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Reddit App – Suspicious high number of recent 5 star, one word reviews
- Dah00n 3y agoIt does look rather suspicious.
- skilled 3y agoVery high likelihood of a bad actor doing this. Reddit is already drowning, there is zero chance of this changing the narrative in places where it matters (media).
- Havoc 3y agoThat was my first thought too. However as someone pointed out above though senior Reddit management has a history of creating fake accounts, plus there was that incident of using database access to alter someone’s comment so this seems right up their alley in terms of ethics
- skilled 3y agoIt doesn’t matter what someone said or not. It makes no sense to do stupid one-word reviews that can trigger an app review if people report that an app is generating fake reviews, which is likely the intention by the bad actor.
- Havoc 3y ago>It makes no sense to do stupid one-word reviews that can trigger an app review Inclined to agree, but they're on a roll with the erratic behaviour lately so "makes no sense" doesn't hold a lot of weight here The false flag angle you suggested certainly seems like a possibility to me, but I don't think there is enough here to dismiss the possibility that it is not either.
- slily 3y agoI'm amazed at how unprofessional the management's reaction has been to the blackout. They could've waited a couple of weeks for the controversy to die down. Instead they further escalated the issue and are now making utterly nonsensical decisions like undeleting people's entire posting histories and now things like this [if this isn't a false flag]. What are they thinking?
- tnecniv 3y agoThey’re not thinking. They never really have. They add features nobody wants all the time instead of making changes the community asks about for years. Who wanted live streaming or instant messaging on Reddit? Spez has edited users’ comments in the past as well. Basically Reddit the company is incompetent for failing to understand their product and run by a child.
- carstenhag 3y agoInstant messaging? Yeah, not sure about that, but reddit was really lacking there. About live threads: the existing static threads were annoying to use for ongoing sport events for example. So I did like the idea, but the implementation was poor.
- tnecniv 3y agoFor live streaming, I meant live video streams. They were pushing it hard for a while. It was a lot of musicians taking requests and a therapy frog (?!). It was fun for a minute but the novelty wore off quickly and I doubt it was worth whatever they paid to build it. It’s like they want to be every social media app at once instead of focusing on their strengths.
- commandlinefan 3y agoReddit was always doomed - it's kind of a surprise it's lasted as long as it did. They call themselves the "front page of the internet" and that's what they've always wanted to be. But to be that, they have to be _completely_ open. No banning subreddits. No banning users. No deleting comments. And for the most part, that's what they were when they started (and I loved it back then). But that's not just not workable as a business model, it's not workable even if there was no cost involved, it invites too much blowback. The only reason we ever got the internet we have (or had, anyway...) was because it was completely decentralized, not in any one person's or organizations hands, and there was nobody to blame for "the whole thing" rather than one part of it.
- thghtihadanacct 3y agotoo many reddit.com posts getting linked up in here.
- Veraticus 3y agoIs it weird that people are into continuing tech drama?
- irthomasthomas 3y agoNo. But it's weird that reddit would engage in this obvious vote rigging at a time when they are under a microscope.
- status200 3y agoI upvoted something this morning and got an immediate "Are you enjoying Reddit?" popup that was a gateway to leave a review, I am curious if that is related.
- bbor 3y agoPerhaps, tho basically every app does that now (should be against policies IMO). At worst they tweaked the frequency flag
- Firmwarrior 3y agoI thought this was disallowed nowadays, but I've been seeing it a lot from a lot of random different apps.. For a while, you'd get these "Enjoying app?" popups where yes -> "Post a review!" and no -> "Wad up your feedback and throw it in this trash can" They disappeared for like 5 years, but they've been back in force recently
- bertil 3y agoThere’s a large body of growth hacking specialists, working in agencies or who go from one company to another, who try anything. They get slapped on their finger a lot but pretty much never face the consequences of pushing the line. I suspect that some of them have tried that continuously for the last five years, repeatedly got their pop-up censored—until, one day, it went through because the person who cared about it left that position.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 3y agoThis and apps sending advertisements in push notifications are the two things that grind my gears about the iOS experience. The latter is already against the TOS as far as I’m aware but apparently never enforced since basically any food delivery app out there violates it.
- bbor 3y agoThe worst is Snapchat. I like Snapchat, I want to have it installed and with notifications turned on, but the advertising notifications were just beyond the pale. Clickbait text leading to content I have 0 relation to or interest in, sent super frequently
- RainbowFriends 3y agoThe behavior of Reddit's management has inspired me to login through the series of accounts I have created over the years and delete all content I had contributed to. Doesn't management realize they are dependent on people like us to create content to generate value for the website?
