Does Reddit have an astroturfing problem? What the data suggests

Because the only metric that matters for social media is engagement, and a war against active account, no matter the purpose, would make that line go down.

Also, shill accounts prove to advertisers that the platform works to make money. That’s the whole reason Reddit exists.

Because it would be a monumental waste of time and money. Even if you could track down the overseas operators doing this, there's not much damages you could sue for, and alternatives would just pop up in their place.

Obviously it's hard to prove such a thing but I've always wondered if the owners of Reddit actively support having these operations run on their site.

I've seen cases where the admins delete comments that talk about the issue

I'm assuming it already falls under rules 2 and 5, content manipulation and deceptive interactions

For the same reason Amazon doesn't solve fake reviews. Their business needs the content and they're confident that the people who haven't left for better options will remain undiscerning.

Based on what happens everywhere, they're paying reddit for leniency. Pink contracts have been around since Uunet was offering them to Usenet spammers.

Generally you can't stop them, they're shell companies run from countries that don't care. You spend a lot of time and effort trying to block one and they just spin up another, it's asymmetrical in that you expend more resources to stop it.

reddit wants engagement numbers to grow either way, so that disincentivizes it further

I'll bet there's a browser extension to hide comments and posts from those auto generated user names. Like maybe you end up not seeing something interesting because someone used a throwaway account, but otherwise I don't really care what someone has to say that can't even be bothered to pick a name.

It would be trivial for spammers to at least use different pattern. I am afraid they keep to the default, cause real users do the same. I am not surprised, the chance of colliding with other user login, on registration, on such old and popular website is high.

It's crazy to me they are presenting sluggified account names as something that should be taken seriously. But I guess it doesn't matter because most people just don't notice, and worse, the technology surrounding reddit does not seem to care.

I wasn’t aware of GearLab, thanks for the tip. I will say, though I took a look and it seems like they heavily use Amazon links so they suffer from similar downsides as Wirecutter.

Amazon nowadays is such a crapshoot. A link to a product isn’t reliable. The price could be different than what the review stated, and the link might be for an listing that shows as out of stock. I think GearLab tries to fix this by giving you a link to search results on Amazon instead, but in some ways that’s worse. In the couple of links I tried the reviewed product wasn’t the top result so now it’s up to you to decide which of the links is the real one.

That loses some of the value prop for me because part of what I want from a service like this is to give me a link to a legit product listing. That’s not GearLab’s fault, Amazon makes that very difficult, but it still reduces the utility for me. That said it’s better than nothing which just points to the sad state of affairs in e-commerce today.

Edit: it looks like at least some of their links take you directly to the product page. Not sure why some of them take you to a search results page instead, but my guess is it’s an issue with expiring links.

What's their business model? A priori, I don't trust them because there's no reason for them to give out all that information for free. I assume it's a affiliate marketing / referral revenue stream? I suppose it could be fair within those parameters, but it would mean there's no incentive for them to test products that don't have such a program.

I pay for Consumer Reports, since you actually need a paid subscription to access the data, which makes sense structurally. I don't really know if the reviews are any good, though I've been relatively happy with it. I also paid a subscription for an independent supplement testing lab, but I forget what it's called at the moment.

GearLab is legit. Their outdoor sibling (https://www.outdoorgearlab.com/) is also great. I think the whole concept of "best" in a product category is fairly flawed, but they do it well; their individual product reviews are even better.

I imagine they only review places that will give them affiliate points. I was curious if they tested the mattic in the robot vacuums category and they didn’t.

> For product reviews, I've been using GearLab (https://www.techgearlab.com/) for years with pretty reliable results. I have no affiliation with them.

Why would you assume any website is immune to this problem of bots and fake or paid reviews? Bots are so cheap now and smart enough to pass as realistic humans.

Even with good intentions, money runs out eventually (they say no ads and no sponsored content) and someone with deep pockets will exploit this.

Eventually everyone will just have to implement the foolproof solution of putting in the rules that saying that their website has a problem is "a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills" and be done with it.

It may be that the people most likely to blindly follow astroturfed suggestions don’t pay attention to these indicators. In which case volume is more important than camouflage.

some people will expend a surprising amount of effort to justify their personal choices

at this point astroturfing is a given... corporations do it, governments do it, individuals do it... anonymous content in aggregate can not be relied on

I think due to the outsized power ads companies (and even those that aren't purely ads founded, like FB, but for which the model of profitability was always ads on the long-horizon) have over the current internet this won't ever go away, in fact it will only keep getting worse, hand in hand with the augmented agentic workflows.

An id-with-options-for-anonymity solution would go a long way but no one is remotely interested in that because it would just crater all these companies valuations if you figured out 60k subscribers were actually 45k bots, and 80% comments were automated agentic replies.

I had launched almost 10 years ago a campaign in indiegogo and immediately got spammed with people selling marketing campaigns, I launched a few days ago one in gamefound and the same happened. Without it, or you investing on your own marketing campaigns it's just impossible to get any traction of sorts, unless you have a network of contacts that themselves can reach organically other people, and the same for other things, like bootstrapping an online social platform. It's almost as if it's a "cost of doing business".

Most of these marketers themselves have automated funnels, now all using agents, there's a lot of tell-tales on the messages you receive and then on the follow ups too - sometimes to the point that the messages just miss completely things you made clear just on the previous message and just follow a funnel to get you through the door. At a certain threshold or when told explicitly sometimes a human goes into the loop, but 2 messages in it's like they reset back to factory defaults...

>s between actual people.

Only for arbitrary people. Gate kept or low member count communities that exist to facilitate a discussion between appliance repair men, literature enthusiasts, fly tying hobbyists or owners of a particular model of vehicle are largely alive and well (unfortunately a lot of them moved from forums to facebook, but still.

reddit is an echo chamber when it comes to most topics, and politics are probably the worst of all. Back in the Gamergate days it was all MRA types (throwback!); in 2016 it became 50% Bernie and 50% Trump; these days it's mostly mainstream liberal. I assume the actual political makeup of the user base hasn't changed that much in that time, but people who obsessively refresh and upvote/downvote posts based on their politics have an outsize impact on what comes to the top. I'm sure there's some impact from automated astroturfing, but humans drive it.

No serious person would ever suggest using it to take the "political temperature" of society at large. It's about as useful as Nextdoor for that.

Damn I haven't seen a Bill Gates conspiracy theory in a long time. What a throwback

I don't think the article is reassuring it is not astroturfed? He studied only a small case, for a brand on the smaller side, and found significant amount of bots.

If you see a single sheep on an island, it is safe to assume there is more than one sheep living on the island.

For a while people were suggesting that adding "reddit" to queries for shopping advice was a real way to get uncensored/genuine commentary and reviews.

Even the first time I saw the advice I was skeptical, reddit is rife with bots, and fake comments/posts. It's been well-known for almost a decade at this point that there are multiple individuals moderating many communities there, and that kinda power is rife for abuse.

I've been a sporadic reddit reader/poster for a few years, but this past month I've had enough and deleted my account. The main draw was niche-topics, but they've been overrun with AI slop, and even the local communities have become echo-chambers rather than posts of new bands, events, etc. The local newspaper can tell me about those already.