3 ms·

I've never understood this logic. Very few subs limit posts by karma and those that do certainly don't require the insane amounts of karma that these bots are f

• MattGaiser 5y ago
  It just takes one person to do that though and say "you made a new account for this you troll?" before everyone gets it.
  • josefx 5y ago
    That would work if the moderators of various subs weren't part of it, quite a few subs will hand out temp. bans when you "accuse someone of shilling". Even if the account was created the day a story went public, didn't post anything until weeks later when the story hit reddit and never backed up its attempts to discredit one side of the conflict. Some fun oriented subs will however happily ban spam bots that just automate imgur reposts if you point one out early enough.
• cogman10 5y ago
  Before the advent of the current crop of social media, online forums would post your post count and sign up dates. Posts from someone that has a brand new account and low post count were HIGHLY scrutinized. In some cases, needing mod approval before becoming visible. My assumption is troll farms are buying accounts with karma to try and do an end around such a system. It wouldn't be hard on reddit/hn/or other vote based social media locations to pay extra scrutiny, even automated, against brand new accounts. By using established accounts, it makes astroturf detection harder to do. Now every account is potentially an astroturfer.
• yabones 5y ago
  Indeed, there's more to it than that. I haven't gone in-depth, so this is my very pedestrian understanding... The very secretive spam filter has cut-outs for 'high value' accounts - this isn't really documented formally, but it's pretty obvious that posting limits are essentially nonexistant for 1M+ users, either by design or because they're well known to the mods... The value of the high-karma accounts is that they're much more likely to be accepted for moderator applications. Get enough mods on a default sub, and you basically control the universe. That's very difficult, so the much easier way is to create legit-looking fringe subreddits with names like "newstoday" or "politicallyuncensorednews". Get enough of your smurf accounts to upvote those, and you can get to rising for /all. Get enough real bites and you might even get it to the front page. I haven't really looked into this stuff for a few years, because it's frankly depressing. So my understanding will be a little off what the most recent networks are doing.
  • Pokepokalypse 5y ago
    That's why I think the best thing any (all) of us can do is to report and block every single page that's doing this. Unfortunately, I don't have 1M+ users; so I doubt this message will get out or make any difference.
• 93po 5y ago
  I have a 100% legitimate, human operated reddit account and I am constantly shadow banned by default on subreddits (i.e. my comment shows for me logged in, but is hidden when viewed in private window). I am sure it's not based entirely on karma, but karma and account age are definitely large factors