- andrewmcwatters 3y agoYou'll want to destructively edit them, because apparently Reddit has recently started removing soft delete flags on some content, and it's not clear to people why besides possibly this blackout. It's not clear if Reddit has post history to rollback destructive edits.
- MiguelX413 3y agoThey must so people can't just edit away ban-worthy content
- cge 3y agoA substantial portion of my destructive edits (that were followed by deletion) appear to have now been rolled back, so it appears they do have the ability. These were recently deleted, however; there may be a time limit based on edit time.
- andrewmcwatters 3y agoThanks for sharing this.
- cactusplant7374 3y agoWhy were they rolled back? Your content was deemed important?
- hgsgm 3y agoSpez doesn't want comments that say "this comment was removed"; it hurts the IPO.
- brucethemoose2 3y agoThe 5 star reviews (via my IP and an anonymized proxy) don't look like that to me. Then again, even real human reviews are kinda lazy jibberish so...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- david_allison 3y agoThe Play Store displays different star ratings and comments depending on your country/language/device form factor (at the very least - probably also other dimensions).
- brucethemoose2 3y agoI was looking at it through the browser, specifically on Bromite through the anonymized view through startpage.com.
- shipscode 3y agoThis Reddit thing is starting to border insane conspiracy. This is a boring legacy tech company who’s best selling point is being a discussion forum for the chronically mid. The employees are probably checked out and hiding at home, I can’t imagine anybody has time to do all the random stuff they’re being accused of.
- wunderland 3y agoI think you’re underestimating how little work an App Store astroturfing campaign would be
- bertil 3y agoI’ve heard of many schemes like that, and with one exception, employees are not involved or even told this is happening. One senior executive with the budget and incentives to make a metric go up contracts an external party. The one exception is a company that asks employees to review their employer. They seem to verify that the reviews are coming from actual employees.
- tnecniv 3y agoYeah Spez and a marketing director probably hired a bot farm or a mill in a developing country. If you use your employees, it’ll leak.
- Etheryte 3y agoAs a side note for others, mid means mediocre or poor of quality, and hence chronically mid means extremely mediocre or very low quality.
- jey 3y agoIt also seems to be a sly reference to the “midwit” meme.
- tanjtanjtanj 3y agoI doubt it. Mid is extremely commonly used slang that means "Mid-Tier", "middle-of-the-road", "middling" etc.
- andrewstuart2 3y agoI mean, stuff like this could quite easily be sabotage as retaliation for the other more legitimate problems like direct statements by reddit leadership. I have enough direct evidence to consider leaving, so I'm not going to spend lots of energy getting outraged about things that aren't as cut-and-dry.
- bertil 3y agoAre you a current employee? How’s the mood internally? What was the internal take on the API price increase? Are there problems that you feel are more worrisome that are not being discussed? Is the CEO popular? Are you “marked as available for a conversation” on LinkedIn?
- andrewstuart2 3y agoDefinitely not a reddit employee, though if I was right now, I wouldn't be for much longer. I'm moving to lemmy and building some tools to help others do so too.
- circuit10 3y agoThey might mean leaving as a user
- andrewstuart2 3y agoYeah, that's what I meant. Sorry for the confusion.
- jmyeet 3y agoI'm surprised how many people are willing to dismiss on its face the idea that a tech company doesn't engage in astroturfing despite all evidence to the contrary (eg Yelp, Glassdoor). I don't know if it is or not but 5 star reviews with one word are suspiciou and the idea is entirely credible.; This is going to continually happen with all UGC sites until the community enjoys collective ownership of the value they're creating. Until then the owners are incentivized to extract as much value as possible from their value-creators.
- tayo42 3y agowish r/programming was still up, one of the last top posts was someone going through the post of a anti-protest account. one of the accounts recent posts was something along the lines of "Im sorry Im not allowed to generate content like that" in an advice post
- flutas 3y agoFound a screenshot of it. https://i.imgur.com/4e9jO7P.jpg https://i.imgur.com/4e9jO7P.jpg User profile in question has since been deleted: https://www.reddit.com/user/Joseph_Harris2 https://www.reddit.com/user/Joseph_Harris2 Archive that includes the comment (can't find an old reddit one though): https://web.archive.org/web/20230611231119/https://www.reddit.com/user/Joseph_Harris2 https://web.archive.org/web/20230611231119/https://www.reddi... The /r/programming thread has other examples of pretty obvious astroturfing: https://web.archive.org/web/20230611210834/https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/146wn9s/meta_who_is_astroturfing_rprogramming_and_why/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230611210834/https://old.reddi...
