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Reddit is being manipulated by big financial services companies

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Re: Reddit is being manipulated by big financial services companies

#61
post #49
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Donald Trump's war on media is 'biggest threat to democracy' says Navy Seal who brought down Osama Bin Laden". What is this an example of? This sounds like exactly the kind of thing that I would expect on the front page if there was no vote manipulation.

I think he means the headline seems generated to get clicks and the underlying implied article isn't expected to contain any news.

Seems to me like the headline is generated to convey a message without requiring clicks, not to get them. The article doesn't add anything because the headline is the content.

Re: Reddit is being manipulated by big financial services companies

#62
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In my mind, nothing like that should ever get vetted - only vetted accounts would be able to approve other accounts to get vetted. And with multiple layers of vetting, even if mistakes happen, it just won't go very high. Worst case scenario, if a group does infiltrate a layer, you just demote the whole layer. It might be a temporary frustration for real people, but that is better than perpetuating shills.

People who are picturing crowds coming in and messing up such a system aren't really getting the idea -- it is a closed system. Above the lowest layer, it is read-only to the public, unless you are given permission to contribute. The other commenter who said people don't want a system like this may be correct... but that might be a good thing. Catering to the crowds isn't the goal here. Finding the much smaller groups that are willing to put in more work to manage themselves, and engage in meaningful dialogue is exactly what might make places like /r/politics meaningful.

Re: Reddit is being manipulated by big financial services companies

#63

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…

In Susan Fowler vs. 5.5 billion dollar company, why on earth would you suspect that Susan is the one contracting with reputation management firms?

Re: Reddit is being manipulated by big financial services companies

#64
Link to this post in three years and ponder in its prescients... Web 3.0 will be born in the death of the heavily botted social networks. Reddit, Facebook & Instagram, Twitter... are all basically pay-to-win schemes at this point, benefiting greatly in terms of adoption from the grey market pay-for-likes botnets, where marketers and propagandists know they can make their content highly visible if they're willing to pay.

People pay very little attention to the fragility that has arisen in the Web 2.0 economy. Once there is widespread understanding of the gaming, cheating, and botting, these social network institutions will crumble. There will be piecemeal attempts to reduce botting, but they will annoy end users, and annoy investors and shareholders as they come to realize XX% of their user base never existed.

Web 3.0 will be the death of anonymity, with social networks and APIs that are, by design, hard to automate, and even harder to hide your true identity from. There will be CAPTCHA-like systems (possibly tied to hardware) that facilitate this. This will of course promise to fix the problem of botting, while heavily benefiting surveillance, for state, and for advertisement. There will be a new breed of social networks built around ensuring the content you are seeing is genuine or "organic", and yet the incentives will be much more perverse, and their networks, much more invasive.

Re: Reddit is being manipulated by big financial services companies

#66
post #7

It's a shame this has happened. It used to that aggregated news was the best news because it wasn't opinionated. It also didn't need to focus on the big ticket items (murder, sex, drugs) like newspapers, as sales weren't a concern, so you have science, tech, and I kid you not, actual good news to read about! But now with the pay-to-get-upvotes scams going on, we get utterly biased and even ridiculous stories constant…

... this is a former Navy Seal who oversaw the operation that lead to the killing of Osama Bin Laden AND he said that Trump's sentiment about the media being the enemy of the people is the greatest threat to democracy in his lifetime. The article backs it up with video footage of a portion of his speech.

Every single part of the title is true.

Re: Reddit is being manipulated by big financial services companies

#67

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…

It should be feasible to write a slap-drone (nod to Iain Banks) style Reddit bot that trawls all comments in the major subreddits and minor subreddits which their mods request, and performs a fuzzy match on the comment contents. Any comments found with substantively the same content gets the account followed around. Every comment from that account for a period of time gets an immediate reply citing the findings, and a warning to others that the account is possibly a commercial astroturfing account. Monetize by offering a paid opt-in subscription where subscribers who post comments with an appropriate disclaimer don't get slap droned.

This has the advantage that even posting much the same comment into different subreddits using different accounts in each subreddit is detected.

Re: Reddit is being manipulated by big financial services companies

#68
I'd noticed something like this on HN a few years ago. A negative comment about Apple might be voted up at first. Then, about an hour after posting, there would be many negative votes. The timing on this was consistent. After that, no more negative votes, and the rating would float up again.

Re: Reddit is being manipulated by big financial services companies

#69
post #48
post #7

It's a shame this has happened. It used to that aggregated news was the best news because it wasn't opinionated. It also didn't need to focus on the big ticket items (murder, sex, drugs) like newspapers, as sales weren't a concern, so you have science, tech, and I kid you not, actual good news to read about! But now with the pay-to-get-upvotes scams going on, we get utterly biased and even ridiculous stories constant…

The political subreddits are almost a weird case study of trends and tactics right now. If you pay close enough attention to /r/politics over the last month or so you saw general tones of the stories being raised to the top: "Trump is being manipulated like a puppet", "Trump is too stupid to be president", "Trump is sabotaging ____". And neither title is all that surprising withing the context of the echo chamber tha…

This might just be a reflection of the media echo chamber?

Reddit is largely regurgitated news stories. The news entities are all famously easy to manipulate and care more about speed and quantity over quality. A lot of news organizations are shamelessly partisan too, more so than ever.

I avoid the political subreddits even when they align with my political ideology because they are mostly filled with controversy driven stories rather than any useful political debate. You can't fill 24hr news cycles without filling it up with useless drama, so it's better to not get caught in that trap and just wait for the actually good stories float to the top.

Re: Reddit is being manipulated by big financial services companies

#70
post #51
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It comes from the politics sub, which - to put it mildly - is one of the most suspect subs for manipulation on Reddit. They let that sub appear on the homepage, yet they ban a lot of other similar subs that are on the other side of the spectrum. It's one of those issues where I look at Reddit and think... something isn't right.

> They let that sub appear on the homepage, yet they ban a lot of other similar subs that are on the other side of the spectrum. Perhaps I'm not familiar with the situation. What similar subs have been banned?

The very large Donald Trump subreddit.

(I dare not link to it. It is quite toxic.)

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