Reddit hacking for votes and profit
hackaday.com
Reddit hacking for votes and profit
1–10 of 28 posts
Re: Reddit hacking for votes and profit
#2This 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.
Re: Reddit hacking for votes and profit
#3 ...as long as the article is interesting, this can be quite successful.
Re: Reddit hacking for votes and profit
#4This 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.
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 gender of the first name and of the picture... most of the time.
Once she wrote a blog post she'd just set the sequencer and her posting would hit the front page in about two hours. She found it was a very consistent way to get 5k page views, sometimes better if the blog posting was good and it got picked up on other social media sites like proggit.
She'd gotten a few of her blog posts to be "all time favorites" on this site, but then another project eclipsed her blogging and she lost the credentials for the fake accounts in a hard drive crash.
Today, this "Zone" is dominated by other people doing the same thing. If you know what to look for, there's a quite unmistakable signature.
She thought about doing the same for reddit, but it was clear at the start that reddit had much better defenses -- it would have been a bigger project, and she probably would have burned some of her proxies before getting it right.
Note that you can get around the IP address problem in several ways. One of them is that you can rent SOCKS5 proxies for $3/month/IP address. Supervillians use bot nets.
Re: Reddit hacking for votes and profit
#5...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. That guy's got a voting ring. You might call it something else, like "I have a twitter account with a lot of followers who use HN", but that's what it is. This sort of practice takes some of the chance and variation out.
An advanced method is to recognize the role of "social proof" in social media. My informant has collected behavioral data sets from certain social media sites and discovered that the C.T.R. on articles increases as the number to the left increases: even if the headline is uninteresting, the high number makes people think that it "has to be good;" in experiments where the number of "ringer" votes was varied, she discovered that the ratio of "organic" to "ringer" votes got better the more "ringers" there were.
Re: Reddit hacking for votes and profit
#6More info on the technical side would have been far more interesting, ihmo.
command control system implementation, software stack, coupling the capta with a captcha filling service...
(I do not support this kind of scheme)
Re: Reddit hacking for votes and profit
#7I 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.
Re: Reddit hacking for votes and profit
#8As 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.
Re: Reddit hacking for votes and profit
#9...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…
the high number makes people think that it "has to be good;"
"If an intelligent man delights so in this, why don't I?"
... and the pause is probably enough.
Re: Reddit hacking for votes and profit
#10...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.
Also, sometimes you submit an interesting story and it gets immediately downvoted to 0 points, removing it from the subreddit homepage. If you can solve this, a good story has more chances of being picked.