- tayo42 3y agoNice! That's the one I was referring to. Pretty wild. Surprised those didn't get more attention
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- deleted 3y ago
- no1groyp 3y ago[dead]
- croes 3y agoFool me once, ... https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddit-founders-made-hundreds-of-fake-profiles-so-site-looked-popular/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddi...
- redkinght99 3y agoWhy is Aaron Swartz not given co-founder status in this article? I'm not saying he was part of this review faking allegedly going on, just odd he's memory holed.
- leovander 3y agoThey were the original founders, he was given the title when he joined?
- idlewords 3y agoBecause he wasn't a co-founder, he came in later and got a co-founder title retroactively for reasons. You can tell the story either way and there's nothing nefarious about failing to mention Swartz, who is not at high risk of being forgotten.
- croes 3y ago>Steve Huffman & I founded Reddit. We acquired Aaron Swartz's company infogami 6mos after we launched. https://twitter.com/alexisohanian/status/93374221685755904 https://twitter.com/alexisohanian/status/93374221685755904
- yung_steezy 3y agoI don't see much of an issue with them astroturfing the site when it first launched in 2005. Content begets content so something needs to get the ball rolling.
- delusional 3y agoI don't think it's so much and issue as it's pretty clear evidence that the current leadership is capable and comfortable with using that tactic. If you told me Jamie Dimon had personally sanctioned fake reviews for the JPMorgan app, I'd tell you to fuck off, there's no way that man would know how to do that. If you tell me the /u/spaz is doing it himself, I'd roll my eyes and say obviously.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- skizm 3y agoI wonder if Reddit just bought Apollo and sunset it over like 2 years (think darksky), if this would have all blown over.
- stjohnswarts 3y agoNot really, it's not like Apollo has 90% of the 3rd party app users, there are tons of other apps, and this would have happened regardless. Apollo just gave them a martyr to make it a bit easier
- steviedotboston 3y agonever underestimate the ability of redditors to find something to get angry about
- hbn 3y agoThe official iOS Reddit app was already from a purchased third party client that people used to like (AlienBlue). The issue is the popular apps will inherently be at odds with Reddit's goals, because popular apps are popular due to their user-friendly experiences, and Reddit doesn't want a nice app where users can get in and out without interference. They want dark patterns that get you mindlessly scrolling forever, showing you ads, and tracking every tap and fling you do.
- skizm 3y agoRight, agreed, which is why the very long sunset period would make people grumble but theoretically not yell for blood. That said I’m not sure if it would work. Just speculating.
- oehpr 3y agoI think people would pick up the change of ownership and flee for greener pastures. Think MySQL. Actually, to be honest... can anyone think of an example where a company bought a competitor with a large user base, and then just outright, or even gradually destroyed their acquisition? Mismanaged, sure. But destroyed? Nothing comes to mind immediately. Like was Vine destroyed or mismanaged? Maybe this distinction doesn't matter. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- carabiner 3y agoI've used the official Reddit app for a few years. I don't find it that bad. Can someone enlighten me as to why it is terrible?
- steviedotboston 3y agoi dont think thats what people are saying, they're just saying that 3rd party apps shouldnt be destroyed. people have built companies and they're livelihoods around them.
- taude 3y agowhy would you build your livelihood as a 3rd party app this day in age dependent on another company? This story of companies changing policies is nothing new, and a obvious risk if you pursue this type of business dependent upon other peoples platforms. Companies yanking access to data/api usage/changing terms for farmville games/changing ad words terms/etc. has been going on since the internet was commercialized in the 90s. People who did make money off apps like this, should call it a good run for a few years and move on to the next thing.
- steviedotboston 3y ago>People who did make money off apps like this, should call it a good run for a few years and move on to the next thing. That seems to be what is happening, but Reddit shouldn't be given a free pass. They could have handled this much better. They announced drastically higher API fees with no warning or grace period. It was extremely sudden and extremely steep.
- riskable 3y ago> why would you build your livelihood as a 3rd party app this day in age dependent on another company? Every 3rd party app that exists is dependent on another company (e.g. Google and Apple).
- yrro 3y agoNo tabs. But take a step back. We shouldn't _need_ to use an app to browse a sodding WEB SITE! The only reason I installed the app is because Reddit deliberately made their mobile web site so appallingly annoying to use!
