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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

#81

Post by chadwittman »

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 think strgrd must be from the future, I strongly agree with your prediction of the future.

There feels like there is an analogy to our civilization. We existed as very primal beings operating in a world of high anonymity. A real world with high anonymity meant a more dangerous environment (theft, murder, assault, etc). In order for us to congregate & live a collectively improved life, we decreased anonymity. We did this with the idea of names, roles (sheriff), & printed records.

New complexity emerged from this. We needed to collect funds via taxes, make and enforce rules. We needed to know who each other were in order to give the rules some repercussions. Eye witnesses were crucial because of their "ability" to remove anonymity.

These steps of stripping anonymity were done with the intention of improving society. This point here is debateable, feel free to challenge.

We're at a unique moment in time where there's a highly dense "locale" that has full anonymity. What's even more interesting about this locale is that it's permeated across our "real world" society. The implications of this reality are immense, we live in two worlds that are interwoven — one that has little anonymity & the other with abundant anonymity.

As technology increases in power & importance (it will) this is tipping the scales. In general, I don't have much faith in humanity's ability to live within an anonymous world without devolving into very primal pre-civilization behavior (see: 4chan /b/).

I'm not sure this is a stoppable (or advisable to stop) process.

Re: Reddit is being manipulated by big financial services companies

#82

Post by Slackwise »

mrfusion wrote: post #15

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

1. Make the website invite-only.

2. Give out X invites to everyone.

3. Every user now has a reference pointing to who invited them.

4. Require that you must vouch for the behavior of the people you invite, and their behavior may impact your participation.

5. Use tree traversal and analysis for pruning bad sections of the population of users. (i.e. If you see a series of bad users, go up the tree to find the source and prune it there.)

6. Work on algorithms and moderator tools to improve said analysis.

7. Give merit and incentive to those who contribute. (See: Slashdot and Everything2 systems.)

8. Add anonymous meta-moderation. (Again, see Slashdot.)

9. Give ranks and small power to users based on their merit and participation, and somewhat based on their invited friends.

I can keep going. It's a bit harsh, but I feel it'd work.

I've considered making an example app, but the hard part would be getting a critical mass of users and content. Reddit, for example, faked posting content for their first few years to seed their community. It's hard to grow a new community, if even possible.

P.S. If anyone has a lobste.rs's invite, lemme know. Curious to see how their invite-only website has progressed.

Re: Reddit is being manipulated by big financial services companies

#84

Post by DanBC »

oconnore wrote: post #63
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…

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?

Dowjones is advancing the conspiracy theory that The sinister BigTaxiCartel want to see Uber done in, so they pay for writers to create blog posts for disgruntled ex-employees.

(It's not something I believe).

Re: Reddit is being manipulated by big financial services companies

#85

Post by M_Grey »

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…

On a news or politics subreddit? Sure. I haven't seen much astroturfing on ELI5, or Askscience. Reddit is a big place... fortunately bigger than the various news and politics cesspools that inevitably emerge and rise to popularity.

Re: Reddit is being manipulated by big financial services companies

#86

Post by guelo »

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…

Just because you don't like a headline is not evidence that it was paid for. The main organic bias in crowdsourced news sites are clickbait headlines and it affects all political view points.

Re: Reddit is being manipulated by big financial services companies

#87

Post by ethbro »

nix0n wrote: post #75
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.

You don't have to employ AI/human differentiation (e.g. captcha) if you statistically mine user actions. I think that's where resolution is more likely to come from.

By definition, shill accounts have different patterns than normal user accounts. Step 1) Deal with new accounts (preferably in an anonymous way). Step 2) Mine the actions of older accounts to detect patterns that point back to shilling.

Not insurmountable.

Re: Reddit is being manipulated by big financial services companies

#88

Post by josho »

chadwittman wrote: post #81
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 think strgrd must be from the future, I strongly agree with your prediction of the future. There feels like there is an analogy to our civilization. We existed as very primal beings operating in a world of high anonymity. A real world with high anonymity meant a more dangerous environment (theft, murder, assault, etc). In order for us to congregate & live a collectively improved life, we decreased anonymity. We did…

> I don't have much faith in humanity's ability to live within an anonymous

I can imagine being comfortable with an anonymous free future. This future would require much strengthened privacy protections, and even a very different looking government before I'd be comfortable however. I don't see those institutions giving us the protections we'd need.

I suppose this thread has made me realize that an anonymous world is only required when our laws and institutions don't fully protect us as individuals.

Re: Reddit is being manipulated by big financial services companies

#89

Post by josho »

We've seen this before. Usenet was killed from spam as it didn't have a defence against those seeking to profit from the audience.

This is today's equivalent of the same problem. The difference is it is now two monied interests battling for the audience.

I long for a modern usenet newsgroup equivalent that has some kind of protection from monied interests, I suppose a small audience is a guard.

Re: Reddit is being manipulated by big financial services companies

#90

Post by techstrategist »

kneel wrote: post #30
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…

No one said HN is exempt from this, actually it happens all the time. However HN is tiny compared to reddit it doesnt fracture itself into small subreddits. Things are much more managable this way. When shill content does pop up it's pretty obvious and it's usually called out.

It seems likely that only the poorly-written shill content gets called out.
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