Does Reddit have an astroturfing problem? What the data suggests
petervijeh.com
petervijeh.com
To give a simple example, one video game franchise subreddit bans any negative discussion on the most recent title. Over 5-10 years, this shielded them from negative feedback. But the franchise has tanked because core users weren't listened to, and they ended up making something nobody wanted.
Reddit's system rewards these low effort posts for some reason. Over time, the platform becomes less and less trustworthy until it becomes something like Quora.
The users themselves are killing it.
Reddit doesn't even make any attempt to control quality since user engagement numbers matter more than quality.
Reminds me of Quora which over optimized the site for engagement growth but eventually became completely useless for this reason.
https://web.archive.org/web/20140929012305/http://www.reddit...
https://web.archive.org/web/20140929073818/http://www.reddit...
https://web.archive.org/web/20140929232807/http://www.reddit...
No original OP posts are allowed, only URLs from the same old websites.
This post sounds like you are still disagreeing but nothing you've said points to another conclusion
This type of subreddit specifically is almost entirely useless since the advent of AI.
Now in 2026, even small niche subreddits are facebook / tiktok tier with low effort meme posts etc
Completely agree.
There's a few niche subs I hang out in but, for me, the standout in terms of quality decline is r/DIYUK. The difference between that sub in 2019/2020 vs today is stark.
It's pretty common to scroll through several pages of repetitive one-line "jokes" before getting to anything remotely resembling a real answer.
Mods seem relatively inactive and there are only 4 of them anyway, which is nowhere near enough to keep on top of the volume of posts and comments nowadays. Really it needs either a lot more mods, or some form of LLM-backed automation, to weed out the low effort comments.
It's become a bit of a wasteland in terms of a lot of the regular contributors who used to give good, well thought out answers, have tapped out. I complained about this the other week and got downvoted and accussed of "showboating" which, honestly, I'm not even sure what the commenter who said that meant in the context of the discussion that we were having.
It's a real shame because there aren't really any good UK-focussed DIY-oriented discussion forums any more: all the others degraded and became toxic, which is where r/DIYUK won, because it resisted that trend for longer. No more, sadly. DIYnot always stood out as a place that was more about battling egos than providing meaningful help and advice and, although r/DIYUK hasn't gone in quite that direction, it is sadly headed down an equally useless and destructive path quality-wise.
But mods can say they censored you because of low quality contribution to reddit. :)
I do agree that the karma system does not work. I was able to farm 77k karma in two years, after I created a new account there (the old account I had before for +14 years was forced to change the password, so I created a new account - and used EXACTLY the same password, to prove a point to reddit that they are incredibly stupid. Sadly, reddit never understood the problem, even though it should be obvious that, if your passwords are lost yet users retain the same password after being forced by reddit to change it, something in reddit's insinuation simply does not add up here.)
Dang is more or less what keeps HN from becoming Reddit.
This is called Algospeak and has infected a lot of people's everyday language. People say "unalive" instead of "kill" or "murder", because the internet has drilled into them that you have to use that word.
My memory is fuzzy, but I remember it getting pretty shallow and memetic since before the Digg diaspora in 2010. And I think it was the popularity of image posts that did it; it was better before image links became popular.
However, Slashdot was already highly memetic since the late nineties, and it was not image-based, so I may be wrong about the effect of pictures.
Plus at this point if you really want to ask what Reddit thinks ask an LLM, it'll tell you in painful detail without exposing you to that place. Just remember to check claims and sources (a good practice for human claims as well as LLM ones).
I'm not aware of a social media site that does it but I think that I'd very strongly prefer a site where I could view a transparent log of who voted for what and when and what moderator took what action and when and why and how that all factors into how a comment / post / thread is ranked on the feed at any particular moment than one that hides all that stuff.
Reproducible builds but for social media.
Less 'pay no attention to that man behind the curtain' and more 'Exactly what it says on the tin"
The more that I interact with moderators on social media the more I've come to realize that as much as they're burnt out from answering the same questions from not-bad actors over and over as they are dealing with organic bad actors or automated content generators and that a great deal of those questions stem from the opaque nature of the algorithm.
All too often I find that moderators on social media are exasperated and burnt out not just from the endless janitorial work but also from users reaching out to them for understanding about the opaque nature of their actions and the outcomes that they have in the system.
So a lot of moderators gravitate towards a 'don't rock the boat' sort of mentality and over time adopt this sort of mentality: https://youtu.be/hNuu9CpdjIo?t=56
IMHO we're well past the point where any sort of security by obscurity with regards to the algorithm prevents any sort of automated influence on social media and the negative impacts of this kind of moderating technique only causes more damage than it prevents / mitigates.
you can have neither or both but I dont see any way to have one without the other.
>The more that I interact with moderators on social media the more I've come to realize that as much as they're burnt out from answering the same questions from not-bad actors over and over
I'm mystified why this isnt a problem AI isnt applied to.
Their own rules forbid low effort posts:
"No off-topic comments, memes, low-effort comments or jokes"
I have never heard that term used before, prior to reading this thread...
All I know is that "low-effort comments" -- is going into my 2026 lexicon!
(Admittedly this comment, my comment, the words I have written, above -- is admittedly somewhat of a "low-effort comment" in and of itself(!) A low-effort comment about other low-effort comments (a "meta" low-effort comment, if you will!), but I digress... I guess at times "we all fall short of the glory of the highest of high effort comments"... :-) )
Anyway, "low-effort comment" is a great piece of terminology, isn't it? :-)
It's going into my 2026 lexicon...
It's not being first to the race, it's that some people are lazy and don't want to read "long" posts but will optimize for snappy quips that are more likely to be upvoted. This incentives some "karma whores" to make these posts instead of engaging with the topic more.
Tragedy? Low-effort memes
Someone in high esteem passes away unexpectedly? Low-effort memes
Slow descend into fascism? Low-effort memes
The worst thing for a forum is to let users punish comments they disagree with, you know, one way by fading out their comments until you cant read them.
Echo chambers have gotten stronger.
Before I added a bunch of subreddits to my blacklist that will never show up again in a search engine I had to make a new reddit account every four to six months.
(pet hate: it's perfectly OK to call your subreddit xyz_offficial, even when you are in no way officially affiliated with the game developer or publisher)
Pretty sure that's his day job.
As an example, I am well aware of how strict r/worldnews is moderated on IvP topics, so I am extra careful to be factual rather than simply making comments based on more general thoughts, like I do for other areas.
I have responded to some comments in the past by responding by quoting legal cases, news links I sourced my comment from, or from subject experts.
It doesn't matter how accurate or factually proven the comment is. If it's even slightly critical, it'll end up with votes of anywhere from -10 to -50 from all the down votes.
For other people's comments, anything negative that hasn't been down voted into oblivion will always have the "cross" icon next to them, meaning it's listed as "controversial", which is when it has a large number of down votes, plus up votes to balance it out.