- micromacrofoot 3y agoI've worked at companies that paid for reviews, and they usually don't look like this (I do not condone buying reviews personally). If you're paying usually you won't be satisfied with 1 word reviews and they won't contain slang like "gud"... they'll be more like: "This is good app that solved my problems" Usually at least a sentence, vague, with a minor grammar error here and there. I've also seen people try to sabotage an app by paying for reviews and trying to frame the app owner. There are also cases where a review bomb will start to generate counter-protestors. These people often don't support the app or really case about the protest, but are simple contrarians who will go against the grain of any popular opinion. I suspect this is annoyed users doing the minimum because they were prompted with a review request in-app and wanted it to go away.
- cowmix 3y agoI've noticed that the I'm getting WAY more push notification from Reddit (mobile web) than I ever did before.
- nvrgngvup 3y agoThey need to find the DAU one way or the other. I guess a lot of heavy active users would have started going dark as the blackout is extending. The power user curve must have started leaning left, and engagement might be tanking. I would not be surprised if people who can pay monthly fees to a third party app for better experience, on an otherwise free website, would also be the ones buying gold.
- Kiro 3y agoGo to the popular third-party apps that are getting killed and scroll past the RIP messages for latest reviews and you will see a lot of one word 5-star reviews. Are those suspicious as well? No, that's just what people do. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.andrewshu.android.reddit&hl=en_US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.andrewshu.... https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.laurencedawson.reddit_sync&hl=en_US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.laurenceda... I think it's frivolous that people in that thread (and here) take this at face value.
- taude 3y agoEspecially people HERE on this site.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- raincole 3y agoI clicked your first link and scrolled for one whole minute. 0(literally zero, not "few") one word 5-star reviews found. You might want to clarify what you actually meant.
- Kiro 3y ago> 0(literally zero, not "few") Admittedly I included reviews like "Great app" and "Good. " but if we're strictly going on one word only: "Awesome." "" "Great!" "Perfect" "Works" "Great" "Perfect" "" Not sure why that's a requirement though. Isn't the point that the reviews are low effort or is one word exactly indicative of something? If I bought fake reviews I would expect a tiny bit higher standard than that. Edit: HN stripping emojis but they were thumb ups.
- vctrnk 3y agoSame here, and it's not region-targeted (I'm not from US/EU). This is borderline FUD.
- indymike 3y agoHow long until the adults at Conde Nast step in and stop the madness? This whole thing is: 1. Doing long term damage to search position for Reddit content. Results, short and long term reduction in SEO generated traffic, fewer ad clicks, lower revenue, and a loss in valuation. Also, paying to get traffic will cut into margin, further reducing valuation. 2. Causing users to delete their accounts, lowering active user counts, and cutting Reddit's valuation. 3. Forcing people doing work for free to stop, meaning that Reddit will have to spend money to either hire or recruit and train more free moderators, resulting in increased operating costs, thus reducing profit margins, resulting in a lower valuation. 4. If it is true that management at Reddit is undeleting deleted users and accounts, they may be creating a situation where they claim they have more users than they do. Because this is the result of management's actions, it could be viewed negatively by regulators and law enforcement. What is going on needs to be stopped. It's insane.
- Merad 3y agoEven if Condé Nast has any influence over the situation, do you really think the "adults" there know anything about the situation beyond the status reports they're getting from Reddit leadership?
- gkoberger 3y agoI don't know how much sway Conde Nast has. Reddit spun out in 2011, and since then has raised about $1.25bn (!!) dollars. So I doubt Conde Nast has much say, if any, at this point.... and while I dislike everything spez is doing, I imagine he has the full backing of investors looking to IPO soon.
- jonny_eh 3y agoWhoever invested the $1.25B has the say now. Hence this drama.
- hdjjhhvvhga 3y agoBut do these people realize what is actually happening? And to think it all started because of API pricing increase...
- nerdchum 3y agoThe UI team who designed this atrocity of a web app needs to be made public and shamed and the executives who signed off on it need to be fired and never allowed to work in the industry again.
- dcchambers 3y agoI wouldn't necessarily shame the developers and designers that were just doing what the PM/leadership at Reddit told them to do while getting paid to do so. It's a job - nothing more.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- nerdchum 3y agoYeah that's why I didn't mention developers. I know they're just doing what they are supposed to and I've been there spitting out shitty code for management. This app monstrosity reeks of nepotism driven management or friend driven management. No UI team in their right mind would create something like this
- bbor 3y agoYeahhhh I don’t think it’s engineers fault. Reddit used to be gorgeous. It’s about showing more ads, measuring engagements, fitting different (more casual) usecases as validated by A/B tests, etc. “the engineers and designers are just dumb” is intellectually lazy IMO, with no offense intended :)
- davisr 3y agoYes and no. The engineers and designers probably are dumb, but they were specifically hired by management to engineer and design management's vision. They would not have been hired if they did not share management's vision. If they have better taste, then they should quit. I bet lots have, but they don't work at Reddit anymore. https://yewtu.be/watch?v=lLcpcytUnWU https://yewtu.be/watch?v=lLcpcytUnWU
- 3y ago
- nvrgngvup 3y agoJust clicked on a post. Now they are pushing users on phone browsers to either login or download native app. I don’t know when they changed it. I have been able to access posts without logging in.
