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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

#21

Post by rm_-rf_slash »

I can only see one cure to this pervasive issue that affects every website on the internet that allows for user comments:

First, verified accounts, like Twitter, are visually separate from non-verified accounts. The distinction has to be visible on every place the username is displayed or when their post is displayed.

Second, only verified users have upvote/downvote privileges. To me it is downright foolish to allow any jackass or botnet to make a ton of accounts and up/down vote the conversation as they please.

I have seen this forum management all over the web and it's turning me off from social media more and more by the day. Newspaper comment sections used to be insightful, and now they are generally cesspools of shills and bots. Double or more for forums like Reddit. I even see it on Hacker News.

We can have open discussions and we can have discussions free of paid influence, but I do not believe it is possible to have both.

Re: Reddit is being manipulated by big financial services companies

#22

Post by wcarron »

codingdave wrote: post #19
mrfusion wrote: post #15

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

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.

This approach is probably the most reasonable. Stackoverflow seems to have implemented it fairly well.

Re: Reddit is being manipulated by big financial services companies

#24

Post by dowjones »

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 cautioned that judgment should be reserved until both sides of the story were made public?

Re: Reddit is being manipulated by big financial services companies

#25

Post by edgarvaldes »

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…

Do you have an example?

Re: Reddit is being manipulated by big financial services companies

#26

Post by Nadya »

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…

Sometimes they make no effort to hide it.

http://i.imgur.com/M6wAJ1A.png

Re: Reddit is being manipulated by big financial services companies

#27

Post by pavel_lishin »

anon2264 wrote: post #14

Reddit has some pretty extreme heavy handed political censorship. All Republican posts from the main Republican subreddit (the_donald) are censored from the front page (what most read). Techdirt is censored from r/news and r/worldnews and some of the other main subs. And for pretty repulsive apparent reason... All of the posts from r/conspiracy about the DNC corruption and subversion that was proven were censored. Wi…

> Reddit has some pretty extreme heavy handed political censorship.

> Techdirt is censored from r/news and r/worldnews and some of the other main subs.

You are confusing "reddit" and "users of reddit who have created subreddits and run them as they see fit".

Re: Reddit is being manipulated by big financial services companies

#28

Post by edgarvaldes »

Drumlin wrote: post #20
vostok wrote: 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.

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.

Re: Reddit is being manipulated by big financial services companies

#30

Post by kneel »

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.

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