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Reddit hacking for votes and profit

hackaday.com

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Re: Reddit hacking for votes and profit

#21

Post by Udo »

terra_t wrote: post #5
kylec wrote: post #3

...as long as the article is interesting, this can be quite successful. If the article's interesting you don't need to game the system - people will vote on it naturally.

Not necessarily. Most people find success on social media sites is capricious; not a lot of people read the "new" queue, so your first few organic votes are a matter of luck. Downvotes on reddit make this go double. Even great content can get buried if it doesn't get noticed. For instance, there's a certain blog on a three letter domain name for which I'll sometimes see two or three posting on the front page at HN. T…

Most people find success on social media sites is capricious; not a lot of people read the "new" queue, so your first few organic votes are a matter of luck. Downvotes on reddit make this go double. Even great content can get buried if it doesn't get noticed.

I'd go even further and say that most stories have some kind of "weight" behind them that is not available to small-time users. If you follow the 'net news, especially topics about social networking, one sees always the same players getting lots of attention for the stuff they just happen to be doing at the time. I'd argue the system is indeed rigged, even without taking hacks like this one into account.

Re: Reddit hacking for votes and profit

#22

Post by Udo »

StavrosK wrote: post #2

This is odd, considering how reddit bans the submission as soon as two accounts vote on it from the same IP. EDIT: Hmm, the page in the video says "unique IPs", so it looks like they are used remotely. Odd.

This is odd, considering how reddit bans the submission as soon as two accounts vote on it from the same IP.

So whenever two people post/vote from the same corporate network, they are completely screwed? At the same time, this "restriction" is almost meaningless to a real fraudster. Awesome.

Re: Reddit hacking for votes and profit

#23

Post by keefe »

jacquesm wrote: post #15
terra_t wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I knew this purple-haired superheroine who did this to a certain "Zone" which is famous for vapid and incoherent blog postings written in broken English. She made about 1000 fake accounts and used Tor to make them appear to come from multiple IP addresses. The fake accounts were made with a statistical model that generated plausible usernames, real names, profile pictures and everything -- it could even pair up the g…

For every good thing that you could create on the internet there are going to be people hell bent on screwing it up. Your 'friend' and her copycats think they are somehow entitled to that traffic, which in the long run is responsible for the famous eternal September feeling that many websites have. Gaming the system is like the internet equivalent of slash-and-burn agriculture. I don't care whether it works or not, o…

It's the site owner's responsibility to figure this sort of things now. A set of users acting in a cluster is detectable as are aberrant behavior patterns from particular IPs.

Re: Reddit hacking for votes and profit

#24

Post by keefe »

wardrox wrote: post #8

As a Reddit Mod, this doesn't seem to counter one of the best defences against people spamming their own content: training the spam filter to hate a specific URL. This system would only seem to work if the URL got through the spam filter, so isn't much use to the kind of voting rings you tend to find already operating on Reddit. Though it's still a very valuable proof of concept.

the URL being linked need not necessarily go directly to the target site.

also I cringe at the fact that this is called a "hack".

Re: Reddit hacking for votes and profit

#25

Post by barrkel »

terra_t wrote: post #14
barrkel wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe those cheap SOCKS5 proxies are often actually implemented over bot nets.

You can definitely buy them from people who host their own machines in data centers.

I don't doubt that; but one should be suspicious of bulk proxy server lists sold for very low rates.

Re: Reddit hacking for votes and profit

#27

Post by fungi »

keefe wrote: post #24
wardrox wrote: post #8

As a Reddit Mod, this doesn't seem to counter one of the best defences against people spamming their own content: training the spam filter to hate a specific URL. This system would only seem to work if the URL got through the spam filter, so isn't much use to the kind of voting rings you tend to find already operating on Reddit. Though it's still a very valuable proof of concept.

the URL being linked need not necessarily go directly to the target site. also I cringe at the fact that this is called a "hack".

hack a day was bleeding cash so owner made it more mainstream

Re: Reddit hacking for votes and profit

#28

Post by Stevenup7002 »

terra_t wrote: post #11
Stevenup7002 wrote: post #7

I really don't see the point any more, almost everyone who uses these sites can pretty much automatically tune themselves out from spam now. Give up.

The people who do things like this, those who do any social media operations (SMO), are smart enough to use it to promote 'acceptable' content that won't be flagged as spam. If it comes down to a war with the operators of the site, you will lose. If it gets personal, they'll burn you. Successful SMO promotes content which, plausibly, you'd imagine succeeded organically. Sometimes the content is excellent and sometime…

Good point, I stand corrected.
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