Yes vote manipulation is common on reddit.
this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2023
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It's not just common, it's the entire basis of the platform.
Every dumb fucking talking point they want their users to regurgitate in the real world goes to the moon. Speak the truth and be silenced.
It's a nightmare platform.
Which is funny if you have a home computer and two people upvote the same thing from different accounts on it. Mods will absolutely drop a ban hammer.
Bot armies have been all over reddit for years manipulating votes and the larger the community, the larger that problem is.
I think the real reason they got rid of the 3rd party apps is that some apps (particularly the mod tools) make it easier to detect when the site's own bots are active.
Oh that's interesting, thanks. I hadn't considered that or honestly know enough about the mod tools to have considered that.
People manipulating the site as well. I documented a user's spam network and dozens of alts where they basically ran a network of spam subs to promote their books, had different personas for different political viewpoints, etc. Admins banned them so many times but they just start new subs and change their personas again. Basically every other sub knows about them and bans them too cause they just spam the same shit constantly 24/7. They also harassed a bunch of co mods and are a narcissistic egomaniac.
Yikes. I imagine that happens a lot.
Everyone always talks about their alt accounts, and every time I hear about alr accounts, I'm like "you guys have more than one account"?
But of course they do. And the craziest people like you say will use them to market or take advantage of the system.
This guy has accounts with bios that align with identity groups he wants to speak on behalf of, and they're like all co-mods, all talk in the same idiosyncratic way. Their comments always include links to not very reputable news sources identically formatted. They comment on each other's posts with the same canned responses, and are basically the only approved submitters to his subs when he starts out.
And when I talk about different identity groups, this guy has/had profiles with bios like: "I'm a trans woman!" "I'm an anti-fascist satanic atheist!" "I'm a larger woman who isn't shy about her beauty!" "I'm a Jew!" Then he'd jump in to debates and be like "as a..." and quote himself. "u/princessdragonslayer" used to post nsfw pics of "herself" and quote this guy in the post titles.
It's also funny cause he self-publishes books that are conflicting in their politics and tries to make sure redditors don't know. He has a pro-cop book that's basically fascist, he has a rape-pill book about "Why Men and Women Can't be Friends," but on reddit he plays a liberal guy who posts anti-Trump stuff 24/7/365.
Whaaaat wow that's amazing and uncomfortable.
How do you even follow all of that? Did you just fall down a rabbit hole?
If he tries to make sure redditors don't know his accounts are connected, how did you find out?
I was on a random sub called badchoicesgoodstories and there was an odd essay/conspiracy post about Hitler that seemed off, because it quoted statements Hitler had made in campaign speeches and purported them as factual accounts of the Nazi party policy. I commented that this was a bad way to approach what amounted to campaign propaganda, and that I had family history that diverged from the claims this post had made. I had also quoted from an encyclopedia which is considered first line reference material for the Third Reich. I found myself immediately banned from 20+ subreddits all at once for "spreading disinformation," and on questioning it, the person revealed themselves to be a psychotic narcissist, they also deleted my one comment then inserted a false quote of me in response to make me look like a Nazi.
Then I looked at other comments they removed and realized they basically do this all the time, found similar posts containing accounts of how shitty they were, then I started adding people who they were shitty to to a private sub where we could discuss this person (they basically would search their name on reddit and if anyone complained about them they'd go call them Nazis and harass them in whatever sub it happened to be.) So we basically created a list of all their current and previous alt accounts and subreddits, following their own gratuitous self-promotion to their Amazon pages, Goodreads reviews, their publisher company LLCs that published books between all their pseudonyms, one of which was a real-estate holdings company. They tried to get us banned for "stalking" them but since they promoted all of this on reddit themselves and operated as a public figure, their books, comics, memes, were all merchandised and sold through online marketplaces and vendors, there wasn't much they could do.
They had all their primary accounts suspended recently and lost all their main subreddits, presumably for harassing former co-mods, according to one of them. I currently mod a lemmy community that contains a snippet of their behavior and the full list of their alts and subs, although they've left their official name mostly behind and I think trying to keep a lower profile now.
Wow that's nuts.
I might have understood something, if this person used different usernames on reddit but also used different pseudonyms for each book, how did you tie the accounts together to reasonably prove it was the same person?
