Thread

Does Reddit have an astroturfing problem? What the data suggests

312 points · 408 comments · p-s-v

nomel · 1790637663 · focus · HN ↗
> Thin accounts: few comments, low scores, no real standing in the subreddit.
> Young accounts, or accounts with histories that are hidden or wiped.
Nope, this is no longer an indicator of a bot account. Many that I've looked into will have active posts to local town/region subreddits (often times multiple!) and different sports subreddits, sometimes getting unusually high amounts of karma in them (which suggests a network).
Turing test is looong dead, so no reason to assume the small fractions of a cent to make comments, to get a reasonable history, isn't being taken advantage of.
1. drop_star · 1790638357 · focus · HN ↗
  Ya this is me. I used to use the web version now im 'required' to have an account. I just create and delete accounts every couple weeks. I use the generic Word-Word-#### and keep my history private.
  1. irishcoffee · 1790638723 · focus · HN ↗
    Out of curiosity, why? The amount of times I’ve banged out a Reddit or hn response and deleted it is almost uncountable. Why do you bother replying to Reddit comments?
    mhitza · 1790639202 · focus · HN ↗
    Unless you have a reliable social network with reach, reddit is still the reliable way to get some answers for one niche or another.
    jjulius · 1790640414 · focus · HN ↗
    "A", not "the".
    fluoridation · 1790640751 · focus · HN ↗
    Your behavior is even stranger than that which you are questioning. The fact you take the time to type out the response means you also feel the urge to respond, and that urge is strong enough that you don't stop yourself before starting, even though you know you are likely to just delete before sending. It's odd that you would ask why someone would reply to a comment when you should already understand why someone would do that: because they feel the same urge you do, and don't have the compulsion to stop themselves before sending.
    irishcoffee · 1790728079 · focus · HN ↗
    It’s therapeutic. Try it sometime
    fluoridation · 1790809588 · focus · HN ↗
    I've done it. I don't agree that it's therapeutic.
    lazyasciiart · 1790641397 · focus · HN ↗
    They didn't even say they reply to anything. Perhaps they use it entirely to post local news stories.
    benoau · 1790641687 · focus · HN ↗
    You need an account just to browse old.reddit.com now, there's some extensions that do an okay job of emulating it but it's not quite the same.
    gib444 · 1790643687 · focus · HN ↗
    Working proxies (though probably the emulation you're referring to):
    <a href="https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib-instances/blob/main/instances.md" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib-instances/blob/main/ins...
    Akronymus · 1790671555 · focus · HN ↗
    set the cookie "redesign_optout" to true
    _g0xr · 1790651220 · focus · HN ↗
    Deleting a comment doesn't delete it from reddit's backend, only from public view, so reddit still retains and can track and sell your data. Making multiple accounts (assuming one also takes other steps like using a VPN and clearing cookies and local storage) would make it harder for reddit to connect all your comments and build a profile on you.
    someonebaggy · 1790683118 · focus · HN ↗
    That's why people were using extensions to edit their comments to random words instead. Apparently Reddit had no way to un-edit a comment. It's probably been fixed by now though.
  2. x______________ · 1790644232 · focus · HN ↗
    > Ya this is me. I used to use the web version now im 'required' to have an account.
    Save yourself some trouble, forcing you to sign in is your browsing data stored in cookies. Incognito/private should allow you to browse without being logged in..
2. sippingabonedry · 1790640279 · focus · HN ↗
  Too many subreddits still have minimum karma or account age requirements. Most of those are ruled by tyrant moderators so you're not missing much, but it's made the site largely useless. I estimate 60% of discussions on Reddit are fake or fabricated on some level.
  Can't post honest questions anymore without posting obviously phony pandering banter first to increase your karma. What's worse, it promotes the bad behaviors the bots are actually good it.
  Bring back forums.
  1. Scottn1 · 1790642606 · focus · HN ↗
    Reddit started to become questionably relevant that I am even reading real humans anymore for me I'd say around 2021. Covid caused the internet "grift" of karm-farming, content creators shilling miracle products "they love", and hidden agenda posts with affiliate links to really take off. Slowly over time you'd notice fake sounding or off tangent type comments intertwined into threads. Some subreddits were way worse and some still felt pretty clean around that time.