Don't want to engage with Zionists, go to anime_titties, don't want to engage with Qatari propaganda, go to worldnews.
Israel has been allied with our nations ever since it was founded, the Qataris and other oil sheiks were a bunch of warlords and nomads a century ago.
r/sanfrancisco is quite negative on the current mayor Daniel Lurie and frequently expresses approval for Zohran Mamdani even though Lurie has an approval rate of 74% in SF [2] while Mamdani has a 69% favorability [3] in NYC largely because of the political skew of the sub.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49556546
[2]: https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/sf-mayor-lurie-...
[3]: https://sri.siena.edu/2026/09/23/siena-poll-of-likely-new-yo...
Shareholders want to get paid. CEO wants to get paid.
The primary KPI's are revenue and profit, customer satisfaction will only matter if people actively quit.
I started to get banned from subreddits after giving perfectly polite comments which happened to be contrary to popular opinion, so stopped posting on Reddit and only read it with an ad-blocking browser.
Don't give them content, don't give them your data and revenue. Reddit know full well that there should be an appeal process to user-mod nazi's. But these people obsessively post new content on their forums and so are protected.
In some case this is benign, like with advertisers and marketing, and in other cases it is much worse in which case there could be actual foreign enemy governments doing psyop campaigns on reddit.
Reddit isn't controlled by the company. Instead it is controlled by an army of anonymous nobodies who could have all sorts of bad motivations.
They got rid of him just because the owner of the subreddit was someone else who wasn't really using reddit any more but still could kick that mod.
I'm suspecting that is only because of behaviors learned from US on the internet. If not for that they wouldn't have thought of banning for it. It's not a topic that comes up often, but IRL negative views on gypsies are the norm in Europe.
I think it's important to understand that it's viewed as culture issue, not color-of-skin issue (that is something that can be changed, people of gypsy heritage that go to school and work are not considered gypsies for this) and so not getting filled in the category of "racism".
Now we could have a discussion on whether being poor is a choice or a consequence of societal inequality, but I think more people agree on racism here...
I said the exact same thing for like 20 years. Until I realized that this thought is utterly racist. Luckily, I was disgusted about myself and my environment where this is a normal thought, and improved, instead of doubling down.
You've just called a behavior based on a name of an ethnic group. You cannot be more racist than that.
Most often it is the mainstream society living in stationary houses describing people living in temporary encampments with a different culture.
There are exceptions though: I participate in some capacity in most of the feminist subreddits, and the divisions between different branches are pretty charged. One example "feminismuncensored" subreddit which I believe was created in reaction to the "feminism" subreddit's slant towards white liberal feminism (which has been getting better over the years), but seems to have attracted trans-exclusionary feminists due to the name, and the fact that trans-exclusionary feminist views are also not tolerated in most of the other larger feminist subreddits (for those who don't really pay attention to this, my use of "trans-exclusionary" rather than "gender-critical" is a signal of my own bias towards trans-inclusive feminism).
The /r/feminismuncensored moderators recently stickied a post clarifying that transphobic comments are not tolerated there, and as you can imagine it was heavily downvoted by people who (I think somewhat reasonably) assumed the name of the subreddit meant trans-exclusionary feminism would be tolerated. Comments supporting the moderators' decision there were heavily downvoted as well. So this is one of the (relatively rare IMO) cases where the subreddit appears to be frequented by people whose views are out of line with the moderators' ideas of acceptable discourse. In most other subreddits the moderator bias and community bias tend to be more closely aligned
I understand this is a fraught question, and I'm not trying to be snide or score points. Given the specifics of the post you're replying to, I think that's a germane thing to clarify here.
A good example is worldnews. For a long time I thought it was a pretty good source of, well, news. But at some point I started noticing that certain topics (cough Negativity about Israel cough) which got a decent amount of discussion were deleted as duplicates of posts that came in later and had 0 comments and could not be seen on hot/top/whatever.
Back to your topic, I think this is in large part due to the death of multiple forums and personal websites and the aggregation of everyone to like 4 platforms.
In the past, if you were banned or didn't like one forum, you could find another. Or maybe just post your thoughts on your own website/blog. But now nobody will see it unless it's on reddit, discord or YouTube.
I don't think we can get that back, but maybe a bluesky(-ish) forum/reddit alternative where you can chose who you interact/see posts and comments from would work well. It would take another collosal fuckup to get people to move and even then... Lemmy was alive during the API/third party apps thing and nobody really moved.
Such topics tend to naturally create opinionated flame wars, politics just being the most obvious example, but the subreddit mods often take a side even though the subreddit may advertise itself as the general hub for the topic.
I'm told that their mods tolerate left leaning hate speech much more than right leaning counterpart so unaware visitors think current left leaning government is beloved by a great majority and that it has been for years.
But they told me that last election ended very tight, something like 49/51% and I'm told current imminent election is at similar 50/50 split.
Same probably happened with German election.
No. I'm not nasty or disrespectful. I just disagree and give the reasons why.
I try to be helpful but I no longer care. I only glance at the titles in case something new shows up. I don't want to sound like I'm bragging but, as I said, I'm an expert in one area and experienced in the other and reddit users lose that. I know others feel the same way and never go there. I wish I wouldn't.
Tried to clear a confusion between DDR5 / LPDDR5 / DIMM standards and cited the relevant JEDEC standards with specific quotes? Get downvoted, all of arguments ignored and replied with more false information.
Tried to argue that, even if given a charitable interpretation, some units of measurement could be confused if not written correctly (on a conversation where such confusion was clearly happening already)? Downvoted.
Explain the difference between latency and throughput? Explain that O(1) ⊂ O(n)?
Reddit is full of idiots who are too confident about things they don't understand and aren't humble enough to admit they're wrong, so they just insist and I just don't care anymore.
And let's not even get started about having nuance and a balance point of view in politics.
This is just the nefarious nature of karma-based systems. It also applies here. I find reddit's shadow banning/shadow hiding especially offensive. (Just think for a moment how utterly disgusting it is that such a feature was intentionally designed, implemented, and is now maintained.)
Not downvoting legitimate (but unpopular) comments is protected by the various rule systems (reddiquette, HN guidelines), but of course rule adherence is (very) low (especially on reddit).
> I wish I wouldn't.
Me too. And here as well.
I recently got banned from subreddit A1 because I commented in subreddit A2 without knowing the ongoing bloodfeud where A1 moderators didn't find the A2 moderators strict enough. I'm a tourist to the topic "A" all together and barely understood the lore of the topic. Let alone the cultural eggshells of following a search result into the wrong subreddit.
Let us see if the pedophiles control this site too. Bookmark this and then check back later to see if it was flagged and removed.
It’s like discovering that katy perry is a 4chan mod that deletes tayposts.
> Young accounts, or accounts with histories that are hidden or wiped.
Nope, this is no longer an indicator of a bot account. Many that I've looked into will have active posts to local town/region subreddits (often times multiple!) and different sports subreddits, sometimes getting unusually high amounts of karma in them (which suggests a network).
