? That sounds like a very difficult thing to do.

"Hi I noticed you weren't that online as recently as you were are you ok?"

Wow that must be a lot of work

Wow I feel for you, friend

Yea id be happy to help out from time to time.

--- But needs to happen with other things.

Quite often seen in GitHub where an attacker can contribute to build trust. With Reddit, mini modding, regular submissions, good comments etc

Defense includes not being shamed or pressured when life seems more important.

But can any mod remove other mods? How does that work in reddit?

Seniority. Older mods can remove younger mods.

So just try to buy or steal the most senior mod's account and then you have the mod for yourself? Ouch.

Strangely not mentioned much in here is how these accounts are up for sale.

It's definitely never mentioned on reddit because simply saying one of the websites in an offhand comment gets you a sitewide ban and your comment deleted.

The simplest thing is probably just to ask for it. I'm sure if you went now and asked to be moderator for a hundred different mid-sized subs, you'd get yes from a few. If you "seem trustworthy", probably more than a few.

This was exactly the playbook that led to the xz backdoor.

Just the quotes:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39909905

Very long page but a lot more in depth. Search for “Jigar Kumar pressured Lasse Collin”

https://securelist.com/xz-backdoor-story-part-2-social-engin...

And an overview:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XZ_Utils_backdoor

Yes, I had that in mind too.

Its worth any maintainer to be familiar with these methods to build up defences. With a few sock puppet accounts a single person could do it on their spare time. A nation state or criminal full time enterprise could do several attacks.

It's scary and immoral but I find it fascinating too. Like the dark side of the how to win friends books.

Security.

Probably in the same way as Jia Tan took over the xz.

Mods aren't set in stone, they tend to be active for a few years and then give up. Once that happens and you notice the current mods not posting anything for a period of time, you can simply file a request to side-wide admins to take over that sub, as giving it to anyone else is better than leaving it completely unmoderated.

it's surprising that this feature remains relatively unknown. the article doesn't seem to be directly aware of it. I recently requested a fairly important subreddit which had been taken over by mods of a competing to sub and locked down to prevent competition, and they gave it to me immediately

https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/29184583611...

Apart from getting the existing mod team to hand over to you, you can also petition to the reddit admins. For example, there is a process to replace inactive mods and this could be used to take control of a subreddit with existing users.

https://www.reddit.com/r/redditrequest/ - see the sidebar.

If the sub has an inactive or no mod, its as simple as making a post.

People offer money to buy your reddit handle, assuming you are a mod of a reddit they want to control.

This is a second order effect of Google weighting Reddit heavily in Search.

And a third-order effect of every other link being SEO garbage or AI slop

Reply on news.ycombinator.com