    But LLM's have completely and utterly destroyed Reddit. To the point of it feels like it is 75% FAKE conversations and/or astroturfed with only a FEW real people commenting anymore. Plus the LLM's have gotten so much better I catch myself sometimes wondering if a certain comment is from a real person or not. Just too much mental energy required for Reddit now to the point of I hardly go there anymore for anything other specific technical questions.
    It is sad because it used to be a wealth of knowledge and community. All of /r/askreddit is just bot started ragebait questions, karma-farming or stupid hypotheticals now. /r/popular is just trashy. Constantly I notice videos that are sometimes 7-10+ years old getting reposted again like they are new, just to get rage conversation started again.
    You cannot search for ANY product recommendations anymore. Fake "Hey I tried this brand and it was game-changing". No subreddit is safe. Look at /r/supplements now, it is full of those type comments to innocent topic starting questions that are also probably fake. Off topic stuff such as "xxx brand Beef liver supplement changing my life" when someone asks what brand of multivitamin others prefer.
    Reddit used to have a few real cesspool subreddits one could avoid, but now I consider the whole site one. You can't even browse Reddit anymore without being blocked to download their app to continue. Old-Reddit now requires a login. Ads make it unreadable without a blocker.
    Ugh. Just the worst of the internet all on display at Reddit now.
    radlad · 1790651666 · focus · HN ↗
    And all the LLMs are trained on it.
    The_Blade · 1790652678 · focus · HN ↗
    Ouroburos tossing its own salad
  2. Nifty3929 · 1790643041 · focus · HN ↗
    "Bring back forums" - I'm with you. I prefer forums as well, but when I think about it a little bit I can't say exactly why. Threaded conversations on specific topics, with moderation? That's basically Reddit (and forums). So what do you think it is that makes Reddit feel icky, versus the forums we've had in days of yore? Is it something fundamental about the system/experience, or is it just a "nobody goes there anymore... it's too crowded" problem?
    Maybe the difference is the post/comments framing? Rather than an opening post with sequential follow-up replies? Maybe something about voting? Maybe it's all the bolt-on features?
    cosmic_cheese · 1790643935 · focus · HN ↗
    Part of it I think is that old-school forums tended to have tighter-knit communities that weren’t as prone to shifting around. People had to find the forum in the first place and then register a new account to post, which may sound trivial but presents enough friction to filter a lot of people (including many low-quality posters) out.
    Contrast this to Reddit: its search and web searches instantly surface subreddits and one account gets you access to the majority of the site. Friction is nearly nonexistent.
    I think forums were also less prone to power-tripping moderation. It was still a problem, but there’s not but so big-headed somebody can get about being a mod for some backwoods niche topic forum that will never get all that big.
    Finally, some of it is owed to how forums were dominant during a time when the internet was primarily populated by the sorts of people who owned computers then: academics, nerds, and open-minded early adopters. The dynamic was just different. It’s also the part that’d be most difficult to reproduce today.
    _g0xr · 1790650694 · focus · HN ↗
    Downvotes are cancerous, imo. It encourages petty fighting (great for "engagement" metrics) and discourages good faith contributors.
    Even upvotes can be an issue. Oh, you wrote your comment the day after the post went up? Too late! Nobody's looking anymore, no upvotes for you. No replies either. You feel your effort has reached nobody and you have wasted your time, so you stop bothering to put in effort.
    I think the generality of it pushes topics into "old and inactive" way too fast.
    Also, reddit's moderation is terrible. Just look at how long hate subreddits have tended to last even after they started hitting r/all regularly. People who are worth talking to don't tend to hang out anywhere that starts to feel like little nazi camp. Subreddits are separated to an extent, which does help, but that only goes so far.
    I think the visual design also discourages longer "wall of text" responses in a way that traditional forums often don't. Lots of things (especially anything nuanced) can't be said in a tweet.
