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Astroturfing on reddit has been a thing for over a decade and has really accelerated over the last few years. There's several companies where literally that is

Astroturfing on reddit has been a thing for over a decade and has really accelerated over the last few years. There's several companies where literally that is their business model to promote your product or service on reddit. I saw one for sale on acquire.com a while back for 7 figures

_vqpz 10mo ago
Sockpuppet accounts are literally the foundation of Reddit [1] [1] 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...
- CamelCaseName 10mo ago
  Not a "gotcha" There's obviously a massive difference between using sockpuppet accounts to: * Influence perception on a social media platform as a 3rd party vs. * Put content on a social media platform that users are looking for so they return to the platform It doesn't matter who shares a story with you on social media if the goal is to entertain, but it does matter if the goal is to get you to do something [spend money on their courses]
  - truetraveller 10mo ago
    The "value" of Reddit as a platform is knowing that people ORGANICALLY liked content. Otherwise, just go to an aggregator. These sock puppet accounts were there to deceive, no doubt. Obviously, they are "different" in some ways, but deceptive nonetheless.
    - CamelCaseName 10mo ago
      They didn't fake voting, they faked submissions. So you could clearly tell if people liked or didn't like something.
Teever 10mo ago
I’m shocked when I come across people who think that sockpuppeting doesn’t happen on social media including HN. I wish there were laws that required large social media sites to publish data to their end users that indicate the severity of the problem.
- lispisok 10mo ago
  HN is so prime to sockpuppet on because of its fairly low comment rate but high concentration of users who can make technology decisions at companies.
  - notahacker 10mo ago
    Sure, but I suspect also harder because it's full of contrarians that will point out at least five better ways of solving the problem and people that upon being greeted with anything that looks like disguised marketing copy will spontaneously combust. And if you do manage to sneak a URL into a discussion without anyone thinking it's marketing, the next four comments will be about whether the design of the landing page is unsuited for people with 2400 pixel wide monitors or people with noscript enabled (Also it's the kind of website where you absolutely can get good responses from "Show HN: A thing you might want to use and here's how much profit I'm making from it already" until a bunch of green usernames say nice things about it)
    - immibis 10mo ago
      But also easier because those comments quickly become dead.
    - uoaei 10mo ago
      Contrarianism is an effective sockpuppet tactic, then, in order to buy legitimacy and trust in the marketplace of ideas.
    - deleted 10mo ago
      [deleted]
  - deleted 10mo ago
gosub100 10mo ago
It's so painfully obvious too. On my local subreddit: "what's the best ice cream shop in $CITY?" Check their post history, one "lol" on a cat pic on /r/aww 8 months ago. 4 lines of code could catch this.
- SamBam 10mo ago
  And yet I suspect it's super effective, because of the powerful illusion of it being real people. There's the classic search "hack" of adding site:reddit.com to any product recommendation search, to find "real" recommendations. Most of the time this is going to find 5-10 posts, each with only a dozen comments and a dozen up-votes. And yet it feels do much more real than whatever at the top of Google that many people will trust these reviews.
  - tclancy 10mo ago
    And the new feature to hide your post and comment history makes it impossible to even guess at whether someone is a "real" person or not.
- ceejayoz 10mo ago
  > Check their post history, one "lol" on a cat pic on /r/aww 8 months ago. And now Reddit has made it possible to hide your post history. Probably because of this exact issue.
  - ZoneZealot 10mo ago
    The funny thing about that is it's extremely simple to bypass. On old or new reddit, search 'author:example' to find posts by /u/example. Or to see both comments and posts, on new reddit go to the user profile and do blank search like a single space character. That's using reddit's own site, of course there are other methods like Google dorks.
  - cruffle_duffle 10mo ago
    Well that and some moderators of large subreddits like to ban people based on participation in other subreddits that “disagree” with whatever flavor echo chamber the moderator happens to live in.
baxtr 10mo ago
For those like me who didn’t know: Astroturfing is the practice of creating a fake "grassroots" movement to make it look like a cause, product, or candidate has widespread public support when they actually do not.
- echelon 10mo ago
  You should see Higgsfield right now. They're buying stolen Reddit accounts and spamming over 500 videos a day to various subreddits. They're also advertising fake "unlimited" plans. Their reseller pricing (they're a reseller) is 1/10th the upstream API pricing, so they're metering and throttling and banning users that cost them money. They're getting thousands of people to subscribe to $1800 "18 month" plans. Their unofficial subreddit is full of complaints. Probably a dozen complaint threads a day now. Highly unethical company.
- tedivm 10mo ago
  Also for people who don't know, if you pay someone to post something (including just giving them a free product) it has to be disclosed. Astroturfing is (in simple terms) a form of fraud and the FTC does go over companies for it.
  - startupsfail 10mo ago
    I'm curious, where it has to be disclosed? Like if a company would pay a few legitimate reddit account owners to review their post and upvote, and would disclose this activity in the DISCLOSURES.txt available on their website, would that be legal? Where would one find some reddit users willing to do such reviews, by the way?
mapmeld 10mo ago
I'm seeing a much less sophisticated campaign for this on my city's subreddits recently... Someone will ask a weird or generic question, and either poster or the top comment is a throwaway account with a spiel about checking $site_name. It's exhausting, especially since people will write out real advice and corrections about how to deal with rats, bedbugs, neighborhoods, etc. and it all goes into the ether in hopes someone will get scammed. Or maybe it's an SEO thing because the site name is so generic it's un-googleable. I hope it doesn't work.
- rchaud 10mo ago
  This is the same kind of spam that overwhelmed blog comment sections and sent everyone scurrying to Reddit and Facebook 15 years ago. The spam was always had a generic comment praising the post and a line below shilling dick pills and Prada bags, but spelled like v_1_@_g_r_@ and the URL was simiarly obfuscated so they didn't trip a spam filter.
- ehnto 10mo ago
  Youtube has been spammed with these multi-account back and fourth discussion advertisements for a while. They're frequently for small local attorneys or financial advisors, and I have to wonder if those individuals realise how they're being marketed in bad faith. I used to co-work next to a SEO specialist back in my freelance days and he would offer rankings, but the client would not be told that they were getting said rankings by blackhat SEO tactics (that mostly no longer work). It's all so obvious and standardised that I have to imagine it is part of a toolkit or framework marketers are using without much thought.
m1sta__ 10mo ago
The conservative subreddits go from hundreds of active users to tens of thousands of active users depending on the talking points of the GOP at any moment. It's very very obvious.

