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Real question. Assuming that mastodon got super popular, would it be at risk of the same or is it someone more immune to this sort of thing?
Every server has their own policy, so there will always be reasonable places on Mastodon.
> Are people farming karma to later sell the accounts to shill products? Yes. Any self-respecting bot shiller knows their accounts need to look as genuine as possible. Broad subreddit use and commenting, harmless comments. Then whammy with the sponsored post when the time is right. The more harmless the better. The more comment karma the better. It's not Reddit pumping their numbers. They don't need to and after Elon…
> Are people farming karma to later sell the accounts to shill products? > Yes. I wonder who buys though. I had an account which was 9 years old, over well over 100k karma and I decided I would delete it. Before doing so and out of curiosity, I contacted a couple of accounts that said they bought accounts. I was offered $20 (twenty) dollars. No more. Deleted the account. If that is a representative amount then it's a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Are people farming karma to later sell the accounts to shill products? > Yes. I wonder who buys though. I had an account which was 9 years old, over well over 100k karma and I decided I would delete it. Before doing so and out of curiosity, I contacted a couple of accounts that said they bought accounts. I was offered $20 (twenty) dollars. No more. Deleted the account. If that is a representative amount then it's a…
Couldn't the karma farming also be automated with fairly inoffensive "hey, really cool work!" types of comments?
People are farming karma to sell accounts. Marketing and PR firms dominate reddit. Think of the site at it's peak, I'd say about 6 or 7 years ago was the end of it's plateau, how valuable would it have been to control the fan community for your book, show, movie franchise, sports team. What about if you're a product maker in a category, say you're REI and you want a presence on buy it for life. Political campaigns, everything, reddit was just such a huge target, easily manipulated and full of people who think they're talking to other humans. It was bound to happen.
Of course just like SEO, it went too far and now it's uncanny, the site is in heavy decline due to this and you can go on most communities, they get one or two new posts a day and they're almost always botted to the top and PR/marketing.
> Reddit trying to pump up the site with fake accounts to juice growth I don't think they need to anymore but that's how Reddit started. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddi...
After a while it's easy to see common themes in the replies. Many are coming from established accounts with lots of one-liners, often to discussions that are a couple days old and that get little attention -- slick.
Suck up all of the existing answers, GPT-them into something that matches the common threads, and then post it to build credibility.