Turing test is looong dead, so no reason to assume the small fractions of a cent to make comments, to get a reasonable history, isn't being taken advantage of.
https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib-instances/blob/main/ins...
Save yourself some trouble, forcing you to sign in is your browsing data stored in cookies. Incognito/private should allow you to browse without being logged in..
Can't post honest questions anymore without posting obviously phony pandering banter first to increase your karma. What's worse, it promotes the bad behaviors the bots are actually good it.
Bring back forums.
But LLM's have completely and utterly destroyed Reddit. To the point of it feels like it is 75% FAKE conversations and/or astroturfed with only a FEW real people commenting anymore. Plus the LLM's have gotten so much better I catch myself sometimes wondering if a certain comment is from a real person or not. Just too much mental energy required for Reddit now to the point of I hardly go there anymore for anything other specific technical questions.
It is sad because it used to be a wealth of knowledge and community. All of /r/askreddit is just bot started ragebait questions, karma-farming or stupid hypotheticals now. /r/popular is just trashy. Constantly I notice videos that are sometimes 7-10+ years old getting reposted again like they are new, just to get rage conversation started again.
You cannot search for ANY product recommendations anymore. Fake "Hey I tried this brand and it was game-changing". No subreddit is safe. Look at /r/supplements now, it is full of those type comments to innocent topic starting questions that are also probably fake. Off topic stuff such as "xxx brand Beef liver supplement changing my life" when someone asks what brand of multivitamin others prefer.
Reddit used to have a few real cesspool subreddits one could avoid, but now I consider the whole site one. You can't even browse Reddit anymore without being blocked to download their app to continue. Old-Reddit now requires a login. Ads make it unreadable without a blocker.
Ugh. Just the worst of the internet all on display at Reddit now.
Maybe the difference is the post/comments framing? Rather than an opening post with sequential follow-up replies? Maybe something about voting? Maybe it's all the bolt-on features?
Contrast this to Reddit: its search and web searches instantly surface subreddits and one account gets you access to the majority of the site. Friction is nearly nonexistent.
I think forums were also less prone to power-tripping moderation. It was still a problem, but there’s not but so big-headed somebody can get about being a mod for some backwoods niche topic forum that will never get all that big.
Finally, some of it is owed to how forums were dominant during a time when the internet was primarily populated by the sorts of people who owned computers then: academics, nerds, and open-minded early adopters. The dynamic was just different. It’s also the part that’d be most difficult to reproduce today.
Even upvotes can be an issue. Oh, you wrote your comment the day after the post went up? Too late! Nobody's looking anymore, no upvotes for you. No replies either. You feel your effort has reached nobody and you have wasted your time, so you stop bothering to put in effort.
I think the generality of it pushes topics into "old and inactive" way too fast.
Also, reddit's moderation is terrible. Just look at how long hate subreddits have tended to last even after they started hitting r/all regularly. People who are worth talking to don't tend to hang out anywhere that starts to feel like little nazi camp. Subreddits are separated to an extent, which does help, but that only goes so far.
I think the visual design also discourages longer "wall of text" responses in a way that traditional forums often don't. Lots of things (especially anything nuanced) can't be said in a tweet.
I do think the size that comes from centralization is part of it too. "Communities" feel less community, and posts/discussions are abandoned too fast and almost never revisited (exceptions are posts that come up as the #1 google search result for a tech problem).
The default and r/all subreddits are the worst by miles, though.
But city subreddits and any kind of recommendation thread have been much shittier lately because of the bots and the chatgpt copypasters.
Little forums also have a lot more character in their visual design than reddit, and they tend to allow more customization for individual users too. It's easier to recognize a person behind a regular commenter if they have a big pfp image or a goofy signature.
Smaller communities. You generally knew what kind of community you were participating in. Focused discussion. A forum was usually about a specific subject, rather than one account participating in dozens of completely unrelated communities.
Your identity was more compartmentalized. What you said on a linux forum didn't necessarily follow you into a motorcycle community.
Moderation had different incentives. If you ran a forum, you needed people to actually want to come back. Moderation that became too heavy-handed could kill the community you were trying to maintain.
Reddit essentially turned the forum model into one enormous site with thousands of sections, sounds great but broke more than it fixed.
Your Reddit account becomes a single identity spanning everything you do. Someone can look through your activity in completely unrelated subreddits, form an opinion about you based on that, and potentially use something you said somewhere else against you... no matter what the culture/norms/rules were of the other community.
A traditional forum depended on its community surviving. On Reddit, a subreddit can become extremely valuable simply because it occupies a desirable name and has accumulated a large user base. The underlying platform is doing most of the work of bringing people there. The moderator can be "all powerful" and heavy handed because they know rarely do competing subreddits actually work out.
If you don’t like r/cars what are you gonna make to compete with it? r/cars2?
Votes and karma. The concept of karma isn't bad but Reddit's implementation is bad. HN has a similar problem. There's only up and down votes with no context.
Why was a post upvoted or downvoted? Did people find it funny or informative? Did it correct the original link or a parent post? No fucking clue. Just scalar value that goes up and down. Then you get bad proxies for context with vote ratios (controversial etc).
Slashdot's voting system isn't perfect but much better. Instead of some scalar value a post is moderated with some sort of context (Interesting, Informative, etc). Voting is also distributed among users and limited. If you get moderator points you're limited in how many you get and you can't post to a thread you've moderated. Meta moderation also helps to correct for overzealous/reactionary moderation.
The context is useful because you get an idea of why something was moderated as it was. The limited number and random distribution of moderation points helps inspire actual moderation. You either downvote obviously trolling/bad faith posts or upvote actually constructive posts. No one wastes their mod points on memes and "me too" posts. Drive by memes and short knee jerk replies just wallow in the Score: 1 area most users quickly learn to filter out. They're not punished but also not rewarded.
Giving everyone unlimited mod points devolves a site into gaming karma. Trolls enjoy seeing how low their karma can get while karma whores will post whatever gets upvotes rather than something constructive. Karma is a bad proxy for constructive contributions to the community.
Two things.
1. Voting: It changes the incentives for posting a comment. It becomes a popularity contest where people go after easy points by posting low quality but popular comments, rather than focusing on quality discussion. Similarly, quality posts are suppressed if they are unpopular. This behavior is killing what's left of this site too, but that's a discussion for another time.
Ordering posts chronologically removes this manipulation. Real life discussions are not threaded, and aren't voted upon.
2. Forums required investment by parties sufficiently dedicated to a topic: you need hosting, administration; this costs money. Reddit on the other hand inverts the equation. It incentivizes the worst of the worst people on the Internet (penniless losers with unlimited free time) to usurp power and build fiefdoms. In a way Reddit exploits them because they do their dirty work for free. This is who ends up controlling subreddits.
- threads are linear
You post something to a five year old discussion, everyone in the forum notices.
