Yes I agree most people don't realize how common this problem is. And that very lack of public awareness is itself a problem.

4chan is another forum that comes to mind as knowing that there's a high presence of fake posts and glowie posts and so on. I think most people using forums know it goes on to some degree, but they feel they don't have definitive proof of how widespread it is. I guess most internet users would think it's 5% non-organic posts and comments, when in reality it might be 50%.

Most forums' admins and mods are in active denial about this to their users and often themselves, because they want the forum to appear organic so they can attract new users. They want to believe it's all real, because that makes the work worth it. So most new forums like ruqqus, voat, poal, etc all get swamped by bad actors since they have no system to root them out, and then later have to develop a defense mechanism against it (usually too late) which itself creates backlash from the community. Public backlash that the attackers amplify as much as possible. Both the attacks themselves and the public backlash from the bans are a source of instability for the forum itself and the userbase. Ruqqus, voat, and poal all failed because of this exact same development arc. The attackers fracture and infiltrate the community and admin group so badly that the admins give up and everyone quits out of exhaustion and frustration. So taking all this in to account, it's obvious why a typical admin of a typical forum would be motivated to delete all attacks as well as any discussion of attackers. So that's what 95% of forums do. And the forums that don't, often just instead let it take over the whole forum.

Also admins don't want to show any public weakness to attackers, or else attackers might get ideas and new motivations. So basically most admins delete all mentions of it ever, and also never tell anyone details of what's going on for security reasons (and to keep the website looking nice for new users) so the users remain in the dark about what's really happening.

Part of why the saidit community has awareness of it, is because on saidit we allow information about it to exist publicly which creates awareness. Most forums (hackernews, reddit, twitter, GLP, etc) erase all information regarding attackers to remove it from the forum and ban anyone mentioning the attackers or any drama related to it. They 100% remove both the attacks themselves as well as the "the attackers were banned" posts in reaction to it. They basically kill all discussion about it, and would certainly never allow such a thing on the front page, and this is how they maintain the appearance of harmony... and for some forums that have a narrow focus like hackernews, it works. Because this drama is "off topic". On saidit we allow people to air their grievances, as long as they obey the rules, which actually brings light to this sort of activity. This creates awareness. And also most people here on saidit have been banned from reddit at some point, so they're well aware how "curated" of an environment it is because they've run against it firsthand.

Lastly, from a psychological perspective I think most people don't realize how advanced bots are until they see a sub like www.reddit.com/r/GPT3 and see how good the bots have become. Or when they run in to an actual shill group that is undeniably obvious, which is honestly pretty rare if you don't have access to the moderator or admin side of things. Which is another reason a bit of public airing of laundry from time to time is good (as long as it doesn't take over the forum).

Anyway, after some thought, that's my take on the issue. What do you think about it?