Thread

1. 0xy · 1790603258 · focus · HN ↗

   Yes, yes it does. There's astroturfing of every variety: political, brands, image rehab, you name it.

   Just look at how often Bill Gates gets glazing articles posted which receive suspicious rankings. None of the comments mention the Epstein-sized elephants in the room.

   Politics is even worse, and it's useless as a platform for taking political temperature. Numerous companies openly admit to this activity and Reddit has never commented on this practice.

   1. rafram · 1790603837 · focus · HN ↗

      reddit is an echo chamber when it comes to most topics, and politics are probably the worst of all. Back in the Gamergate days it was all MRA types (throwback!); in 2016 it became 50% Bernie and 50% Trump; these days it's mostly mainstream liberal. I assume the actual political makeup of the user base hasn't changed that much in that time, but people who obsessively refresh and upvote/downvote posts based on their politics have an outsize impact on what comes to the top. I'm sure there's some impact from automated astroturfing, but humans drive it.

      No serious person would ever suggest using it to take the "political temperature" of society at large. It's about as useful as Nextdoor for that.

      1. lurk2 · 1790663771 · focus · HN ↗

         > Back in the Gamergate days it was all MRA types (throwback!)

         MRAs were a minority of a minority of users; even when the site was mostly white and Asian men talking about computer science, it was overwhelmingly liberal. There are far more who fit into the MRA category now but those have come about due to the cultural trend towards sexual doomerism among Gen Z men, who inherited it from millennial incels (most of whom fled the site around the time of Ellen Pao’s tenure). MRAs were mostly Gen X and elder millennials.

         > I assume the actual political makeup of the user base hasn't changed that much in that time

         Why? The site used to have a minority of right-leaning users (/r/conservative, /r/anarcho_capitalism, /r/DebateFascism, /r/TheDonald, /r/altright, /r/darkenlightenment, /r/politicalcompassmemes, etc.). All of these communities are completely marginal now; half of them were outright banned from the site. Reddit doesn’t have a positive reputation among people who are even moderately conservative because of how heavy-handed the moderation is. It has always had this reputation, but there was a brief time from around 2014 to around 2017 when conservatives could actually engage with parts of it in a way that they just don’t bother to do anymore.

      2. 98753579909754 · 1790663990 · focus · HN ↗

         [dead]

   2. ChrisRR · 1790604034 · focus · HN ↗

      Damn I haven't seen a Bill Gates conspiracy theory in a long time. What a throwback

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