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. 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. 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.

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