- oehpr 3y agoThere were (are?) A/B tests being done to lock people out. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36287411 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36287411
- ghastly2 3y agoReddit has a lack of machine learning and infra investment to justify any sort of high IPO price, so their management hired ex Meta and Twitter employees and trying to figure out how to make more of what they have so they can go back to Wall Street with a stronger message during these stricter economic times where money is not raining from the sky like a few years ago. If Wall Street was smart they would wonder why invest in a platform that has barely evolved the format of discussion from threads and message board posts even though they had 18 years to do it. They should also consider the fact that conditions are ripe for disruption. Overall investing in Reddit right now as both an investor and a user seems very dangerous.
- nvrgngvup 3y agoIMO, Reddit is valuable. It has the necessary scale in terms of footfall or eyeballs [whatever metric is appropriate]. Where they have failed is to evolve and deliver on customer promises. Not having sufficient mod tools, suboptimal experience on official apps are just few issues that get the majority of limelight. Inability to build enterprise products or tiered data API for businesses and education are also missing, that they could have leveraged.
- rchaud 3y agoIf eyeballs were that important advertisers would be banging down their doors to place ads. Reddit's problem is that it's full of anonymous people that are hard to reach with targeted advertising.
- nvrgngvup 3y agoIt’s true that users are anonymous to others, but Reddit still has treasure trove of data on what likes, dislikes, political leaning and in some cases current emotional state/wellbeing of individual users. Unless they are stating that they can’t process this data, they surely should have enough knowledge to do targeted ads. Most likely scenario is that they have not invested enough on RnD and BD.
- mrits 3y ago
- almost_usual 3y agoReddit has essentially declared war on its users, they’re going to fight back.
- darepublic 3y agoI have received and rejected more offers for this particular app than any other.
- riskable 3y agoI've never said, "No" to anything more in my life than YouTube Premium. Now that I've started browsing Reddit using Firefox on my phone it might just take the lead.
- wnevets 3y agoWill Google look into this? Probably not.
- lastangryman 3y agoOn long enough timescales, capitalism destroys anything good. The root cause behind all of this drama is Reddits need to maximise their valuation, and the impact that has on their decision making.
- macintux 3y agoI’m driving this week across several states and it’s quite depressing how many small town grocery stores have a recent Dollar General next door that will kill them sooner or later (mostly sooner). We really need more ways to measure value than dollar bills.
- I_am_tiberius 3y agoIt all depends on us now. If we just leave our content there and don't delete our users, it will continue like nothing happened.
- KerrAvon 3y agojust gonna leave this here: https://kbin.social https://kbin.social
- cmcconomy 3y agoReddit and Twitter will be interesting to look back on as case studies
- ranting-moth 3y agoWill case studies be allowed under the dictatorship?
- adrianmonk 3y agoIt would be hilarious if they managed to get themselves banned from Google Play and Apple's App Store. After essentially killing off third-party apps, they'd have neither those nor their own. (Disclaimer: I'm taking a lot of stuff at face value. I'm not privy to info about whether the API pricing is specifically intended to kill third-party apps, whether these ratings are definitely fake, or whether that can be traced to Reddit.)
- surrTurr 3y agoDoes anyone else notice the increasing number of bots following you on Reddit? It started ~2 weeks ago. Before that point, I never got follow notifications from anyone.
- trollied 3y agoBefore that point in time there were feeds to other sites that let mods and devs catch that sort of spam, using tools developed by 3rd parties. Reddit cut the feeds off. Go figure.
- rafark 3y agoUm, just a thought. Shouldn’t people be posting these things outside of reddit? The admins can always take down posts like this.
- angryasian 3y agoDONT USE THEIR APP!!! They've purposely remove i.reddit and reddit.compat first to not provide a proper mobile web experience. then they cut off their api's to mobile developers. Don't reward their deplorable behavior
- joanne123 3y ago[dead]
- randallcrawford 3y ago[dead]