    I do think the size that comes from centralization is part of it too. "Communities" feel less community, and posts/discussions are abandoned too fast and almost never revisited (exceptions are posts that come up as the #1 google search result for a tech problem).
    The default and r/all subreddits are the worst by miles, though.
    But city subreddits and any kind of recommendation thread have been much shittier lately because of the bots and the chatgpt copypasters.
    Little forums also have a lot more character in their visual design than reddit, and they tend to allow more customization for individual users too. It's easier to recognize a person behind a regular commenter if they have a big pfp image or a goofy signature.
    monkeywork · 1790660097 · focus · HN ↗
    A few things I miss:
    Smaller communities. You generally knew what kind of community you were participating in. Focused discussion. A forum was usually about a specific subject, rather than one account participating in dozens of completely unrelated communities.
    Your identity was more compartmentalized. What you said on a linux forum didn't necessarily follow you into a motorcycle community.
    Moderation had different incentives. If you ran a forum, you needed people to actually want to come back. Moderation that became too heavy-handed could kill the community you were trying to maintain.
    Reddit essentially turned the forum model into one enormous site with thousands of sections, sounds great but broke more than it fixed.
    Your Reddit account becomes a single identity spanning everything you do. Someone can look through your activity in completely unrelated subreddits, form an opinion about you based on that, and potentially use something you said somewhere else against you... no matter what the culture/norms/rules were of the other community.
    A traditional forum depended on its community surviving. On Reddit, a subreddit can become extremely valuable simply because it occupies a desirable name and has accumulated a large user base. The underlying platform is doing most of the work of bringing people there. The moderator can be "all powerful" and heavy handed because they know rarely do competing subreddits actually work out.
    demibabs · 1790670300 · focus · HN ↗
    The names thing is a pretty big issue now that i think about it.
    If you don’t like r/cars what are you gonna make to compete with it? r/cars2?
    giantrobot · 1790662216 · focus · HN ↗
    > So what do you think it is that makes Reddit feel icky, versus the forums we've had in days of yore?
    Votes and karma. The concept of karma isn't bad but Reddit's implementation is bad. HN has a similar problem. There's only up and down votes with no context.
    Why was a post upvoted or downvoted? Did people find it funny or informative? Did it correct the original link or a parent post? No fucking clue. Just scalar value that goes up and down. Then you get bad proxies for context with vote ratios (controversial etc).
    Slashdot's voting system isn't perfect but much better. Instead of some scalar value a post is moderated with some sort of context (Interesting, Informative, etc). Voting is also distributed among users and limited. If you get moderator points you're limited in how many you get and you can't post to a thread you've moderated. Meta moderation also helps to correct for overzealous/reactionary moderation.
    The context is useful because you get an idea of why something was moderated as it was. The limited number and random distribution of moderation points helps inspire actual moderation. You either downvote obviously trolling/bad faith posts or upvote actually constructive posts. No one wastes their mod points on memes and "me too" posts. Drive by memes and short knee jerk replies just wallow in the Score: 1 area most users quickly learn to filter out. They're not punished but also not rewarded.
    Giving everyone unlimited mod points devolves a site into gaming karma. Trolls enjoy seeing how low their karma can get while karma whores will post whatever gets upvotes rather than something constructive. Karma is a bad proxy for constructive contributions to the community.
    alex1138 · 1790662818 · focus · HN ↗
    HN has [flag]. And anything and everything is subject to it...
    Teever · 1790667092 · focus · HN ↗
    I'd like to hear more about how you feel the HN flag feature relates to the comparisons the user you replied to raised to the Slashdot voting system and context in voting.
    sippingabonedry · 1790669868 · focus · HN ↗
    > So what do you think it is that makes Reddit feel icky, versus the forums we've had in days of yore?
    Two things.
    1. Voting: It changes the incentives for posting a comment. It becomes a popularity contest where people go after easy points by posting low quality but popular comments, rather than focusing on quality discussion. Similarly, quality posts are suppressed if they are unpopular. This behavior is killing what's left of this site too, but that's a discussion for another time.
    Ordering posts chronologically removes this manipulation. Real life discussions are not threaded, and aren't voted upon.