_vqpz 10mo ago

Sockpuppet accounts are literally the foundation of Reddit [1] [1] 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...

CamelCaseName 10mo ago
Not a "gotcha" There's obviously a massive difference between using sockpuppet accounts to: * Influence perception on a social media platform as a 3rd party vs. * Put content on a social media platform that users are looking for so they return to the platform It doesn't matter who shares a story with you on social media if the goal is to entertain, but it does matter if the goal is to get you to do something [spend money on their courses]
- truetraveller 10mo ago
  The "value" of Reddit as a platform is knowing that people ORGANICALLY liked content. Otherwise, just go to an aggregator. These sock puppet accounts were there to deceive, no doubt. Obviously, they are "different" in some ways, but deceptive nonetheless.
  - CamelCaseName 10mo ago
    They didn't fake voting, they faked submissions. So you could clearly tell if people liked or didn't like something.

Teever 10mo ago

I’m shocked when I come across people who think that sockpuppeting doesn’t happen on social media including HN. I wish there were laws that required large social media sites to publish data to their end users that indicate the severity of the problem.

lispisok 10mo ago
HN is so prime to sockpuppet on because of its fairly low comment rate but high concentration of users who can make technology decisions at companies.
- notahacker 10mo ago
  Sure, but I suspect also harder because it's full of contrarians that will point out at least five better ways of solving the problem and people that upon being greeted with anything that looks like disguised marketing copy will spontaneously combust. And if you do manage to sneak a URL into a discussion without anyone thinking it's marketing, the next four comments will be about whether the design of the landing page is unsuited for people with 2400 pixel wide monitors or people with noscript enabled (Also it's the kind of website where you absolutely can get good responses from "Show HN: A thing you might want to use and here's how much profit I'm making from it already" until a bunch of green usernames say nice things about it)
  - immibis 10mo ago
    But also easier because those comments quickly become dead.
  - uoaei 10mo ago
    Contrarianism is an effective sockpuppet tactic, then, in order to buy legitimacy and trust in the marketplace of ideas.
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 10mo ago

gosub100 10mo ago

It's so painfully obvious too. On my local subreddit: "what's the best ice cream shop in $CITY?" Check their post history, one "lol" on a cat pic on /r/aww 8 months ago. 4 lines of code could catch this.

