> 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.
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" - I'm with you. I prefer forums as well, but when I think about it a little bit I can't say exactly why. Threaded conversations on specific topics, with moderation? That's basically Reddit (and forums). So what do you think it is that makes Reddit feel icky, versus the forums we've had in days of yore? Is it something fundamental about the system/experience, or is it just a "nobody goes there anymore... it's too crowded" problem?
Maybe the difference is the post/comments framing? Rather than an opening post with sequential follow-up replies? Maybe something about voting? Maybe it's all the bolt-on features?
Part of it I think is that old-school forums tended to have tighter-knit communities that weren’t as prone to shifting around. People had to find the forum in the first place and then register a new account to post, which may sound trivial but presents enough friction to filter a lot of people (including many low-quality posters) out.
Contrast this to Reddit: its search and web searches instantly surface subreddits and one account gets you access to the majority of the site. Friction is nearly nonexistent.
I think forums were also less prone to power-tripping moderation. It was still a problem, but there’s not but so big-headed somebody can get about being a mod for some backwoods niche topic forum that will never get all that big.
Finally, some of it is owed to how forums were dominant during a time when the internet was primarily populated by the sorts of people who owned computers then: academics, nerds, and open-minded early adopters. The dynamic was just different. It’s also the part that’d be most difficult to reproduce today.
Reddit started to become questionably relevant that I am even reading real humans anymore for me I'd say around 2021. Covid caused the internet "grift" of karm-farming, content creators shilling miracle products "they love", and hidden agenda posts with affiliate links to really take off. Slowly over time you'd notice fake sounding or off tangent type comments intertwined into threads. Some subreddits were way worse and some still felt pretty clean around that time.
But LLM's have completely and utterly destroyed Reddit. To the point of it feels like it is 75% FAKE conversations and/or astroturfed with only a FEW real people commenting anymore. Plus the LLM's have gotten so much better I catch myself sometimes wondering if a certain comment is from a real person or not. Just too much mental energy required for Reddit now to the point of I hardly go there anymore for anything other specific technical questions.
It is sad because it used to be a wealth of knowledge and community. All of /r/askreddit is just bot started ragebait questions, karma-farming or stupid hypotheticals now. /r/popular is just trashy. Constantly I notice videos that are sometimes 7-10+ years old getting reposted again like they are new, just to get rage conversation started again.
You cannot search for ANY product recommendations anymore. Fake "Hey I tried this brand and it was game-changing". No subreddit is safe. Look at /r/supplements now, it is full of those type comments to innocent topic starting questions that are also probably fake. Off topic stuff such as "xxx brand Beef liver supplement changing my life" when someone asks what brand of multivitamin others prefer.
Reddit used to have a few real cesspool subreddits one could avoid, but now I consider the whole site one. You can't even browse Reddit anymore without being blocked to download their app to continue. Old-Reddit now requires a login. Ads make it unreadable without a blocker.
Ugh. Just the worst of the internet all on display at Reddit now.
Ya this is me. I used to use the web version now im 'required' to have an account. I just create and delete accounts every couple weeks. I use the generic Word-Word-#### and keep my history private.
Out of curiosity, why? The amount of times I’ve banged out a Reddit or hn response and deleted it is almost uncountable. Why do you bother replying to Reddit comments?
Your behavior is even stranger than that which you are questioning. The fact you take the time to type out the response means you also feel the urge to respond, and that urge is strong enough that you don't stop yourself before starting, even though you know you are likely to just delete before sending. It's odd that you would ask why someone would reply to a comment when you should already understand why someone would do that: because they feel the same urge you do, and don't have the compulsion to stop themselves before sending.
> Ya this is me. I used to use the web version now im 'required' to have an account.
Save yourself some trouble, forcing you to sign in is your browsing data stored in cookies. Incognito/private should allow you to browse without being logged in..
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).