    2. Forums required investment by parties sufficiently dedicated to a topic: you need hosting, administration; this costs money. Reddit on the other hand inverts the equation. It incentivizes the worst of the worst people on the Internet (penniless losers with unlimited free time) to usurp power and build fiefdoms. In a way Reddit exploits them because they do their dirty work for free. This is who ends up controlling subreddits.
    Neywiny · 1791039636 · focus · HN ↗
    This is what I brought up about the Giants game fiasco. When a quick quip generates tens of thousands of fake internet points, who cares if it's true? And not one of the ones I saw had an apology edit or were deleted. People don't care about the content, they care about the fake internet points
    nobleach · 1790683856 · focus · HN ↗
    Oh man, I LOVED newsgroups back when they were being used for their intended purpose! I got a lot of help on the Delphi programming group back in the day. Every day was a new adventure of posts - and even some valuable flame-wars. I'm sure some of that still exists but most folks moved to PHP bulletin boards, and then on to other platforms like Discord/Telegram.
    OroPla · 1790690716 · focus · HN ↗
    The reasons forums are better:
    - threads are linear
    You post something to a five year old discussion, everyone in the forum notices.
    - no voting
    Doesn't matter whether your opinion is controversial or not, it is presented as just as valid as all other opinions and thus is worth engaging with, fostering debate.
    - smaller communities
    It is actually possible to read every post made to the forum and know every member.
    - niche interest as the main driver of everything
    Everyone is aligned on at least something and politics don't pervade everything.
    - moderation can still kill everything
    If you got a mod willing to remove posts or ban users for differences of opinion (sexist, racist, homophobe, transphobe, islamophobe, etc. etc) then everything dies either way.
  3. Cider9986 · 1790645616 · focus · HN ↗
    > Bring back forums.
    Here's an active and good privacy forum: <a href="https://discuss.privacyguides.net" rel="nofollow">https://discuss.privacyguides.net
    Here's an active and good private OS forum where privacy is discussed along with Android apps and the OS, ofc: <a href="https://discuss.grapheneos.org" rel="nofollow">https://discuss.grapheneos.org
    kulahan · 1790654507 · focus · HN ↗
    The major draw of Reddit is that it's a "forum" that covers every topic. These are cool, but I want a forum for succulents, and for SEA cooking, and for Eve Online, and for Hiking, and for...
    Cider9986 · 1790656434 · focus · HN ↗
    It takes a ton of work to run a forum. In the case of the two examples I linked, there's simply no alternative on Reddit, so it's not an option to use Reddit. Those communities are vastly more knowledgeable, organized, kind, fairly moderated, etc, compared to r/privacy.
    I guess you get what you put into it in terms of community.
    I used to be more interested in succulents. It's a shame mine have to stay under grow lights to not stretch out. It would be cool to have them scattered around...
    I could see succulents benefiting from a Discourse forum, but Reddit likely does the job pretty well with photo sharing. The nice thing about Discourse is, I feel like threads are more permanent.
    A forum I would want is a modern cooking forum for homecooks with a slight focus on science. Although I have not actually searched for one. It comes up on HN from time to time.
    kulahan · 1790803350 · focus · HN ↗
    I’m lucky enough to live in a region with light so intense I can pretty much ONLY grow cacti and succulents. My bear paw is a literal bush now, and my ponytail palm is nearing beginner bonsai levels. On the flip side, tomatoes can’t easily handle the intensity of the sun here…
    Still, I’ve had a $50 set of plants die because I uh… poured water on it. Took me a long time to figure out what happened there.
    Along a similar vein, a mycology forum would likely be of incredible help even to scientists!
    A science-oriented cooking forum could be great, so long as it stays closer to Alton brown-tier science, imo!
    But at the end of the day, people don’t often seek these out. That’s kind of the magic of reddit. You go for basketball and news updates, and you end up in a forum dedicated to hating on Uncle Joe from Willy Wonka. Nobody would ever seek that tiny forum out, but it can survive by embedding with more useful forums.
    someonebaggy · 1790683006 · focus · HN ↗
    AFAIK privacyguides is rather controversial among actual privacy-minded people (the kind who would use GrapheneOS)
    Cider9986 · 1790690312 · focus · HN ↗
    You may be out of date. I haven't heard anything recently. Are you thinking of this?
