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. 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)

Open on Hacker News to reply ↗

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.