> 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've made recommendations a lot more often than that back when I used reddit just through being active in a specific niche-ish subreddit and regularly answering questions with answers that end up saying 'buy [well-known good product that solves this exact problem you want solved]'. Then again, my account was several years old by that point, and I was recommending probably 4-5~ different products depending on the question, all from different sellers, not to mention that I'd answer all kinds of different questions, building goodwill and recognition, so accusing me of being a bot (or just a human who has a financial interest in promoting certain products) probably wouldn't do much, but if you want assume ill-will, it'd be really hard to truly disprove that kind of accusation.
This is why Reddit is a low value high effort distribution channel. When your userbase is hostile and suspicious constantly to any commercial introductions, advertising there becomes just an exercise in futility. The demographic also is problematic on Bluesky. Same on hackernews. Astroturfing is certainly a response to this friction and in turn it only creates more of it.
Also specifically with Reddit they have allowed hiding comment history which makes it even harder, I imagine they did this for boosting ad business
There are much better platforms to spend your effort on like X. X requires many users to purchase a subscription account and thus acts as sort of a litmus test (people who can afford low amount of money per month).
> Also specifically with Reddit they have allowed hiding comment history which makes it even harder
Such a terrible change, and it's apparently the default for new users. I have no way to check if the person I'm about to spend 3 minutes typing a reply to is just bleep-bloop.
It wasn’t just the LLM language, the sections “The corpus” and “What the data supports” were disjointed and unconvincing. Likely due to lack of human wrangling. Unfortunately they were the core of the analysis.
The article does state clearly first that it was first drafted with AI, I appreciate the author's honesty. I wish all AI-assisted articles would do the same.
Well done on getting that far. I noped out after the first sentence, and kicked myself for not realising it just based on the title.
EDIT: oh, hang on, I read some other comments, and it turns out there's an AI disclaimer - and, now I check again, it's true! There is! Well, fair enough then, but I think this disclaimer should come literally right at the start
Niche topics like linux feel somewhat safe from bots. But the last time I checked the more popular subs.. yikes..
When I see 2-weeks old account "Incendiary-Leg-8592" responding to a post by another weeks old user "Pivotal-Kitchen-0498", I have a hard time believing they are humans behind them.
Maybe some niche subs are safe-ish from targeted bots, but I'm seeing some niche subs constantly hit by bots who misunderstand what the sub is actually about and post something that maybe matches the words of the sub's name ... but not the actual intent of the sub. Basically lost bots, and they don't stop.
Also the software / programming subs are just spam hell now.
In the electrician subreddits, it’s painfully obvious whenever something is a bot, since… nobody ever really has anything terribly positive to say about any new brands. There are a few established brands with respect like Fluek, Knipex, and Klein. But it’s mostly a community of haters.
Periodically an account shows up promoting something asinine and it sticks out like a sore thumb.
Doesn't even have to be bots. Just dumb humans who see a sub name like 'fostering' and don't bother to read far enough to see 'CHILDREN' so they post about giving away a dog.
Do you use the "old" reddit view? Reddit introduced display names separate from account usernames, but old reddit doesn't show them. The user that shows up as Incendiary-Leg-8592 on old Reddit might have simply accepted reddit's suggestion when they created their account, and appear to everyone else (whatever the old/new reddit breakdown is) as something less spammy looking.
Assuming you do indeed still use "old" reddit, the next time you see such a comment, open their account page in a private window (or any browser that isn't logged in). They might look different to themselves and most others.
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’s actually easier for astroturfers to pick non-autogenerated names when they create accounts because they won’t feel any pressure to put much thought into it.
I would also bet that the vast majority of human users don’t bother to pick their own name because they don’t initially intend to post, they’re just creating an account because that’s all but required just to even read Reddit these days. Some fraction of them might later be motivated to comment, but by that time the account already exists.
Then you're blocking most people that sign in with Apple or Google, which is what Reddit first suggests. It's still probably a reasonable filter, for tech related people, but not in general
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 think the items listed under "What astroturfing would look like" were a pretty narrow scope. If I were designing a ~spam system~ astroturfing solution, I'd engineer out these four simple indicators as soon as I could.
* Those accounts naming one brand almost every time they name any.
* Thin accounts: few comments, low scores, no real standing in the subreddit.