    <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49880630">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49880630
    someonebaggy · 1790690796 · focus · HN ↗
    Oh maybe it was privacytools then
  4. geocar · 1790653622 · focus · HN ↗
    > I estimate 60% of discussions on Reddit are fake or fabricated on some level.
    Why so low?
    I think it is higher than 99%
    > Can't post honest questions anymore without posting obviously phony pandering banter first to increase your karma
    Or just buy a "pre aged" account. They're only a few cents each if you buy them in bulk.
    Sha1rholder · 1790654662 · focus · HN ↗
    No. Much more expensive.
    monster_truck · 1790655886 · focus · HN ↗
    You are vastly underestimating the level of bulk
    Sha1rholder · 1790925567 · focus · HN ↗
    You are vastly underestimating the level of price.
    Accounts ARE expensive.
  5. frr149 · 1790655092 · focus · HN ↗
    Bring back usenet! It was free and distributed
    vintermann · 1790657726 · focus · HN ↗
    and had virtually no ways to deal with bad actors, which is why no one uses it anymore.
  6. Krasnol · 1790657222 · focus · HN ↗
    > Bring back forums.
    How are/were they better? The gate keeping started with the registration and the mods on reddit learned from those on forums. Those are probably the same people.
    I mod two small subreddits and the minimum karma "settings" are there so you can have a second look. You still approve them if they act like normal commentators.
    Maybe you should try modding one too to get a clear picture and not just the memes about big subs.
  7. intended · 1790657977 · focus · HN ↗
    It’s trivial to understand why the useless banter is needed though.
    Before people started using age limits on accounts, you had more bots and trolls on Reddit.
    Forums had similar barriers as well, with general or low stakes sections you needed to develop age or standing within before you could post on other topics.
    “Worse” isn’t a function of behaviors bots can do. There is no activity that dedication cannot make a bot cannot replicate.
    It used to be that you could make out patterns in bot behavior to figure out which accounts were authentic and which were not.
    With LLMs, those fingerprints are gone. They post in communities and behave in manners that are indistinguishable from normal users.
    Forums worked because they were in an era that has long since past.
3. hightrix · 1790650750 · focus · HN ↗
  Yep. The hidden history especially.
  I have a 15+ year old account that has a hidden history because far too many times someone dug through my comments, took something out of context, and pivoted to that instead of the actual conversation.
  My take is that people should respond to the comment not the commenter.
  1. [deleted] · 1790652380 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
  2. lbreakjai · 1790671596 · focus · HN ↗
    I hid mine because someone with five minutes of free time could probably find my real name just from the small list of subreddits I follow: The town I currently live in, my home country, and a handful of subs from which you clearly can infer that I'm a software developer.
  3. password54321 · 1790675869 · focus · HN ↗
    Your comment history is still searchable. Just put the username in quotation marks and add site:reddit.
    pcthrowaway · 1790703917 · focus · HN ↗
    Assuming you have a username which isn't just a common word. I was recently trying to find comments by a user with such a name and realized it's impossible (sharing this reddit hack I guess)
    It doesn't help that afaik there are no search engines which allow you to search by links (aka the now-broken "links:" operator on google), which would allow you to search "links:reddit.com/user/xxxxx site:reddit.com" and find all comments by that user, since the username portion of their comment would have a profile link
    acsi · 1790747990 · focus · HN ↗
    <a href="https://arctic-shift.photon-reddit.com" rel="nofollow">https://arctic-shift.photon-reddit.com
    They're all archived and searchable off-site too. Even deleted and removed comments.
4. geocar · 1790653492 · focus · HN ↗
  > Thin accounts: few comments, low scores, no real standing in the subreddit.
  > Young accounts, or accounts with histories that are hidden or wiped.
  DDG search "buy pre-aged reddit accounts" and you will find all of these. You can even search reddit for this.
