Thread

1. DharmaPolice · 1790605755 · focus · HN ↗

   There have been a few cases posted to the theoryofreddit subreddit where it's obvious that there were sets of accounts which were blanket recommending specific products a disproportionate amount of time. The user accounts involved were often banned shortly afterwards (or were deleted). These were (upon examination) really obvious though, often promoting extremely niche products using very exact terminology.

   This I think leads to a sort of toupee fallacy - where because you can spot the really bad examples you feel confident that you can identify the much better, more subtle examples. If an account which has only made 50 comments (all of which are very generic) makes 20 comments in a single month explicitly recommending ImageGeneratorDeluxeProMax then sure, you can guess they might not be legit. But if an account runs for a longer period of time and makes a lot more general organic contributions then if 1 in 500 of their comments are in favour of a particular product then it's harder to say.

   I think ultimately account age is the only thing that will be difficult to replicate at scale. I know people buy older accounts but there is still a fundamental difficulty in obtaining them in sufficient numbers. And yes, obviously that will mean disregarding the many millions of legitimate accounts that are under (say) 2 or 3 years old. There is also no easy way of hiding accounts under a certain age when searching Reddit via Google.

   By allowing uses to hide user profiles Reddit has also made detecting potentially bad actors that little bit more difficult. And from experience it feels like a large proportion of accounts now have hidden post histories. (It might also be the default for new accounts, I'm not sure).

   1. Traster · 1790670731 · focus · HN ↗

      It's often more useful to think about incentives than try to look for evidence. Even before AI is was relatively well known that "google is dead" and you couldn't research products using google because it was all just SEO slop, so instead people were googling "X product reddit" for recommendations on like menswear, or tools or whatever they were thinking about buying. And you just think to yourself, well yeah, if I were trying to drive sales for my brand, I would be astro-turfing on reddit. And what's the incentive that reddit has to stop this happening? They don't really sell effective ads, so it's not competition, it drives engagment, and the people really responsible for stopping this (if anyone is) are the moderators, who are unpaid and so are eminently bribe-able.

      Everyone understands that pretty girl on instagram who has 300,000 followers is getting paid to show that make up in her stories, why on earth would you think the guy with 300,000 karma posting his fits on /r/malefashionadvice isn't getting the same?

      1. DharmaPolice · 1790762747 · focus · HN ↗

         I agree one should be suspicious by default but the two scenarios are a bit different. Having 300k followers is an audience which an advertiser would definitely pay to access. Having 300k karma doesn't mean that anyone will listen to your next post any more than anyone else. It might prove you are "good at Reddit" in some sense (or at least, heavily invested in posting there).

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