- no voting
Doesn't matter whether your opinion is controversial or not, it is presented as just as valid as all other opinions and thus is worth engaging with, fostering debate.
- smaller communities
It is actually possible to read every post made to the forum and know every member.
- niche interest as the main driver of everything
Everyone is aligned on at least something and politics don't pervade everything.
- moderation can still kill everything
If you got a mod willing to remove posts or ban users for differences of opinion (sexist, racist, homophobe, transphobe, islamophobe, etc. etc) then everything dies either way.
Here's an active and good privacy forum: https://discuss.privacyguides.net
Here's an active and good private OS forum where privacy is discussed along with Android apps and the OS, ofc: https://discuss.grapheneos.org
I guess you get what you put into it in terms of community.
I used to be more interested in succulents. It's a shame mine have to stay under grow lights to not stretch out. It would be cool to have them scattered around...
I could see succulents benefiting from a Discourse forum, but Reddit likely does the job pretty well with photo sharing. The nice thing about Discourse is, I feel like threads are more permanent.
A forum I would want is a modern cooking forum for homecooks with a slight focus on science. Although I have not actually searched for one. It comes up on HN from time to time.
Still, I’ve had a $50 set of plants die because I uh… poured water on it. Took me a long time to figure out what happened there.
Along a similar vein, a mycology forum would likely be of incredible help even to scientists!
A science-oriented cooking forum could be great, so long as it stays closer to Alton brown-tier science, imo!
But at the end of the day, people don’t often seek these out. That’s kind of the magic of reddit. You go for basketball and news updates, and you end up in a forum dedicated to hating on Uncle Joe from Willy Wonka. Nobody would ever seek that tiny forum out, but it can survive by embedding with more useful forums.
Why so low?
I think it is higher than 99%
> Can't post honest questions anymore without posting obviously phony pandering banter first to increase your karma
Or just buy a "pre aged" account. They're only a few cents each if you buy them in bulk.
How are/were they better? The gate keeping started with the registration and the mods on reddit learned from those on forums. Those are probably the same people.
I mod two small subreddits and the minimum karma "settings" are there so you can have a second look. You still approve them if they act like normal commentators.
Maybe you should try modding one too to get a clear picture and not just the memes about big subs.
Before people started using age limits on accounts, you had more bots and trolls on Reddit.
Forums had similar barriers as well, with general or low stakes sections you needed to develop age or standing within before you could post on other topics.
“Worse” isn’t a function of behaviors bots can do. There is no activity that dedication cannot make a bot cannot replicate.
It used to be that you could make out patterns in bot behavior to figure out which accounts were authentic and which were not.
With LLMs, those fingerprints are gone. They post in communities and behave in manners that are indistinguishable from normal users.
Forums worked because they were in an era that has long since past.
I have a 15+ year old account that has a hidden history because far too many times someone dug through my comments, took something out of context, and pivoted to that instead of the actual conversation.
My take is that people should respond to the comment not the commenter.
It doesn't help that afaik there are no search engines which allow you to search by links (aka the now-broken "links:" operator on google), which would allow you to search "links:reddit.com/user/xxxxx site:reddit.com" and find all comments by that user, since the username portion of their comment would have a profile link
They're all archived and searchable off-site too. Even deleted and removed comments.
> Young accounts, or accounts with histories that are hidden or wiped.
DDG search "buy pre-aged reddit accounts" and you will find all of these. You can even search reddit for this.
The author of the article has no fucking idea what they are talking about. Buying "comments" is for chumps.
> I score it this way because an account that keeps bringing up the same brand is the product the vendors above are selling.
Or man, I just like my knife: It's older than my kid, and I've never had to do anything but hone it, and it'll still cut a piece of paper or a tomato no sweat. The next comment will be someone asking what brand of knife it is.
at least Eternal September was a human invasion.
it is trivial now to create synthetic multi-platform personas that generate real looking post histories at unlimited scale. the baseline assumption should be that everything on the internet is fake until proven otherwise.
That's in part why the enforcement of the "no reposts" rules and their conditional counterparts is so selective, having the ability to allow/deny these on increasingly large subreddits effectively amounts to running a money printer as you can then pick and choose who is allowed to karma farm, or direct userbases to their hustle culture bullshit reselling pokemon cards, watches, shoes, or bots to do this, etc.
This is also why there is often so much frankly insane drama over moderators getting catfished, outed as pervs/creeps, etc especially after a genuine subreddit with solid original content gets "too popular".
There are also weird second order effects, especially in places like popular subreddits for games, where selectively allowing what complaints actually make it to the top of the sub are utilized by those who make disgusting amounts of money from botting/farming the game to sell in game items or currency for real money, to create what looks like a genuine public outcry for balance changes or features that seem fun/good on paper but at the end of the day only exist to make it easier for them to get more items to sell. This practice has roots predating reddit, back when everything was still forums and the RMT markets for titles like Diablo 2 were in their infancy. Earlier this year an RMT account for Path of Exile was finally banned, you can find videos where people go through archives of what they had on hand when it happened and tally up prices, no bullshit millions of dollars in total value.
I learned a lot of this firsthand by getting involved in a city subreddit when I first moved out on my own, some people found out I could code well enough and tried to pay me a lot of money to assist them in creating these kinds of farms/influence operations. I obviously declined, this is all so fucking stupid! A few of them flew too close to the sun and made millions of dollars through ad programs on places like facebook, used what they could to pay off their college loans, buy a nice car, and then lost their asses in court and declared bankruptcy after giving most of it back.
Maybe just post your human outline and the data, where the data processing and viz is AI assisted if you like.
The synthetic prose is not a value-add over your outline. It takes time to read, and reduces the bit-rate over your intentions.
OP there isn't a word length requirement on blog posts. You put all the information you learned into your instructions for the LLM. Just post that.
> I wanted to know whether the knife subreddits I read, and scrape for New
Knife Day, show any sign of that. Not a hunch about one suspicious comment,
but something I could count and someone else could recount.
> The practical check is the one the data endorses
The language is so obfuscated that the crude draft would really be better than this. I've just realized that one of the telltale signs of LLMs is: inventing a new terminology like here - tail accounts, never giving a direct definition what it really is, and then going with it, like it's obvious.
This is the 7th submission on HN in the last week which has entered my RSS feed, which has AI-tell slop right in the title. It's really discouraging.
I audibly went "ah!", as if in pain from a muscle twinge and immediately came back to the thread to find this comment.
Ain't no way I'm gonna spend my free time reading Claude-isms.
This I think leads to a sort of toupee fallacy - where because you can spot the really bad examples you feel confident that you can identify the much better, more subtle examples. If an account which has only made 50 comments (all of which are very generic) makes 20 comments in a single month explicitly recommending ImageGeneratorDeluxeProMax then sure, you can guess they might not be legit. But if an account runs for a longer period of time and makes a lot more general organic contributions then if 1 in 500 of their comments are in favour of a particular product then it's harder to say.
