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Comment by asdff | Hacker News Reader

There is some sort of wink wink nudge nudge agreement going on with certain spam accounts. You will see them post article spam with hidden history, and if you look up their posts either via google or any other reddit crawling tool, they are posting all over various subreddits that same article maybe dozens of times. If they comment it is really basic and formulaic and found all over their post histories as well.

I feel like reddit enjoys it as these posts (often political in some way) usually get good engagement which is in line with reddits own incentives for courting advertiser money.

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There have been incidents where users who reported certain spambots were themselves banned for "report abuse". It's speculated the operators of those spambots pay money to Reddit to not be banned.

I have a 16 year old account and received my first account warning, ever, for reporting a user's comment (to reddit, not the sub) a single time and the admins disagreeing that it violated the guidelines.

I have screenshots somewhere, but it basically said if I continued to abuse the report feature my account would be banned.

Reddit is a publicly traded company and I sincerely doubt the company is taking some organized racket money on the side. But there is some serious conduct issues with admins, and I won't speculate about their motivations.

Granted they are publicly traded and sure organized racket money dwarves for a policy traded company. However, if we step back from the making money side, there are real sovereign reasons for wanting to explicitly and implicitly allow for bot networks to operate.

First and foremost is the destruction of organization of people. If you’ll recall, Reddit used to be an oasis of the internet. Growing up, I was always in awe of the intelligent and impactful discussions that would occur organically (something Hacker News can’t even rival). Now, it’s slop.

There is real value there that Reddit is offering the government. I’m sure other foreign governments (the globalists) also benefit from a weaker people. So I’d imagine it’s the kind of racket that is so high-up, secretive, and decentralized that there is no real culpability and everyone is aware (except the people).

This practice was perfected by gallowboob years ago.

He would spam a link/pic/post and monitor, if the post didn’t gain traction, he would delete and post again as to not trigger protections against the same link being posted.

He was a cancer on Reddit and I’m sure he still exists under different monikers. But now there are 100s of gallowboobs.

> He was a cancer on Reddit and I’m sure he still exists under different monikers. But now there are 100s of gallowboobs.

Yep, for example: If you mention the name "TurboStrider27" on /r/Games, your comment gets shadowbanned.

Holy hell!! The fact that this name still rings out to me years later really says something! And at one point /r/Games was the gaming subreddit for more informed people (compared to /r/gaming). And then one day somebody pointed out a guy named “TurboStrider27” was responsible for a large amount of slop posts. Lo-and-behold, a majority of posts did come from him.

I had no idea this was implicitly permitted (and even supported) but it makes sense if it’s been ongoing for so long. It’s no accident.

gallowboob in particular was an interesting case because he was very much a real person. and oh hell did a subreddit I mod know that way all too well

i think the guy had a like a keyword alert on his username because like one of my co-mods on a subreddit would talk about the guy and then we'd get reports for "It's targeted harassment against me" (which are reports that are sent to the admins) like a few hours later. much to the dismay of him, we had a chat with the admins later and it was like "as long as you're not saying to do vote manipulate or harass the guy it's fine."

i think a lot of it came from the fact that so like if you're modding a subreddit, a lot of people spend their time in the modqueue view rather than the comments so you see the targeted harassment reports on "xyz is a meanie head" and just click "remove" because it already is on the edge at best for most subreddits. this is how context gets lost. so people would see "unfavorable treatment" (not that it didn't happen, gallowboob's company's domain was soft-banned on reddit yet his subreddits had automod rules set to approve them) when if more people were as trigger happy on the report button a similar thing would happen

the admin problems with this are much worse because the comments tend to be looked at in isolation so saying "i'm gonna kill you", in isolation, looks without context pretty bad, but might be part of a joke chain or song meme that reddit likes to do every so often. take into account the fact that admins get whiny sometimes if your AEO removals are too high. then take into account the AEO guy's Tarot card reading and whether Mercury is in retrograde and you get a lot of mods who are a bit trigger happy, esp when people've gotten banned for approving stuff the AEO removed for dumb reasons

this somewhat led to a bit of an inflated ego with regards to reddit but eventually from what i see he left... at least under that username anyway.

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