Thread

Does Reddit have an astroturfing problem? What the data suggests

312 points · 408 comments · p-s-v

nomilk · 1790655652 · focus · HN ↗
The biggest problem I have with reddit is mods can slowly but systematically ban users who express unfavourable opinions, and over time, anyone casually browsing could mistakenly believe those views are unpopular, whereas in reality everyone with that view (everyone who spoke it, anyway) was banned.
To give a simple example, one video game franchise subreddit bans any negative discussion on the most recent title. Over 5-10 years, this shielded them from negative feedback. But the franchise has tanked because core users weren't listened to, and they ended up making something nobody wanted.
1. aurareturn · 1790656841 · focus · HN ↗
  My biggest problem with Reddit is that trolls, memes, unintelligent posts have taken over the platform. Go to any semi-popular subreddit and most upvoted posts are just low effort memes. Posts that are long and well thought out don't win over memes and trolls. One of the reasons is that posting a few short words wins in upvotes because they get posted first while it takes much longer to write something thoughtful.
  Reddit's system rewards these low effort posts for some reason. Over time, the platform becomes less and less trustworthy until it becomes something like Quora.
  1. whatisthiseven · 1790657430 · focus · HN ↗
    People who build their identity around high scoring karma of memes take it seriously, and certainly don't want to hear "every subreddit devolves into memes if you let it"
    The users themselves are killing it.
  2. cbg0 · 1790657464 · focus · HN ↗
    This has always been Reddit, aside from the niche subreddits.
    aurareturn · 1790658784 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't think so. I've been a Reddit user for 12+ years or so. Obviously when you make the platform easy to use for anyone, you also invite more casual users who just want to meme.
    Reddit doesn't even make any attempt to control quality since user engagement numbers matter more than quality.
    Reminds me of Quora which over optimized the site for engagement growth but eventually became completely useless for this reason.
    cbg0 · 1790661150 · focus · HN ↗
    Here's the front page from 12 years ago, not exactly riveting debates in top hats.
    <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20140929012305/http://www.reddit.com/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20140929012305/http://www.reddit...
    <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20140929073818/http://www.reddit.com/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20140929073818/http://www.reddit...
    <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20140929232807/http://www.reddit.com/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20140929232807/http://www.reddit...
    aurareturn · 1790665608 · focus · HN ↗
    The subreddits that I frequent have turned into a low effort meme fest.
    No original OP posts are allowed, only URLs from the same old websites.
    krageon · 1790666937 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, and the person you responded to posited that this is because they used to be niche. You claimed this was not the case, they provided some URLs that demonstrate semi popular subreddits have always been shit.
    This post sounds like you are still disagreeing but nothing you've said points to another conclusion
    tayo42 · 1790667195 · focus · HN ↗
    Your reddit experience is from mods and their rules and how they enforce it, not the site overall.
    aurareturn · 1790668023 · focus · HN ↗
    Site overall. Mobile app makes it easy to type a few words and hit send and hard to write well thought out posts.
    rusticpenn · 1790669417 · focus · HN ↗
    Yeah, look at AskHistorians. Its still pretty awesome.
    keiferski · 1790677007 · focus · HN ↗
    Not really, if you want to ask a question. 9/10 times it gets locked for breaking some obscure rule. If anyone answers, that answer is just deleted immediately as well.
    This type of subreddit specifically is almost entirely useless since the advent of AI.
    rusticpenn · 1790843478 · focus · HN ↗
    It depends. I have compard some answers with my discussions with different llms and i still find the answers in the sub qualitatively better.
    kelipso · 1790705616 · focus · HN ↗
    Every interesting question just shows a bunch of deleted comments, so I stopped looking at it a while ago.
    rusticpenn · 1790843423 · focus · HN ↗
    There is another sub which tracks answered questions. Its a side effect when focussing on quality.
    jamesnorden · 1790682267 · focus · HN ↗
    When every mod does the same it becomes the whole website.
    Good4boothee · 1790682362 · focus · HN ↗
    As long as mods are human volunteers, can they ever keep up with scale of reddit? I regularly see submissions (on old.reddit's /r/all) that got to 10k+ upvotes and 200+ comments in hour or two before it was taken down for breaking given subredit rules.
    someonebaggy · 1790682588 · focus · HN ↗
    The site is the sum total of all that
    ieie3366 · 1790675224 · focus · HN ↗
    The big default subreddits were garbage 12 years ago, yes. But the rest of the site was not.
    Now in 2026, even small niche subreddits are facebook / tiktok tier with low effort meme posts etc
    bartread · 1790685422 · focus · HN ↗
    > even small niche subreddits are facebook / tiktok tier with low effort meme posts
    Completely agree.
    There's a few niche subs I hang out in but, for me, the standout in terms of quality decline is r/DIYUK. The difference between that sub in 2019/2020 vs today is stark.
