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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

#71

Post by dowjones »

staticautomatic wrote: post #52
dowjones wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you. Which is why the entire Susan Fowler discussion and subsequent holier-than-thou proclamations (i.e. Mitch Kapor) are odious, since there is currently zero substantiation of any of her claims.

Who can be relied upon to substantiate her claims (particularly if there is no lawsuit) ? Surely not Uber itself or its so called independent advisors.

She claims to have screenshots of everything, so she could substantiate them. But you've pointed out the impossible position Uber is in... what if her claims are false, or exaggerated? How would the company disprove a negative? How could they show that she was never propositioned for sex, if in fact she wasn't? What if federal and state laws, and/or internal privacy policies, prevent the company from publicly releasing communication that would clarify things?

Re: Reddit is being manipulated by big financial services companies

#72

Post by allemagne »

perardi wrote: post #70
vostok wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.)

That has not been banned (yet)

Re: Reddit is being manipulated by big financial services companies

#73

Post by vostok »

perardi wrote: post #70
vostok wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.)

I just took a quick glance at it and it doesn't seem to be similar. Here's an item from its from page.

https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/5vx3af/ (NSFW)

I don't think I've ever seen anything like that on the politics subreddit.

Re: Reddit is being manipulated by big financial services companies

#74

Post by vinhboy »

vostok wrote: post #9
hacker_9 wrote: 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…

> "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.

Spot on. It's like going to a vegetarian restaurant and being upset there's no meat on the menu.

I don't understand all these people complaining that reddit does not have enough differing opinions. What the hell? Do you expect users of a site to conform to your beliefs?

Why don't you go find a different site that reflects your beliefs.

I don't go on HN and complain there's not enough discussion about camping.

Re: Reddit is being manipulated by big financial services companies

#75

Post by nix0n »

strgrd wrote: post #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 p…

I find it hard to believe people will complete captchas or give up anonymity in order to vote.

The bot vs captcha arms race will continue, but I would be very surprised if the captchas started winning.

Re: Reddit is being manipulated by big financial services companies

#76

Post by paulpauper »

A much more insidious spam but very common are fly-by-night 'news' sites that copy paste content from reputable sources and then get up-voted to the top of popular subreddits, generating adsense revenue for the webmasters. Adsense is such a pox on the internet. I know companies need to make money but it also gives rise to soooo much spam.

Re: Reddit is being manipulated by big financial services companies

#77

Post by Crosseye_Jack »

kneel wrote: post #54
mrfusion wrote: post #15

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

Reddit's voting/karma system needs an overhaul. Karma does absolutely nothing on that site yet it's the only metric of value on that site (people do crazy things for meaningless reddit karma), that and having an ancient account but old accounts only matter to mods/admins for the most part. Give an allowance of votes per day/week. More can be bought for very cheap, like 2 cents? Votes are a commodity that can be accum…

> Give an allowance of upvotes per day/week. More can be bought for very cheap, like 2 cents?

Every time a "what would kill off Reddit" thread comes up limiting up/downvotes and paying for more comes up. I feel it would kill off Reddit. (But I'm not a Reddit fan so I wouldn't stand in their way if they wish to add it).

Re: Reddit is being manipulated by big financial services companies

#78

Post by paulpauper »

kneel wrote: post #54
mrfusion wrote: post #15

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

Reddit's voting/karma system needs an overhaul. Karma does absolutely nothing on that site yet it's the only metric of value on that site (people do crazy things for meaningless reddit karma), that and having an ancient account but old accounts only matter to mods/admins for the most part. Give an allowance of votes per day/week. More can be bought for very cheap, like 2 cents? Votes are a commodity that can be accum…

Reddit has a lot of features to stop vote spam..they implemented an overhaul in late 2015 I know. Until then, newly made accounts could affect rankings..now they don't. . Mods are also pretty good at deleting spam, unless they are being paid off. The mods of major subs have enormous power, so it would not surprise me if this is going on still

Re: Reddit is being manipulated by big financial services companies

#79

Post by ethbro »

hacker_9 wrote: post #50
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…

> If you watch carefully I thinks the problem; many browsers don't care to fact check, or even click through to the articles underneath. Indeed I just scroll through the list a few times throughout the day, and might click on anything that sounds interesting. But with the constant and obvious BS it all gets a bit tiresome. If there was an alternative site where they had rules in place to deal with the problem, I'd sw…

Imho, the comment visibility and ordering plays a critical role in this.

It's pretty obvious first comments on HN that are generally upvotable tend to accumulate views, votes, and thereby become undisplacable from the top of the sort. In addition to drowning out lower comments as threads aren't collapsed.

From a pure game perspective, not reading the article / skimming and posting a comment as quickly as possible strictly dominates reading the article, if you're optimizing for karma.

Re: Reddit is being manipulated by big financial services companies

#80

Post by kneel »

Crosseye_Jack wrote: post #77
kneel wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit's voting/karma system needs an overhaul. Karma does absolutely nothing on that site yet it's the only metric of value on that site (people do crazy things for meaningless reddit karma), that and having an ancient account but old accounts only matter to mods/admins for the most part. Give an allowance of votes per day/week. More can be bought for very cheap, like 2 cents? Votes are a commodity that can be accum…

> Give an allowance of upvotes per day/week. More can be bought for very cheap, like 2 cents? Every time a "what would kill off Reddit" thread comes up limiting up/downvotes and paying for more comes up. I feel it would kill off Reddit. (But I'm not a Reddit fan so I wouldn't stand in their way if they wish to add it).

Yeah I think if the idea took off it could work but the actual payment screen and entering cc info would turn off >99% of users.
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