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Recently have noticed a business creating fictional threads on reddit (multiple on different communities) working as an AD to sell something. Example: „What i

• lrem 5y ago
  Closed communities is where it's at... But they have the obvious inherent problem: they don't scale. If a closed community lets in too many people, it becomes a somewhat obscured open community, with all the downsides. And if it doesn't, well, you are unlikely to get in on a topic you are interested in.
  • karatinversion 5y ago
    One of the lessons of the last decade (?) is that if a community scales, subverting it also scales
  • Root_Denied 5y ago
    That's something I've been grappling with recently, and the solution I landed on as "good enough" (though far from perfect) is to have a community where the ability to post and interact is closed, but the ability to view the content is open. Some subreddits have tried a variation of this, such as the Economics subreddit granting a "Bureau Member" flair for individuals who have proven their knowledge of economics in long form posts, but without taking it farther than just extra flair. There's no weekly threads for Bureau Members only to post, or anything like that. The issue then becomes how do you set up a judging body that determines the criteria for who is allowed to interact, and prevent that body from being co-opted in some way. Not an easy task, especially for a social media company where there's absolutely perverse incentives at play.
• Semaphor 5y ago
  Seems like an easy thing to provide a link for?
• lordnacho 5y ago
  Yeah initially I thought Reddit was useful for "give an opinion" type queries, especially where you're getting answers to a newly posted query. Eg my brother managed to get a specialist doctor to give an opinion about our mom's treatment. But for the vast majority of commercially relevant searches, it will get sunk quite soon. It can't be terribly hard to hook up a GPT style bot to harvest karma on various accounts and then use that to gain credibility on "which headphones should I buy" type queries. You might not even need to automate it, a farm of real people could potentially be useful for that, I bet that's offered by someone out there already.
  • nyanpasu64 5y ago
    > It can't be terribly hard to hook up a GPT style bot to harvest karma on various accounts Or more easily, steal and repost images on cute animal subreddits, sometimes adding white borders to the bottom right so duplicate image detection algorithms can't find it.
• rvanlaar 5y ago
  Thank you for sharing this view. There are a few nails in reddit's coffin and this is certainly one of them. I used to be able to gauge real world opinions on reddit pretty accurately, i.e. be aware what was happening before the curve. That is gone now.
  • travisporter 5y ago
    I can second this. Looking for a Bluetooth speaker and if I believed Reddit I am throwing money away if I’m not buying Anker. I’m sure it’s fine but it’s disproportionately represented in Reddit over other audiophile forums
    • ringworld 5y ago
      I really like my Anker Bluetooth speaker, it's an old one that just keeps on working, lasted longer than Android phones. Listening to it now, every morning - the Anker love is real. ;)
      • skydhash 5y ago
        If you need something cheap that lasts, Anker is your best bet. There are others that have longer lifetime, but they are from Sony, Bose or JBL and thus more expensive. My sister has the Soundcore for 2 years now.
        • LanternLight83 5y ago
          Have had mine for several, don't use it as much as I used to because I prefer the sound signature of my phone speaker for spoken content but still love it for music. Reccomended it to my extended family and still get thrown for a loop when I see them using it all the time, like a piece of my home in their's.
• londons_explore 5y ago
  This problem will only get worse as language models get better, making it cheaper to flood a forum with bot comments that look more and more like real humans. Moderators and users alike will spend far more time and resources weeding that stuff out, while it takes far fewer resources to post that stuff in large volumes. The only way to counter that is to have some kind of account verification requiring 1 account per person. Such schemes are all either very unpopular ("Why does reddit need my passport photo!") or very ineffective ("So I just need a new IP and I can sign up for a new account? Great, I'll set up 1000 accounts")..
  • ekanes 5y ago
    Reddit accounts for this already with friction like account creation dates or minimum karma. Seems to work decently
• jstummbillig 5y ago
  Yes, Reddit is being gamed. The question as with any system is: To what extend and how does it compare to alternative systems? The capital that is most relevant on Reddit is status. It is very easy to have people participate in Reddit, which makes it inviting enough to start building status but it's somewhat harder to actually do. Users care about their status and about their communities and Reddit combines the two in a nifty way, that already gives provides some slid resistance against gamification. Sure, you can infiltrate the system with any/or a lot of accounts, careful VPNing, lucky/clever reposting and also keep the guise up (you must, since your portfolio of both content and accounts is under constant review, as long as it remains visible). To get a highish ranking article on google I mostly have to write what feels like convoluted infomercials (or maybe let GPT3 do it for me). There is an industry of people being paid to do so. All it takes is one mediocre writer and some time. To me, the former system seems very brittle and expensive to game, the later much less so, specially since the prevalence of convoluted writing for SEO purposes make the distinction between SEO bullshit and expansive content increasingly difficult: People are getting used to informercial type content on the web and so it is increasingly what they learn to expect. And we give the people what they apparently want.
• JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
  I still think if you are internet savvy you detect these things almost instantly. Uncanny valley works on text too and the revulsion is just as strong. And all it takes to destroy your best cooling for cpu now bot setup is one user saying “No it is not and here is why…” right under the comment.
  • newsclues 5y ago
    A few years ago astroturf on Reddit was of low value and was easily spottable. Now, some of it is so good, it takes longer to confirm than to find. If there is enough value in a community people will exploit it.
  • hayleox 5y ago
    That might happen if the product being pushed is awful. But if the product meets a baseline – not amazing, but perfectly cromulent – then a positive comment might not get such a rebuke. I guess it's not the end of the world if you get astroturfed but you still get a decent enough product, but still, it's not ideal.
• tshaddox 5y ago
  I don't think that's a particularly new thing. I used to be a very active reddit user, but I haven't been active on the site for 2-3 years now. But even 3+ years ago I recall plenty of (granted, anecdotal) reports of commercial astroturfing even for relatively nice subreddits.