    It's pretty common to scroll through several pages of repetitive one-line "jokes" before getting to anything remotely resembling a real answer.
    Mods seem relatively inactive and there are only 4 of them anyway, which is nowhere near enough to keep on top of the volume of posts and comments nowadays. Really it needs either a lot more mods, or some form of LLM-backed automation, to weed out the low effort comments.
    It's become a bit of a wasteland in terms of a lot of the regular contributors who used to give good, well thought out answers, have tapped out. I complained about this the other week and got downvoted and accussed of "showboating" which, honestly, I'm not even sure what the commenter who said that meant in the context of the discussion that we were having.
    It's a real shame because there aren't really any good UK-focussed DIY-oriented discussion forums any more: all the others degraded and became toxic, which is where r/DIYUK won, because it resisted that trend for longer. No more, sadly. DIYnot always stood out as a place that was more about battling egos than providing meaningful help and advice and, although r/DIYUK hasn't gone in quite that direction, it is sadly headed down an equally useless and destructive path quality-wise.
    shevy-java · 1790667259 · focus · HN ↗
    > Reddit doesn't even make any attempt to control quality
    But mods can say they censored you because of low quality contribution to reddit. :)
    I do agree that the karma system does not work. I was able to farm 77k karma in two years, after I created a new account there (the old account I had before for +14 years was forced to change the password, so I created a new account - and used EXACTLY the same password, to prove a point to reddit that they are incredibly stupid. Sadly, reddit never understood the problem, even though it should be obvious that, if your passwords are lost yet users retain the same password after being forced by reddit to change it, something in reddit's insinuation simply does not add up here.)
    harvey9 · 1790685452 · focus · HN ↗
    I once cracked a pretty good joke on a high-traffic thread and got about 30k upvotes for that one post. None of my serious posts in serious subreddits ever got close. I don't think Reddit karma is a useful indicator of anything.
    lordnacho · 1790675632 · focus · HN ↗
    This got me wondering whether you could train an automod to act like Dang.
    Dang is more or less what keeps HN from becoming Reddit.
    aurareturn · 1790676141 · focus · HN ↗
    Don't think so unless all moderate actions are public.
    jamesnorden · 1790682325 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't know about that, political slop is sometimes manually unflagged here.
    someonebaggy · 1790682644 · focus · HN ↗
    People would find exploits in the automod. For example if a trivial keyword filter flags comments mentioning Palestine but not ones that mention Paluhstein, or "the country of Isn'treal"
    This is called Algospeak and has infected a lot of people's everyday language. People say "unalive" instead of "kill" or "murder", because the internet has drilled into them that you have to use that word.
    lordnacho · 1790713668 · focus · HN ↗
    An LLM would easily understand that, no?
    someonebaggy · 1790714819 · focus · HN ↗
    If trained enough, but the commenters will just start calling it watermelon instead. So you train your LLM to block comments about watermelons, so they say thing. So you train your LLM to block comments about things. Congrats you blocked all comments.
    david-gpu · 1790682320 · focus · HN ↗
    I've been on Reddit since late 2005. Before there were comments or subreddits.
    My memory is fuzzy, but I remember it getting pretty shallow and memetic since before the Digg diaspora in 2010. And I think it was the popularity of image posts that did it; it was better before image links became popular.
    However, Slashdot was already highly memetic since the late nineties, and it was not image-based, so I may be wrong about the effect of pictures.
    paimapi · 1790783985 · focus · HN ↗
    you weren't around back in the days that it was just a Ron Paul fanboy forum and a lot of r/atheism echo chambers (I say this as an atheist who got keenly annoyed by the amount of self-fellating going on there) - this was pre-sub-reddits, when kn0thing was still active on the site and a force for some pro-social moderation, and Digg was still their biggest competitor (until it was flooded with the HD-DVD key leak and a lot of people left it out of annoyance)
    pschastain · 1790677825 · focus · HN ↗
    Once-upon-a-time reddit was the cool new alternative to digg
  3. EA-3167 · 1790659257 · focus · HN ↗
    A non-trivial number of the newer accounts that do that are bots, ban-dodgers building karma, people aging accounts for general resale and so on. Even a lot of "human" activity on Reddit isn't in good faith before you even get to the general triviality 99.9999% of it represents.
    Plus at this point if you really want to ask what Reddit thinks ask an LLM, it'll tell you in painful detail without exposing you to that place. Just remember to check claims and sources (a good practice for human claims as well as LLM ones).
  4. Teever · 1790664799 · focus · HN ↗
    One of my biggest criticisms of social media in general is that the algorithm that determines how things are scored and ranked is intentionally obfuscated under the auspices of preventing 3rd parties from gaming it in such way that results in an outcome where it is impossible for users to determine if the platform owners are gaming it themselves.