I think ultimately account age is the only thing that will be difficult to replicate at scale. I know people buy older accounts but there is still a fundamental difficulty in obtaining them in sufficient numbers. And yes, obviously that will mean disregarding the many millions of legitimate accounts that are under (say) 2 or 3 years old. There is also no easy way of hiding accounts under a certain age when searching Reddit via Google.
By allowing uses to hide user profiles Reddit has also made detecting potentially bad actors that little bit more difficult. And from experience it feels like a large proportion of accounts now have hidden post histories. (It might also be the default for new accounts, I'm not sure).
I've made recommendations a lot more often than that back when I used reddit just through being active in a specific niche-ish subreddit and regularly answering questions with answers that end up saying 'buy [well-known good product that solves this exact problem you want solved]'. Then again, my account was several years old by that point, and I was recommending probably 4-5~ different products depending on the question, all from different sellers, not to mention that I'd answer all kinds of different questions, building goodwill and recognition, so accusing me of being a bot (or just a human who has a financial interest in promoting certain products) probably wouldn't do much, but if you want assume ill-will, it'd be really hard to truly disprove that kind of accusation.
There's an additional problem that if an increasing number of people are getting their search results via AI summaries, the AI fetch bot is obviously including all this astroturfing.
Everyone understands that pretty girl on instagram who has 300,000 followers is getting paid to show that make up in her stories, why on earth would you think the guy with 300,000 karma posting his fits on /r/malefashionadvice isn't getting the same?
Also specifically with Reddit they have allowed hiding comment history which makes it even harder, I imagine they did this for boosting ad business
There are much better platforms to spend your effort on like X. X requires many users to purchase a subscription account and thus acts as sort of a litmus test (people who can afford low amount of money per month).
That was a good punchline!
Such a terrible change, and it's apparently the default for new users. I have no way to check if the person I'm about to spend 3 minutes typing a reply to is just bleep-bloop.
Unfortunately, what you state is also true and it is now harder to avoid replying to bots, obvious shills, or trolls.
this type of behavior just comes from a deep place of misery and anger
the amount of time someone spends online is directly related to their socioeconomic status
someone with a rich vibrant and wholesome life with economic comforts to do travelling and hobbies dont have time to go through somebodys comment history and spend time judging and trying to instigate others
someone without those things are going to be online all day.
Unless you delete before scrapers get it, it's stored on multiple databases.
I've stopped engaging on HN a lot because of the characteristic change I notice especially since 2020.
IMO it is a net negative.
10 years ago redditors took some pride in transparency, you were able to check who you were talking to based on their profile (unlike boards like 4chan). Now it's auto-generated user names with hidden everything. Might as well get rid of unique names and profiles at all and call everyone anon.
Agreed. Hiding history has become a negative signal or, really since it's so common to hide, open history is a positive signal.
There used to be bots that summarized an account's posts. One, I think it was usersimulator, was particularly amusing as it ran a markov chain over the account and generated a fresh post in the style of that user. Quite telling.
I still use reddit but I tag accounts using RES and sometimes see the same bad apples turn up in other subreddits.
It's a little unfortunate that when marketers see something that is resistant to commercialization they decide to become even bigger liars instead of letting someone tell them "no".
When I see 2-weeks old account "Incendiary-Leg-8592" responding to a post by another weeks old user "Pivotal-Kitchen-0498", I have a hard time believing they are humans behind them.
It’s actually easier for astroturfers to pick non-autogenerated names when they create accounts because they won’t feel any pressure to put much thought into it.
I would also bet that the vast majority of human users don’t bother to pick their own name because they don’t initially intend to post, they’re just creating an account because that’s all but required just to even read Reddit these days. Some fraction of them might later be motivated to comment, but by that time the account already exists.
Also the software / programming subs are just spam hell now.
"i got tired of x so i built y" is my entire feed. none of my niches are safe. heartbreaking
Periodically an account shows up promoting something asinine and it sticks out like a sore thumb.
Word-Word-#### have become the norm ever since they've been pushing mobile users to use reddit. They also are a good source of questionable users.
Assuming you do indeed still use "old" reddit, the next time you see such a comment, open their account page in a private window (or any browser that isn't logged in). They might look different to themselves and most others.
And on new reddit you can see user names and display names even when accounts have their post/comment history hidden.
One thing I found out is that normies really don't care about their usernames. They fundamentally don't understand the need for pseudonymity on the internet, so they are okay with whatever the website assigns to them.
It's just a little bit of extra friction to them to start sharing their opinions on the site.
An article talking about astroturfing but so tone deaf as to not even rewrite its ai generated content to be human readable.
It truly feels like the dead internet.
EDIT: oh, hang on, I read some other comments, and it turns out there's an AI disclaimer - and, now I check again, it's true! There is! Well, fair enough then, but I think this disclaimer should come literally right at the start
There is less than zero effort on this one. I don't even think the author read the output himself.
I strongly believe that there's a lot of paid product placement and paid political talking points on Reddit, so it's actually remarkable that this (LLM-generated) article fails to find it. I suspect it's just bad design.
If you're already spending money on tokens, there's a very simple experiment you could do instead: just pay one of these companies to position a made-up product and see what they do.
at this point astroturfing is a given... corporations do it, governments do it, individuals do it... anonymous content in aggregate can not be relied on
I don't have good suggestions on what would improve the design while staying with the general approach, but I imagine reporting a "likely not significant" could have at least be improved to a "proven to be not significant" null result by adding the "obvious" control group. Just check how "unlikely" mentions of common memes and catchphrases compare to those brands. Are there non-brand mentions that are distributed similar to the brand mentions, showcasing that these numbers really do not mean much either way?
Whenever somebody was talking about rolled oats, without fail, somebody would chime in that Kölln brand rolled outs were strictly superior and they would gladly pay the 4x markup for them.
It is hilarious because rolled outs are probably one of the most fungible goods out there. Also the comments eventually just... stopped.
Human perception is weird like that so even identical oats may taste better if the packaging is different, and also it might have been a memetic thing, but I am still somewhat convinced that it was a marketing campaign.
* Those accounts naming one brand almost every time they name any. * Thin accounts: few comments, low scores, no real standing in the subreddit. * Young accounts, or accounts with histories that are hidden or wiped. * Links to a store or an affiliate page.
For product reviews, I've been using GearLab (https://www.techgearlab.com/) for years with pretty reliable results. I have no affiliation with them.
Why would you assume any website is immune to this problem of bots and fake or paid reviews? Bots are so cheap now and smart enough to pass as realistic humans.
Even with good intentions, money runs out eventually (they say no ads and no sponsored content) and someone with deep pockets will exploit this.
Eventually everyone will just have to implement the foolproof solution of putting in the rules that saying that their website has a problem is "a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills" and be done with it.
