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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

#111

Post by ThrustVectoring »

yourapostasy wrote: post #67
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…

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…

That sort of thing would match on some memes as well. Not necessarily a bad thing.

Re: Reddit is being manipulated by big financial services companies

#112

Post by tootie »

Rmilb wrote: post #13
tootie wrote: post #4

I don't understand why "financial services" are called out in the headline. They're being manipulated by shady digital marketing companies who have some financial clients among many others.

Financial services account for a substantial portion of the US GDP and some may argue has big sway in the way our laws are written, and now in steering conversation about them on a popular site.

I think that's a big assumption. Financial services firms are not usually savvy marketers and the big wall street firms everyone hates almost never try to appeal directly to consumers and would have little to gain from swaying opinion on reddit. I'd wager retail firms are far more active on social media.

Re: Reddit is being manipulated by big financial services companies

#113

Post by Balgair »

Animats wrote: post #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.

Yeah, this happens to my account. I think I must have made some off-hand comment once that someone did not like and it's their petty vengeance. The DVers will wait about 2 hours (+/- 1hour, random interval) to do so, no more after that normal distribution. The comments are stupid stuff too, like some links to wikipedia pages and just random comments. The ANOVA I did on the DVs showed just random timing and comments (p-val was super high though, as I don't have many comments). It's strange.

Only way I can think to fix it is to tell people to stop talking about HN. If you want to keep HN good, keep it to your very close friends and family. We don't want this to turn into reddit or digg.

Re: Reddit is being manipulated by big financial services companies

#114

Post by wtbob »

Animats wrote: post #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.

I'll often see a similar pattern: I'll post something which disagrees with the common wisdom here on HN, it'll get a flurry of downvotes, then over time it'll get more upvotes. I figure that it's probably just the result of a few folks who are HN addicts, and that over time more reasonable heads prevail.

Re: Reddit is being manipulated by big financial services companies

#115

Post by allenbrunson »

jasonkostempski wrote: post #95
grzm wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usernames don't change. Reviewing their comment history, I believe 'sctb is referring to this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=anon2264

I've been told usernames don't change "without good reason". It seems if you're going to ban an account it would be in good taste to either delete it or anonymize it so I was thinking this might be one of those "good reasons". I've been wanting to delete or anonymize my account for a long time. I doubt I'd go as far as trying to get my account banned to do it, but I'm curious if it's an option.

as a longtime follower of this site, i can tell you for certain that usernames do not change once the account is banned. from an architectural standpoint, it would be impossible, because internally, users are identified with their username strings, rather than some kind of opaque user id.

Re: Reddit is being manipulated by big financial services companies

#116

Post by fnordfnordfnord »

wcarron wrote: post #110
fnordfnordfnord wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't agree. Stackoverflow does some things well, but there are reasons that it hasn't caught on outside a certain cohort who were either there first, or who are very dedicated to cultivating their karma. HN user jfc said it better here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7650975

I have to disagree. Those invested solely in cultivating karma are the reason to institute systems like "earned privileges". Any forum with a voting system will always be misused and abused by those who don't have the priority of the community in mind. Moreover, jfc has valid points about negativity and unhelpful responses, but it remains anecdotal. As a counter, my own anecdotal experience has largely been positive…

I'll grant you that there are many high quality answers / discussions at SO. I also have no problem asserting that SO is infested with karma whores. They also have terrible moderation, and chippy pithy users with all manner of unproductive discussion habits. In other words, they suffer the same types of faults as other forums. I'm glad for you that you that you've had a positive experience on SO, obviously some users do; so have I, to the extent that I don't bother engaging in discussion, but rather just use the place to find the answer I want, and then just leave as soon as I am done with my research. As far as the anecdotes in that HN thread I posted earlier go, jfc isn't alone, there are pages of similar anecdotes in the same thread in addition to plenty of similar criticism elsewhere in the internet.

Re: Reddit is being manipulated by big financial services companies

#117

Post by threepipeproblm »

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…

Yeah, even the CEO got caught editing comments, and nothing happened to him. What do you expect, at this point?

Re: Reddit is being manipulated by big financial services companies

#118

Post by CM30 »

Eupolemos wrote: post #12
ffef wrote: post #5

IIRC didn't reddit use fake users and content when they launched?

I think that is a pretty standard and often needed tactic when starting a forum or community. A community is pretty binary; it's either dead or it isn't, so a it needs to be jumpstarted.

Yep, this is most communities are started. Either through literal fake users (sometimes set up by the staff, sometimes 'imported' from other sites) or by deals and exchanges with other communities (aka you use my site for a bit and I'll do the same on yours).

Not surprising at all that Reddit did the same thing.

Re: Reddit is being manipulated by big financial services companies

#119

Post by dang »

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…

That reads like a cross between personal attack and concern trolling. Artfully done—too artfully actually.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13724990 and marked it off-topic.

Re: Reddit is being manipulated by big financial services companies

#120

Post by Drumlin »

edgarvaldes wrote: post #28
Drumlin wrote: 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.

>something isn't right. Is that a pun? Because obviously reddit has a leftist bias.

It was an accidental pun. I noticed it before posting the comment and almost rewrote it. I'm not one of those people who say "no pun intended", so I just let the pun go free for others to discover.
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