Former Digg refugee now Reddit refugee

submitted by PopASquatt from self.Introductions

sorted by:
top
newinsightfulfun
you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]LockeDemosthenes 17 insightful - 1 fun17 insightful - 0 fun18 insightful - 1 fun -  (4 children)

Beginning of the end was banning "unpopular" conservative subreddits from showing up on the front page.

When i saw a thread about some space drone constructor game skyrocket across r/gaming with thousands of superficial comments and 20k upvotes per hour - each one of those superficial commenters having multi-year accounts with posts across NHL, movies, golf, etc. it struck me that these were huge operations astroturfing reddit for money.

Then came star wars, holy shit, the most inorganic fake social media blitz I've ever seen outside of typical liberal reddit political spam until the recent BLM "stuff."

Reddit is done. Other websites will fall prey to this machine as well. The future is either anonymous astroturfing or verified ID accounts. Both suck.

[–]magnora7 13 insightful - 4 fun13 insightful - 3 fun14 insightful - 4 fun -  (3 children)

You saidit. And also the US presidential election cycles, you can practically see the propaganda swell up in the months prior. And then it suddenly all stops right after the election is over. Shareblue and Cambridge Analytica probably control a good portion of the American social media internet between the two of them, at this point. Internet cultural astroturfing is definitely a "thing" now, and every organization is doing it because it's cheap and very effective. And it's effective, because many people are still under the mistaken impression that social media votes and comments 100% correlate to public opinion. When in reality they can be bought and sold just like giant billboards. Which is basically what reddit has become. A giant billboard.

[–]ManWithABanana 8 insightful - 1 fun8 insightful - 0 fun9 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

I will never forget the first time I saw this in action.

The Los Angeles CA area has a subreddit, and very few republican congressmen left. The Democratic party identified one who they could defeat, and decided to work extra hard (spend extra money etc) to defeat this guy.

The subreddit suddenly gets a picture of this Republican, with a title showing unsubstantiated nonsense. It's not even a meme - just a picture of the guy. It's all about the stuff they put in the title, to smear him and get people to vote for the other guy. And from the time I last checked the subreddit (1 am) - no picture posted - to getting into the office (6 am) - the picture has the most upvotes of all time in the subreddit.

It was clearly a phony account getting mass machine upvotes, but it got people super riled up about the congressman and tons of comments from regular posters. Nobody wanted to hear me when I said "Hey something's wrong here".

Same thing OP is mentioning, but this is literally politics.

[–]magnora7 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Yeah it's one of those things, once you notice it, you can't un-notice it

[–]asterias 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

There's a similar situation with subs dedicated to specific countries, which are actually controlled by foreign entities.