I understand how they operate (it's in the middle of their main page) but that actually makes it more difficult for them. The site commits to test thousands of products each year and they don't do sponsored content, free samples, or ads.
They're walking on a beaten path, see Rtings [0] (even the methodology and visual style, which is a good thing). Everyone eventually needs to look for alternative revenue streams to support themselves especially when the competition is fierce and doesn't always play fair. Affiliate link revenue via Amazon.com is not a reliable long term financing strategy for a review website which has to constantly purchase new stuff and pay qualified reviewers.
Most people search the local market for the product and buy the best deal. It doesn't need to be Amazon.com and in many cases, it can't.
[0] https://www.rtings.com/company/revamping-our-membership-prog...
> Wirecutter is a cash cow for the Times
Wikipedia says the Wirecutter implemented a metered paywall a few years ago as additional source of financing. With the weight of the Times behind them they branched into other areas like podcasts and partnerships with countless other sites. This fits well into what I said in my earlier comment. Running this kind of business is hard and someone with deeper pockets will find an interest in it.
Just a few years after founding and shortly before selling to the Times for 1 year's worth of revenue, Wirecutter trialed a deal with Amazon for sponsored posts, along with exploring other revenue streams [2] like kickbacks.
> if you can keep people's trust
Trustworthiness and money don't always go hand in hand. Facebook is a cash cow and keeps people's trust as they keep coming back. Would you call it a trusted source of information? I remember the pendulum swinging against Wirecutter shortly after the sale. And plenty of reports since [1][2].
Rtings is the authoritative source for reviewing anything with a screen and they struggled financially, having to implement a subscription model.
And at the end of the day, taking Wirecutter as an indisputably trustworthy authority in consumer reviews, anyone else on the market has to compete with them with 2 possible options when reviews go head to head: agree and just be an echo, or contradict and go against the indisputably trustworthy authority. Talk about being between a rock and a hard place.
Maybe I'm, too cynical but the rug has been pulled from under me too many times to count by things that started out trustworthy than found the need or just the allure of money. With the internet only becoming more trustworthy over these past years I'm sure I have no reason to worry, right?
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/08/wirec...
[2] https://www.xdesk.com/wirecutter-standing-desk-review-pay-to...
1. Wirecutter has to review everything. GearLab is more limited; they steer clear of non-technical clothing and their tech arm doesn't even really do camera reviews. They obviously know to avoid categories where there are established review sites that most buyers are loyal to. If Wirecutter misses a category, people will complain - that's the curse of being the "everything" site. Rtings has a similar issue.
2. Wirecutter reviewers work for the Times and are unionized; GearLab hires freelancers.
3. The Times is relying on Wirecutter (alongside Games) to prop up their journalism, which is the spiritual core of their business, and the only part that clearly contributes something to society, but struggles to make money on its own. Putting Wirecutter behind the NYT paywall makes people more likely to sign up for a NYT subscription. GearLab isn't paying for any journalists' pensions.
Wirecutter affiliate links make the Times something like $60-70 million per quarter [1].
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/06/business/media/new-york-t...
No Ads, No Freebies, No Promotion
We refuse to accept any manufacturer's free evaluation units, and we do not accept any paid endorsements. Our focus is strictly on creating content for the benefit of our readers, and we align our business model to focus on our reader's interests.
> When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission, which helps support our testing.
That’s what the parent comment was referring to
That's an interesting development. I was under the impression that outside of larger retailers, affiliate codes weren't as common.
I'm curious then why did techgearlab not choose to review the matic which is certainly a new interesting player in the robot vaccuum game. I'll have to reach out!
For the minority of products that are only sold directly by the manufacturer (which includes Matic), yes, I think it would be very unusual not to have an affiliate program. Matic even has a crappy one for consumers. For one thing, YouTubers, who keep absolutely no distance between business and editorial, aren’t gonna talk about your product unless they can put an affiliate link in the description. Sometimes manufacturers will use something like Impact, other times a publisher will need to reach out directly.
I pay for Consumer Reports, since you actually need a paid subscription to access the data, which makes sense structurally. I don't really know if the reviews are any good, though I've been relatively happy with it. I also paid a subscription for an independent supplement testing lab, but I forget what it's called at the moment.
Yes, they work on an affiliated model. From their About[0] page:
How We Make Money
GearLab is a free service that is entirely reader-supported. We select and review products objectively and independently. We only make money when you click on our affiliate links and buy products we've reviewed, which helps support our testing work.
If you click on a retailer's link on our site and make any purchase, the retailer will contribute a portion of the sale to help support this site. It won't cost you anything extra, and it's a simple way to help us fund our gear reviews. Thanks for your support of our work!
Amazon nowadays is such a crapshoot. A link to a product isn’t reliable. The price could be different than what the review stated, and the link might be for an listing that shows as out of stock. I think GearLab tries to fix this by giving you a link to search results on Amazon instead, but in some ways that’s worse. In the couple of links I tried the reviewed product wasn’t the top result so now it’s up to you to decide which of the links is the real one.
That loses some of the value prop for me because part of what I want from a service like this is to give me a link to a legit product listing. That’s not GearLab’s fault, Amazon makes that very difficult, but it still reduces the utility for me. That said it’s better than nothing which just points to the sad state of affairs in e-commerce today.
Edit: it looks like at least some of their links take you directly to the product page. Not sure why some of them take you to a search results page instead, but my guess is it’s an issue with expiring links.
Free Documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpvcc9C8SbM
An id-with-options-for-anonymity solution would go a long way but no one is remotely interested in that because it would just crater all these companies valuations if you figured out 60k subscribers were actually 45k bots, and 80% comments were automated agentic replies.
I had launched almost 10 years ago a campaign in indiegogo and immediately got spammed with people selling marketing campaigns, I launched a few days ago one in gamefound and the same happened. Without it, or you investing on your own marketing campaigns it's just impossible to get any traction of sorts, unless you have a network of contacts that themselves can reach organically other people, and the same for other things, like bootstrapping an online social platform. It's almost as if it's a "cost of doing business".
Most of these marketers themselves have automated funnels, now all using agents, there's a lot of tell-tales on the messages you receive and then on the follow ups too - sometimes to the point that the messages just miss completely things you made clear just on the previous message and just follow a funnel to get you through the door. At a certain threshold or when told explicitly sometimes a human goes into the loop, but 2 messages in it's like they reset back to factory defaults...
Why doesn't Reddit make sure that shilling is disallowed by their ToS, and then sue these companies and all their customers?
Please name one
Genuinely asking
I try to go to manufacturers own online store if they have one. Or a local retailer. Or a specialty online seller. Or Walmart but they have third party sellers too so you have to avoid those.
Just like scam ads for Google and Facebook.
I've seen cases where the admins delete comments that talk about the issue
It makes it hard to see what's a bot and what's a legitimate account.
I know US people who do this for a living
A few years back a bunch of influencers were fined for doing just that.
Their main activities were click botting and general social media marketing (day job was in SMM analytics).