Reddit accounts were associated because their professional name was plastered on products they each advertised, whether it was books/comics/memes/nfts/tshirts, it was all linked to the same personal brand(s). They also all shared mod duties on the same subs, and the way they wrote comments/conversed was very idiosyncratic, they had catch-phrases and quotes that seemed to be of their own making. The subs they spammed and account length were also indicators, because they almost always all crossposted to whatever subs would allow their content, from a sub only they managed, in order to drive content to their personal subs. Another thing is mod teams (I was occasionally in contact with over this spammer) would report the user as ban evasion and reddit admins would be able to associate the account, which is how most of their accounts get banned. We realized they always tagged their own accounts as "Quality Poster" on their subs too, a tag that was reserved for only their accounts and a few others, and it was pretty easy to tell the difference.
For the self-publishing side and professional pseudonyms, he would use the same publishing company between his different pseudonyms, which is something that book sites often encourage you to search based on. On lets say Book Depository for instance the publisher of a book is a hyperlink, so you can "find other books by...", so it was like different versions of his name with different sort of professional personas. LLCs like a book publisher are all publicly filed entities through the business registrar in their respective states, so you can find out who filed the taxes, which consultant helped create the entity, just by searching the LLCs name on the government website. (I actually reported someone to the FBI once in relation to an act of violence because they had bragged about their shitty personal business on their online profiles, which they stupidly registered with their actual name to their home address, instead of properly with a PO box through a registrar.)
So really all it took was clicking on his own link to his own book, clicking the publisher name, and seeing all the books listed. In other words, doing the very thing he wants users to do on the site. However anyone who did this and mentioned it on reddit would be reported for stalking/harassing him, especially if they shared some of his content he didn't think fit with his current persona. Ie a quote from the rape-pill book, or a comic he wrote making fun of people who protest police violence. It was all about crafting an image that redditors would approve of so he could sell his personal brand on the site and avoid paying for ad services.
Dang that is crazy.
So did you and the sub you guys created to track this guy present your body of evidence to the Reddit admins and that eventually got him banned?
Do you guys track other users who are attempting to manipulate forms for personal gain or was it just this one guy who was so egregious that you felt like you had to to band together?
I used to mod defaults on reddit back around 2011-2015 and only really cared about spammers, so I developed a good eye for it and I'd often report spam on reddit through the formal process, or there were subs like r/thesefuckingaccounts to present spam networks, and a lot of times they would get reported and banned.
In this case the spammer is more aware, and they still operate on the site to some capacity, but they understood they had to be careful and try and hide it/not present it as "spam." They also basically harassed people who talked about them outside of their own subreddits and try to report and get rid of any negative discussion about them. When they spam it's like they act as a public figure, but they report as if they are a normal user who's being doxxed, even though they themselves spread their name(s) around the site. So I created a private subreddit and recruited (sane) people who had been mod-abused by this guy, and we collectively invited more people until we were a few hundred. Most of it was just making fun of him with cheap jokes and people venting, but we had a "current alts" list etc. and would contact mod teams if he was evading a ban with a new account. He only uses the most spammy trash subs now because of this, because any sub that cares about spam or quality of content has banned him many times by now.
I know of a few of these chronically online characters and they generally seem mentally ill in a certain way, so that complicates whether it's good to directly interact with them or not. There's a guy named John Mandlbaur who functions on a similar level. He thinks he's discovered a law of physics is wrong and is everywhere on the internet trying to present his findings for years on end, being a complete asshole to everyone, digging himself into a worse and worse place mentally. I remember someone checked on this reddit spammer in January after the holidays once, and realized on all the days people normally mark by spending time with friends and/or family, he was active on a bunch of his alts the entire time. In all these instances, instead of accepting they may be wrong about even a minor superficial thing, they see it as an affront to their grandiosity and appeal to grand conspiracy theories or very significant things to explain why someone disagrees with them.
I see. So far I'm really enjoying my migration to lemmy, I find it both easier to concede points in an argument and to receive actual answers and even have conversation instead of just endless squabbling over an apostrophe or autocorrect error.
The reddit gotcha culture was really wearing on me over there.