  The author of the article has no fucking idea what they are talking about. Buying "comments" is for chumps.
  > I score it this way because an account that keeps bringing up the same brand is the product the vendors above are selling.
  Or man, I just like my knife: It's older than my kid, and I've never had to do anything but hone it, and it'll still cut a piece of paper or a tomato no sweat. The next comment will be someone asking what brand of knife it is.
  1. paweladamczuk · 1790654106 · focus · HN ↗
    I want to ask instead what stone you use and where/how did you learn to sharpen the knife?
  2. samudrijan · 1790657378 · focus · HN ↗
    How was the tomato?
  3. wiseowise · 1790664455 · focus · HN ↗
    What brand of knife is it?
5. sterlind · 1790655131 · focus · HN ↗
  I've noticed this too. it's always towns and sports teams. but I thought I was being paranoid..
  at least Eternal September was a human invasion.
  1. vintermann · 1790657941 · focus · HN ↗
    I noticed this on Twitter too (back when it was Twitter) I used to call political shill accounts SportsFan123. To my eyes they were heavily astroturfed long before LLMs.
6. metalspot · 1790655497 · focus · HN ↗
  > this is no longer an indicator of a bot account
  it is trivial now to create synthetic multi-platform personas that generate real looking post histories at unlimited scale. the baseline assumption should be that everything on the internet is fake until proven otherwise.
7. monster_truck · 1790655787 · focus · HN ↗
  It also completely ignores the utterly massive greymarket for "aged" accounts, including but not limited to moderator positions. You can buy accounts old enough to drive with millions of karma
  That's in part why the enforcement of the "no reposts" rules and their conditional counterparts is so selective, having the ability to allow/deny these on increasingly large subreddits effectively amounts to running a money printer as you can then pick and choose who is allowed to karma farm, or direct userbases to their hustle culture bullshit reselling pokemon cards, watches, shoes, or bots to do this, etc.
  This is also why there is often so much frankly insane drama over moderators getting catfished, outed as pervs/creeps, etc especially after a genuine subreddit with solid original content gets "too popular".
  There are also weird second order effects, especially in places like popular subreddits for games, where selectively allowing what complaints actually make it to the top of the sub are utilized by those who make disgusting amounts of money from botting/farming the game to sell in game items or currency for real money, to create what looks like a genuine public outcry for balance changes or features that seem fun/good on paper but at the end of the day only exist to make it easier for them to get more items to sell. This practice has roots predating reddit, back when everything was still forums and the RMT markets for titles like Diablo 2 were in their infancy. Earlier this year an RMT account for Path of Exile was finally banned, you can find videos where people go through archives of what they had on hand when it happened and tally up prices, no bullshit millions of dollars in total value.
  I learned a lot of this firsthand by getting involved in a city subreddit when I first moved out on my own, some people found out I could code well enough and tried to pay me a lot of money to assist them in creating these kinds of farms/influence operations. I obviously declined, this is all so fucking stupid! A few of them flew too close to the sun and made millions of dollars through ad programs on places like facebook, used what they could to pay off their college loans, buy a nice car, and then lost their asses in court and declared bankruptcy after giving most of it back.
8. 13415 · 1790669333 · focus · HN ↗
  All claims about bot accounts are flawed when there is no independent confirmation of the methodology. You'd need to have some sufficiently data based on verified bot accounts and evaluate your methods and claims on this data. Many people claim they can identify bot accounts intuitively. I do believe they can to some extent, but it seems far-fetched to insinuate that this ability is accurate enough to evaluate some statistical methods based on indicators.
  1. nomel · 1790892978 · focus · HN ↗
    > but it seems far-fetched to insinuate that this ability is accurate enough to evaluate some statistical methods based on indicators.
    Again, the Turing test is LOOONG since passed, so we're far past the point of being able to do any of this with confidence. It's not possible to gather meaningful statistics anymore, besides maybe identifying some tail/subpopulation created by incompetent devs. And even then, you'll start categorizing the college students paid for social media campaigns (you can find fliers of job postings at your local campus, you'll "have a blast!").

Open on Hacker News to reply ↗

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.