But if you're already there with the automation for thousands of accounts and the knowledge of what an account looks like why not also put some to ripen for 9 bucks a comment :)
Also, shill accounts prove to advertisers that the platform works to make money. That’s the whole reason Reddit exists.
True, but what if a third party existed to measure and compare other metrics that users would actually care about across popular platforms?
reddit wants engagement numbers to grow either way, so that disincentivizes it further
Like, Reddit may know that Bazzly is selling fake comments, which violates Reddit's ToS. How many comments can they prove are tied to Bazzly? How much does an astro-turfed comment financially harm Reddit, and can they convince a jury of that?
Instead, most companies will aggressively shut down the bot networks, if they can identify them, and hope that the astro-turfers focus on other platforms, and/or make it more financially challenging to do it successfully on theirs.
Is it because Reddit as a business is just generally a bad idea dependent on the free labor of mods?
There's no standard of professionalism or repercussion for being a terrible moderator, most of them are anon socially-weird outcasts with a chip on their shoulder.
When you're paying someone real money to be a moderator they tend to do a good job because they want to continue receiving that payment. The reward for a Reddit moderator is instead to feel like you're important and powerful, and that you can punish people you disagree with.
It also means that their power can generally be easily bought, because again, there's no repercussions for manipulating the board. Reddits incentives are entirely broken.
One of the modern issues is that once new competitors enter the market, their funders are publicized to stoke the mob's torches. When Digg was making its comeback last year, I remember seeing one about how it had funding from right wing organizations to incite left wing users to abandon it. This was also why news about George Soros buying Hot Ones made some headlines for a while.
The second a "public forum" starts gaining traction, people immediately start talking about the underlining "psyop" of the content that gets shared. But like... yeah, not everyone agrees on everything. I think that's why you DO sort of need a figurehead to be like "this is what I'm fine with my users talking about". They're immediately chastised as heartless lizard people (Zuck with Facebook), fascist (Musk with Twitter), or whatever "the Reddit mob" thinks of Huffman, but like... that's EVERY platform. Have you seen what WoW players think about Blizzard? Or how Discord's mascot is currently getting treated? 4chan was never good and whatnot.
People want a 'neutral' platform, but what they mean is a neutral platform where everything fits their personal ideologies, with an microcosm of "stupid" users that larp on the site (remember r/DogFort?). The issue, as has always been the case, is that once you have a group, someone realizes there's value in leading it. Then it becomes a textbook case of the Simple Sabotage Field Manual, but for convincing the users to buy products, watch films, and engage in specific activities that align with a demographic to reinforce beliefs.
Anyway, back to remembering to GET OFF THE INTERNET and continue sharing my stupid little fairy tale.
But I noticed Reddit now showing me an ad for a site that seems to indicate it scrapes Reddit for local contractor reviews..
https://arctic-shift.photon-reddit.com/search
I'm sure reddit will kill it at some point like they did Reveddit and Unddit, but it works for now.
The sub reddit may have been created for a specific purpose and the narrative can be controlled. Post a popular opinion that is contrary to the agenda and you will be banned by the mods. Also bots/state employees that will downvote you with enough accounts that your comment will be buried in 20+ downvotes and never be shown.
You have to care about the subject enough to start your own sub reddit or forum and maintain it and nurture it, which mostly won't happen.
There was recent news that not just X but also Meta, TikTok and more are banning the new Elon documentary from posting adverts which shows how coordinated and controlled things are:
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/elon-musk...
It was more fun when it was an incorrect human.
I do it locally to nudge political discourse. Doesn't take much to sway a lot of people.
I'm glad I agree with what I'm doing because its effectiveness is terrifying.
Funnily enough, Reddit got so bad that I stopped appending "reddit" to my queries and I often find myself appending "hackernews" instead (or more commonly, I ask the LLM to find HN discussions on the topic), just because the signal is much higher.
It also makes me think about how much of HN might be astroturfing. Less than reddit for sure, but certainly not 0%.
We are in the age of the replicant now.
> If the tail shows up in buying threads only because it posts a lot, random reassignment says it should write about 7.9% of the brand mentions there, and almost always between 6.3% and 10.1%. It wrote 11.3%.
Is it just me or is this just a block of painfully hard to parse text? This is core to the author’s analysis.
Rather than pasting the analysis from Claude, the author should just explain it themselves. Just the core of their analysis. It doesn’t have to be 2000 words. Put an AI;DR at the top and give us the core of your argument. I would take a paragraph from a human any day over an essay from Claude.
Just look at how often Bill Gates gets glazing articles posted which receive suspicious rankings. None of the comments mention the Epstein-sized elephants in the room.
Politics is even worse, and it's useless as a platform for taking political temperature. Numerous companies openly admit to this activity and Reddit has never commented on this practice.
No serious person would ever suggest using it to take the "political temperature" of society at large. It's about as useful as Nextdoor for that.
MRAs were a minority of a minority of users; even when the site was mostly white and Asian men talking about computer science, it was overwhelmingly liberal. There are far more who fit into the MRA category now but those have come about due to the cultural trend towards sexual doomerism among Gen Z men, who inherited it from millennial incels (most of whom fled the site around the time of Ellen Pao’s tenure). MRAs were mostly Gen X and elder millennials.
> I assume the actual political makeup of the user base hasn't changed that much in that time
Why? The site used to have a minority of right-leaning users (/r/conservative, /r/anarcho_capitalism, /r/DebateFascism, /r/TheDonald, /r/altright, /r/darkenlightenment, /r/politicalcompassmemes, etc.). All of these communities are completely marginal now; half of them were outright banned from the site. Reddit doesn’t have a positive reputation among people who are even moderately conservative because of how heavy-handed the moderation is. It has always had this reputation, but there was a brief time from around 2014 to around 2017 when conservatives could actually engage with parts of it in a way that they just don’t bother to do anymore.
What are some good counter measure, besides ban hammer?
Then, textual analysis to detect when they’re promoting something specific. This is not hard to detect across the set of all active posters.
I've also heard it happens in some games as well, but either way, the one I can say for certain is crypto.
I honestly thought this was a nag asking me to turn off my ad blocker!
> Why do this? Well, it's likely this is done as a means of circumnavigating some subreddits filters to ban mentioning of gambling. The word Stake has likely been filtered out of some subs or mentions of gambling outright banned, and this is a way around it. I noticed too when you utilize Ctrl + F, you cannot find the word "Stake" when searching for it on these posts, due to how these figures are considered different.
I saw the comment you linked a while ago and looked for some of the phrases on Google and turned up five or six hits before getting bored; there were a lot more in the search results that I never checked. This was also around the time that Kick was showing up everywhere because they had been paying for their clips to appear on other sites.
The quality is so low, of submission, discourse, and people.
I can take only a few minutes of scrolling through naively instructive subcomments "fun fact, water is actually wet", or needless authority seeking "as an AuDHD can confirm", the prepending of "super" to everything "this is super not good", it's like reading pure cliche, adding bots in can only improve it, ideally by precipitating it's demise.
