5 ms·

A lot of "local" subreddits started declining around 2015. It's like all the local news website commenters discovered their local subreddits and started posting

• ABCLAW 5y ago
  A lot of investor-relations style astroturfing began in the lead-up to the 2016 election. We did some threat tracking for certain organizations as a result of the growing extreme rhetoric in some of these communities and with social media aggregation tools it became very clear that there are a lot of paid political shill accounts. Facebook's toxic communities are far more grass-roots in comparison. They're also, at least in the cases of the files I was on, a lot more violent, and a lot more volatile. Surveiled Facebook groups looked a lot more like Parler than brigaded reddit subs.
  • heavyset_go 5y ago
    I'd like to hear more about this if you could share the details.
• asdff 5y ago
  I almost think it was these local news sites trying themselves to post on these subreddits. Looking at the histories of the people who actually post articles on a local subreddit, all they do pretty much is post articles. Who even does that? Either someone with some sort of complex to share every article they read on reddit, or an intern who is paid to post the article on social media and reddit is on that list. Even the LA Fire Department is active on reddit now. It's mainstream, and commercialized.