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The most obvious ones are where meme t-shirts are posted to medium-sized niche subreddits and get mysteriously upvoted into the low hundreds, and then a sockpup
by gary_0 5y ago
The most obvious ones are where meme t-shirts are posted to medium-sized niche subreddits and get mysteriously upvoted into the low hundreds, and then a sockpuppet asks OP for a link to buy it. Goodness knows what the more subtle bot accounts are up to. Eggs, bacon, and spam.
- minimaxir 5y agoThat's not astroturfing/ideological manipulation, and it's not strictly evidence of voting manipulation either: people do legit like meme T-shirts and want to buy them (no, I am not in that category). Regardless, voting is just one check on bad behavior. The other one is moderation, and at least on the subreddits I visit, moderators are strict on financial self promotion, but it can still vary. Even on Hacker News comments there's people talking about "hey, I'm working on a startup." and someone asks "what startup?", and they reply "here it is." with a link. I've rarely seen those exchanges get downvoted.
- gary_0 5y ago> it's not strictly evidence of voting manipulation Oh, it's very, very obvious, and Actual Human commenters all ask "what is this doing here?" And that style of message board spamming is decades old, so it's about as obvious to me as a flashing gif banner ad. > The other one is moderation True, once the mods wake up, the posts are always removed. But arguably the damage was already done, and like I said, if this many obvious manipulated posts slip through the cracks, we can make some statistical assumptions about the presence of more evolved predators.
- Guffton 5y agoWithout anyone watching the Watchmen it's very easy for mods to be financially rewarded for protecting blatant adverts in posts even if it goes against a sub's guidelines. Anyone that starts pointing this out gets shadowbanned or downvoted by the herd.