"let's call it...accelerationism"
I don't understand why so many people and companies feel the need to just spam reviews, SEO and questionable ads. It's like almost no one has the idea that may we start with a good product, then we'll tell people about it. It's always a question of what you can have produced cheaply in China and how do we then trick people into buying it.
As it stand you can pretty much assume that if it's advertised, or is promoted on social media, it's going to be a shit product.
To some extend I'd exclude certain types of YouTube reviews, because they frequently aren't paid by the manufacturer and making a video with real people and real data is to expensive to waste on scams.
Only for arbitrary people. Gate kept or low member count communities that exist to facilitate a discussion between appliance repair men, literature enthusiasts, fly tying hobbyists or owners of a particular model of vehicle are largely alive and well (unfortunately a lot of them moved from forums to facebook, but still.
However had, recently they also ruined old.reddit.com. I always said that when they take down old.reddit.com (they require a log in, which makes no sense from a user's perspective) I would be gone. Turns out I retired before that due to mods censoring me willy-nilly style. It's interesting how the internet shifted towards more and more censorship. Can we not come up with an internet without censorship? I am not even against 0% censorship, e. g. I am fine if bots are not allowed to pester real humans, but specifically a lot of censorship that was and is going on on reddit, has to do with mods arbitrarily enforcing "rules". I know this is the case because I wrote just about the very same content and style on ALL subreddits - on some I ended up being censored, on others not. So that's individual mods abusing their anti-social powers.
On Hackernews this is not as bad, but the UI is annoying, especially the "you post too much". Well, I don't - but Hackernews simply has a rate limit that makes no sense. At the least the censorship on Hackernews is nowhere near close to the reddit censorship.
Reddit mods are not paid by reddit, but many of them wield considerable influence that has real economic value. There are reddit mods who are honest, but they're not likely to be in charge of a sub that can sell things or political views. Just as you should evaluate a newspaper for bias, you should evaluate reddit subs based on their potential for corruption.
Of course, there's another option now: Hire somebody to use AI spambots to drown reddit in a sea of slop singing the praises of whatever it is you're trying to sell.
Very long write up to unconfidently say I don’t know.
Even the first time I saw the advice I was skeptical, reddit is rife with bots, and fake comments/posts. It's been well-known for almost a decade at this point that there are multiple individuals moderating many communities there, and that kinda power is rife for abuse.
I've been a sporadic reddit reader/poster for a few years, but this past month I've had enough and deleted my account. The main draw was niche-topics, but they've been overrun with AI slop, and even the local communities have become echo-chambers rather than posts of new bands, events, etc. The local newspaper can tell me about those already.
Shilling can’t prevent dissatisfied customers from voicing their opinions in a properly moderated subreddit, and astroturfing to spread misinformation about a competitor makes companies much more vulnerable to litigation.
Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, etc they all have hundreds of thousands employees and even if they are not explicitly paid to astroturf, they try to be subconsciously loyal to their employer, downvoting everything that goes against their subtle wiring, and happily upvoting every new product or feature launched by their org
That's just human nature, proven in 3, 2, 1...
In my experience, literally every thread or comment that even just questions the "big narrative", the opinion of the masses, is downvoted, banned or even deleted by mods or the mob.
Example: Germany is breaking apart politically due to the uncontrolled mass immigration topic, resulting in landslide wins of a far-right political party. I want to hear opinions of the voters, the protesters, the undecided, of everybody regadless of their position, but somehow, you will not find their voices on reddit. Like they dont exist.
Hell yeah I love this “I will never prove that I didn’t make this up or trust random output because it was on the computer screen, because of my principles”
Saying postive or neutral statements, say a negative thing, not downvoted but zeroed.
Dead internet is absolutely true
This isn't even most of the times possible, since both humans and bot alike on Reddit now hides their comment/submission history, so it just shows a blank page.
No, I think it's best to just default to assuming everyone is a bot, so to say, and read everything critically regardless of what the source may be.
I was banned by their new AI moderation system. Then I appealed it and got a message saying "Our slop banned you by mistake." (paraphrased)
Then I was banned again by their new AI moderation system.
Then I deleted my post history using Power Delete Suite and stopped using reddit.
https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
Let their bots moderate bots.
Many long-tenured blog authors claim they don't touch code anymore as well. I think that lends credibility to the veracity of the claim, as shocking as it is to you as an individual.
During the Laquan McDonald innocent and trial there were tons of accounts from the_donald, and not-connected to that were pretending to be experts and live in chicago (despite not having history on the sub). In the threads these accounts weren't positively contributing to the conversation, they were spewing:
1. Direct racial slurs 2. Political proganda criticising leadership they didn't like (not having direct experience and not critiqing direct political actions that lead to the event). I.e. "Chicago is a warzone"/etc. 3. Maliciously bad faith arguements. (Non-regulars steering up arguments to push talking points.. these weren't well intention-ed factual/communicative debates)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Laquan_McDonald
Since then: There have been heavy agenda pushing on subs. For example scooters and bikes, after the introduction of rentable ebikes and scooters.. there was heavy votes and arguements over people who criticized the business and users behavior. (When the scooters were added to the city, there were lots of posts about destroying them.. now there are not recognizable accounts arguing and attacking you if you comment on this.. a comment about defending yourself against someone riding aggressively near you gets you site wide banned). Note: the attacks in support for scooters aren't consistent.. sometimes you get breakthroughs talking about the negative impact.
On r/privacy, there are groups of people that grief others about "well you can't do anything about this". I'm not talking about people expressing how they feel, I'm talking about direct denialism and griefing in a sub that is expressly meant to be pro-privacy.
Additionally, the DNC did this on r/wisconsin in 2024. They even used social manipulation tactics with calls to actions that "we must do something." There was documentation about this was coordinated efforts.
This has been documented on accounts that are necro-ing old posts for product recommendations as well.
Theres a lot that is claimed on the Ellen Pao == hitler drama actually being a Spez lead campaign in a business lead fight. (Turns out it was spez that wanted to roll out a lot of the restrictive features and sub removals, and Pao was more of a "let's be less resirictive and socially moderated" )
https://reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/2zcbyq/what_is_go...
It's spez that caused mods to have shit mod tools, the war with API against its users, who seems purely interested in the profit motive, training LLMs on reddit data
And yes, reddit has a censorship problem. Always somewhat of an issue with subreddits as a concept - I'll just get 5 of my friends to ideologically align against you and ban your posts - but even the site itself seems to be this. "The most real place on the internet"?! Fucking please.
In academic journals, we call that "abstract".
Of course, AI coding agents, which the author works on, would also never be astroturfed on Reddit!
You know, astroturfing on Reddit also comes from long time accounts with moderator support.
If you see a single sheep on an island, it is safe to assume there is more than one sheep living on the island.