SamBam 10mo ago
And yet I suspect it's super effective, because of the powerful illusion of it being real people. There's the classic search "hack" of adding site:reddit.com to any product recommendation search, to find "real" recommendations. Most of the time this is going to find 5-10 posts, each with only a dozen comments and a dozen up-votes. And yet it feels do much more real than whatever at the top of Google that many people will trust these reviews.
- tclancy 10mo ago
  And the new feature to hide your post and comment history makes it impossible to even guess at whether someone is a "real" person or not.
ceejayoz 10mo ago
> Check their post history, one "lol" on a cat pic on /r/aww 8 months ago. And now Reddit has made it possible to hide your post history. Probably because of this exact issue.
- ZoneZealot 10mo ago
  The funny thing about that is it's extremely simple to bypass. On old or new reddit, search 'author:example' to find posts by /u/example. Or to see both comments and posts, on new reddit go to the user profile and do blank search like a single space character. That's using reddit's own site, of course there are other methods like Google dorks.
- cruffle_duffle 10mo ago
  Well that and some moderators of large subreddits like to ban people based on participation in other subreddits that “disagree” with whatever flavor echo chamber the moderator happens to live in.

baxtr 10mo ago

For those like me who didn’t know: Astroturfing is the practice of creating a fake "grassroots" movement to make it look like a cause, product, or candidate has widespread public support when they actually do not.

echelon 10mo ago
You should see Higgsfield right now. They're buying stolen Reddit accounts and spamming over 500 videos a day to various subreddits. They're also advertising fake "unlimited" plans. Their reseller pricing (they're a reseller) is 1/10th the upstream API pricing, so they're metering and throttling and banning users that cost them money. They're getting thousands of people to subscribe to $1800 "18 month" plans. Their unofficial subreddit is full of complaints. Probably a dozen complaint threads a day now. Highly unethical company.
tedivm 10mo ago
Also for people who don't know, if you pay someone to post something (including just giving them a free product) it has to be disclosed. Astroturfing is (in simple terms) a form of fraud and the FTC does go over companies for it.
- startupsfail 10mo ago
  I'm curious, where it has to be disclosed? Like if a company would pay a few legitimate reddit account owners to review their post and upvote, and would disclose this activity in the DISCLOSURES.txt available on their website, would that be legal? Where would one find some reddit users willing to do such reviews, by the way?

mapmeld 10mo ago

I'm seeing a much less sophisticated campaign for this on my city's subreddits recently... Someone will ask a weird or generic question, and either poster or the top comment is a throwaway account with a spiel about checking $site_name. It's exhausting, especially since people will write out real advice and corrections about how to deal with rats, bedbugs, neighborhoods, etc. and it all goes into the ether in hopes someone will get scammed. Or maybe it's an SEO thing because the site name is so generic it's un-googleable. I hope it doesn't work.

rchaud 10mo ago
This is the same kind of spam that overwhelmed blog comment sections and sent everyone scurrying to Reddit and Facebook 15 years ago. The spam was always had a generic comment praising the post and a line below shilling dick pills and Prada bags, but spelled like v_1_@_g_r_@ and the URL was simiarly obfuscated so they didn't trip a spam filter.
ehnto 10mo ago
Youtube has been spammed with these multi-account back and fourth discussion advertisements for a while. They're frequently for small local attorneys or financial advisors, and I have to wonder if those individuals realise how they're being marketed in bad faith. I used to co-work next to a SEO specialist back in my freelance days and he would offer rankings, but the client would not be told that they were getting said rankings by blackhat SEO tactics (that mostly no longer work). It's all so obvious and standardised that I have to imagine it is part of a toolkit or framework marketers are using without much thought.

m1sta__ 10mo ago

The conservative subreddits go from hundreds of active users to tens of thousands of active users depending on the talking points of the GOP at any moment. It's very very obvious.