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Reddit is being manipulated by big financial services companies

forbes.com

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Re: Reddit is being manipulated by big financial services companies

#31

Post by grzm »

dowjones wrote: post #24

And HN and other tech sites are somehow exempt from this phenomenon? With billions of dollars at stake at Uber and its various competitors, is it impossible to think, for example, that Susan Fowler had professional authoring help, or was offered compensation to publish her recent blog post? Or that paid/professional/fake commenters downvoted, attacked, and drowned out any voice who simply requested documentation, or…

Without substantiation of any of these types of things occurring, it actively destroys discussion to engage in speculation of them, particularly online. People are left with no good faith upon which to have constructive discourse.

Re: Reddit is being manipulated by big financial services companies

#32

Post by benologist »

edgarvaldes wrote: post #25
codingdave wrote: post #8

I'm not sure how anyone can think discussions on reddit are not manipulated at this point. If you watch carefully, you see the exact same verbiage used from multiple accounts on the same topic used to steer conversations. And as new responses come up, there will be a multi-hour delay, then new verbiage will get posted simultaneously to multiple accounts. There is clearly behind-the-scenes writing efforts going on, th…

Do you have an example?

r/worldnews is full of divisive commentary that shapes discussion in stupid and toxic ways.

https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/5vwt2g/israel_de...

Top thread (minus auto-summary bot's) erroneously declares the title misleading.

The thread under that amplifies some seemingly very flakey accusations a different employee at that organization maintains ties to a terrorist organization renounced decades ago.

Derail accomplished! Threads about Russia being bad usually lead with how the US is bad. Threads about Syria often debate whether Bashar al-Assad is not so bad. I am usually annoyed I read the comments in that subreddit.

Look at this awesome 2 day old account's comments -

https://www.reddit.com/user/Supercootur

Re: Reddit is being manipulated by big financial services companies

#33

Post by clamprecht »

mrfusion wrote: post #15

If you were designing Reddit today what would you do to prevent this kind of stuff?

My idea is for reddit to make as much of the users' posting history available for anyone to download and analyze, but while respecting the privacy of their users. I'm not sure how this can be done (I don't know their terms of service). But the idea is to allow researchers to use reddit's data to find manipulation. I certainly don't expect reddit to solve the problem on their own.

Re: Reddit is being manipulated by big financial services companies

#34

Post by jessriedel »

codingdave wrote: post #19
mrfusion wrote: post #15

If you were designing Reddit today what would you do to prevent this kind of stuff?

Tiered subreddits. You would need to earn credibility in open discussions, and earn your way up into more serious discussions. So there would end up being multiple layers of credibility, with only vetted accounts participating in the highest levels.

Sure, this is an OK scheme for finding higher quality discussion, but it's just not what the market wants.

After the initial adopters had been outnumbered, but long before reddit was popular enough to attract legions of professional marketers, popular subreddits were dominated by puns, memes, highly biased politics, emoting, etc. It's what people upvote, and it doesn't require a reputation system.

Re: Reddit is being manipulated by big financial services companies

#35

Post by jtuente »

tptacek wrote: post #18
anon2264 wrote: post #14

Reddit has some pretty extreme heavy handed political censorship. All Republican posts from the main Republican subreddit (the_donald) are censored from the front page (what most read). Techdirt is censored from r/news and r/worldnews and some of the other main subs. And for pretty repulsive apparent reason... All of the posts from r/conspiracy about the DNC corruption and subversion that was proven were censored. Wi…

Objection! Claim that /r/the_donald is the main "Republican" subreddit assumes facts not in evidence.

Eh, do you know of another "Republican" subreddit with ~400,000 readers? The obvious r/republican is still <100,000 and affiliated subs aren't any larger.

Re: Reddit is being manipulated by big financial services companies

#36

Post by uremog »

codingdave wrote: post #19
mrfusion wrote: post #15

If you were designing Reddit today what would you do to prevent this kind of stuff?

Tiered subreddits. You would need to earn credibility in open discussions, and earn your way up into more serious discussions. So there would end up being multiple layers of credibility, with only vetted accounts participating in the highest levels.

Do you think something like this could overcome the effects of say, the 50 Cent Party[1]? Or would they eventually end up being 80% of the "vetted accounts"?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party

Re: Reddit is being manipulated by big financial services companies

#38

Post by hacker_9 »

dowjones wrote: post #24

And HN and other tech sites are somehow exempt from this phenomenon? With billions of dollars at stake at Uber and its various competitors, is it impossible to think, for example, that Susan Fowler had professional authoring help, or was offered compensation to publish her recent blog post? Or that paid/professional/fake commenters downvoted, attacked, and drowned out any voice who simply requested documentation, or…

There is brigading going on with some HN articles, though the comments fare a lot better. I think this mainly related to people not being able to down vote until they reach a considerable amount of karma. Often if an article reaches the top too quickly, people call it out in the comments.

Re: Reddit is being manipulated by big financial services companies

#39

Post by sctb »

anon2264 wrote: post #14

Reddit has some pretty extreme heavy handed political censorship. All Republican posts from the main Republican subreddit (the_donald) are censored from the front page (what most read). Techdirt is censored from r/news and r/worldnews and some of the other main subs. And for pretty repulsive apparent reason... All of the posts from r/conspiracy about the DNC corruption and subversion that was proven were censored. Wi…

We've asked you not to do this already, so we've banned the account.
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