🌏🧑🚀🔫🧑🚀
Reddit has quite literally been using them since they were first founded. To get the site off the ground, links, votes & engagement was artificially populated for years as the userbase grew. Reddit has never been organic. And anyone who believes reddit ever stopped manipulating those numbers after their "seed phase" to make the site look better is no more than a sweet summer child.
Can you source me on this? I don't know what to Google to find information on this topic.
I don't fault them for seeding content to get a totally blank site off the ground. But spez definitely never stopped manipulating everything that's followed.
What are you talking about? I did not do anything, it is the fault of {TEAM_NAME}. {TEAM_NAME} is the reason why {SITE_NAME} is entirely fake. Do not blame me, BLAME THEM!
I only go back occasionally for a fap, and even my old favourite subreddits are just reposts of old content, it's dead to me.
That's all they really are, a porn aggregator.
a spez one, at that
Or people are boring.
Until recently, Reddit has been seeing an increase in active users. That has made upvotes more available, causing karma inflation.
Also, Reddit has been taking a lot of effort to kill the default sub list, so it is distributing people to subs they wouldn't normally go to.
But upvotes on discussions there are literally 100 times what they used to be just half a year ago. No way that happens naturally.
Yeah, but that wouldn't be Reddit doing that.
It's absolutely Reddit doing that. Buts use API calls, and Reddit has API calls locked down now. Bots have to request access, at the very least.
And given Spez et al's overwhelmingly stalwart commitment to honesty, transparency, and not fucking over his user base (lol) how are you so sure it's not Reddit doing that, when that's exactly what they did to boost numbers when Reddit was new?
Huffman and Ohanian first began Reddit by submitting links from various fake accounts.
B[o]ts use API calls, and Reddit has API calls locked down now.
That is if bots used the API directly, which may or may not be the case. It wouldn't be that hard to automate using Reddit's UI. You also had botmakers who relied on the API given months to transfer to webpage scraping.
And while Reddit did create and upvote posts in the beginning, the site seems to be large enough that I don't see Reddit being able to scale upvotes based on content alone without a massive AI army.
I don’t see Reddit being able to scale upvotes based on content alone without a massive AI army.
You say that as though Reddit cares about the content of a post when manipulating its upvotes, AND as though you have no idea who Sam Altman is or that he was on Reddit's board for several years.
Of all the things Reddit can't or won't do, AI is absolutely NOT one of them.
I say it as knowing that Reddit can change how upvotes work. They've done it in the past and it is a lot easier to change a formula over creating bots to upvote and downvote.
Reddit has also shown its ability to frame and curate both the default steam and r/all by removing porn and limiting political posts.
I don't know why Reddit would deal in bots when it has more powerful tools at hand.
I don’t know why Reddit would deal in bots when it has more powerful tools at hand.
Cheap, easy, impossible for outsiders to quantify, approaching IPO and cash to be made, keeping ad revenue the same without revealing how many actual users have fled the site, etc.
Or just change how upvotes are counted and displayed; no bot is needed. Reddit doesn't publish exact upvote and downvote numbers and hasn't for a while.
It also gives Reddit more control at a higher level to tweak certain numbers in certain subs.
no bot is needed.
For vote manipulation, no.
For faking user engagement and creating content and pretending like hordes of actual humans haven't left and real eyes are actually looking at all these ads, yes.
Since votes are private by default, reddit wouldn't need bots to manipulate voting. They can just show or report on the API whatever number they want.
I'm seeing a huge ratio of upvotes to comments lately on reddit.
Like 30k upvotes, 200 comments.
Happens here too but not as extreme.
I've also seen weird upvote/comment ratios on Lemmy, but I think there are still bugs in the system.
I have seen a post with a sus upvote count and no comments from a different instance. When I view it on the post's home instance, I see plenty of comments from users who's instances that are federated with mine, but my instance's version of the post has few or no comments. It's happened more than once, but I bet it's just temporary strangeness at play when it happens.
I've said this and I'll say it again. Anyone that's on Reddit still, doesn't make quality content or have comments that are worth a shit. All those people went to mastodon, lemmy or somewhere else. Same applies with facebook, xitter, or any other corpo social media.
Yeah, reposts have become a lot more common over the past year.