    I'm not aware of a social media site that does it but I think that I'd very strongly prefer a site where I could view a transparent log of who voted for what and when and what moderator took what action and when and why and how that all factors into how a comment / post / thread is ranked on the feed at any particular moment than one that hides all that stuff.
    Reproducible builds but for social media.
    Less 'pay no attention to that man behind the curtain' and more 'Exactly what it says on the tin"
    The more that I interact with moderators on social media the more I've come to realize that as much as they're burnt out from answering the same questions from not-bad actors over and over as they are dealing with organic bad actors or automated content generators and that a great deal of those questions stem from the opaque nature of the algorithm.
    All too often I find that moderators on social media are exasperated and burnt out not just from the endless janitorial work but also from users reaching out to them for understanding about the opaque nature of their actions and the outcomes that they have in the system.
    So a lot of moderators gravitate towards a 'don't rock the boat' sort of mentality and over time adopt this sort of mentality: <a href="https://youtu.be/hNuu9CpdjIo?t=56" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/hNuu9CpdjIo?t=56
    IMHO we're well past the point where any sort of security by obscurity with regards to the algorithm prevents any sort of automated influence on social media and the negative impacts of this kind of moderating technique only causes more damage than it prevents / mitigates.
    pydry · 1790670206 · focus · HN ↗
    i would like this too but I dont see any way to maintain anonymity or pseudonymity and clamp down on spamming.
    you can have neither or both but I dont see any way to have one without the other.
    >The more that I interact with moderators on social media the more I've come to realize that as much as they're burnt out from answering the same questions from not-bad actors over and over
    I'm mystified why this isnt a problem AI isnt applied to.
    wizzwizz4 · 1790683935 · focus · HN ↗
    It is: /u/AutoModerator can be used for that.
    charcircuit · 1790689744 · focus · HN ↗
    X may be the platform you are looking for.
    <a href="https://github.com/xai-org/x-algorithm" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/xai-org/x-algorithm
    nothercastle · 1790693882 · focus · HN ↗
    X is bad it always reverts to low effort content and then bombards you with constant racisms and sexism. There are Jems but you are constantly swimming in a river of garbage
    marcusverus · 1790710050 · focus · HN ↗
    You get more of what you engage with. If you respond to ragebait--even to express your disgust--the algorithm assumes you want more ragebait.
    verzali · 1790948465 · focus · HN ↗
    When I made a new X account a while back it immediately started showing me awful videos of people getting killed etc. This was without me engaging in anyway, just what came with a fresh account. So yes, maybe it gets worse if I engage, but the site seemed primed to be awful.
  5. munksbeer · 1790683809 · focus · HN ↗
    Visit /r/science
    Their own rules forbid low effort posts:
    "No off-topic comments, memes, low-effort comments or jokes"
    And yet every single topic is filled with exactly that any time I go to read anything. It can't be beyond their wit to get rid of that stuff.
    trombuance · 1790689024 · focus · HN ↗
    That's for the reason already mentioned above: Users who post substance and care about the issues will sooner or later write about something or express an opinion the moderators don't like and get banned. Over time the site is filled with lame jokes, single word comments and cliches.
    peter_d_sherman · 1790736719 · focus · HN ↗
    >"low-effort comments"
    I have never heard that term used before, prior to reading this thread...
    All I know is that "low-effort comments" -- is going into my 2026 lexicon!
    (Admittedly this comment, my comment, the words I have written, above -- is admittedly somewhat of a "low-effort comment" in and of itself(!) A low-effort comment about other low-effort comments (a "meta" low-effort comment, if you will!), but I digress... I guess at times "we all fall short of the glory of the highest of high effort comments"... :-) )
    Anyway, "low-effort comment" is a great piece of terminology, isn't it? :-)
    It's going into my 2026 lexicon...
  6. fishfasell · 1790684066 · focus · HN ↗
    100%, r/science 15 years ago was very strict on keeping the conversation serious and no low effort posts or jokes. That subreddit is now littered with stupid comments, jokes, and you have to dig to find serious commentary. Reddit is dying and I love it.
  7. [deleted] · 1790685662 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
  8. gosub100 · 1790685828 · focus · HN ↗
    > One of the reasons is that posting a few short words wins in upvotes because they get posted first
    It's not being first to the race, it's that some people are lazy and don't want to read "long" posts but will optimize for snappy quips that are more likely to be upvoted. This incentives some "karma whores" to make these posts instead of engaging with the topic more.
  9. Jaygles · 1790687054 · focus · HN ↗
    And there is often no respect for serious topics.
    Tragedy? Low-effort memes
    Someone in high esteem passes away unexpectedly? Low-effort memes
    Slow descend into fascism? Low-effort memes
  10. jansport123 · 1790781116 · focus · HN ↗
    there are still very insightful posts/comments but they are a minority buried by mostly inane comments and reddit is moving more towards like instagram reels model these days.

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