* Young accounts, or accounts with histories that are hidden or wiped.
* Links to a store or an affiliate page.
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.
I gave up on any product related reviews on Reddit a decade ago. It can still be useful for guides that may describe what type of products you should look into, e.g., woodworking tools, skincare, etc.
For product reviews, I've been using GearLab (https://www.techgearlab.com/) for years with pretty reliable results. I have no affiliation with them.
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.
Man, this comment is getting way more attention than I expected lol
Yes, they work on an affiliated model. From their About[0] page:
How We Make Money
GearLab is a free service that is entirely reader-supported. We select and review products objectively and independently. We only make money when you click on our affiliate links and buy products we've reviewed, which helps support our testing work.
If you click on a retailer's link on our site and make any purchase, the retailer will contribute a portion of the sale to help support this site. It won't cost you anything extra, and it's a simple way to help us fund our gear reviews. Thanks for your support of our work!
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.
No Ads, No Freebies, No Promotion
We refuse to accept any manufacturer's free evaluation units, and we do not accept any paid endorsements. Our focus is strictly on creating content for the benefit of our readers, and we align our business model to focus on our reader's interests.
These days there are central clearing-houses for affiliate links that support basically every store, for the rare case where a product isn't available on Amazon/Best Buy/etc. Matic seems to use something called Impact.com. I don't see why that would be a concern.
Are you suggesting that all retailers even boutique/smaller ones use affiliate codes regularly?
That's an interesting development. I was under the impression that outside of larger retailers, affiliate codes weren't as common.
I'm curious then why did techgearlab not choose to review the matic which is certainly a new interesting player in the robot vaccuum game. I'll have to reach out!
Most items are available from retailers like Amazon or Best Buy that have affiliate programs that work on all items. (They may not have the very best price, but that at least gives the review site something to link to, and more price-conscious people will shop around.) Other retailers participate in clearing-house programs like Impact, and others with charming names like Skimlink, Geni.us, etc.
For the minority of products that are only sold directly by the manufacturer (which includes Matic), yes, I think it would be very unusual not to have an affiliate program. Matic even has a crappy one for consumers. For one thing, YouTubers, who keep absolutely no distance between business and editorial, aren’t gonna talk about your product unless they can put an affiliate link in the description. Sometimes manufacturers will use something like Impact, other times a publisher will need to reach out directly.
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.
> 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.
Because they are not a review aggregator? They purchase the products themselves, do extensive testing, and then publish their results. You can find more about their process on their About page here: https://www.techgearlab.com/about.
I was editing my comment but I can go into detail about what I mean here.
I understand how they operate (it's in the middle of their main page) but that actually makes it more difficult for them. The site commits to test thousands of products each year and they don't do sponsored content, free samples, or ads.
They're walking on a beaten path, see Rtings [0] (even the methodology and visual style, which is a good thing). Everyone eventually needs to look for alternative revenue streams to support themselves especially when the competition is fierce and doesn't always play fair. Affiliate link revenue via Amazon.com is not a reliable long term financing strategy for a review website which has to constantly purchase new stuff and pay qualified reviewers.
Most people search the local market for the product and buy the best deal. It doesn't need to be Amazon.com and in many cases, it can't.
Why not? Wirecutter is a cash cow for the Times; if you can keep people's trust, recommending (and affiliate-linking to) products in semi-luxury categories is a lucrative business!
Wikipedia says the Wirecutter implemented a metered paywall a few years ago as additional source of financing. With the weight of the Times behind them they branched into other areas like podcasts and partnerships with countless other sites. This fits well into what I said in my earlier comment. Running this kind of business is hard and someone with deeper pockets will find an interest in it.
Just a few years after founding and shortly before selling to the Times for 1 year's worth of revenue, Wirecutter trialed a deal with Amazon for sponsored posts, along with exploring other revenue streams [2] like kickbacks.
> if you can keep people's trust
Trustworthiness and money don't always go hand in hand. Facebook is a cash cow and keeps people's trust as they keep coming back. Would you call it a trusted source of information? I remember the pendulum swinging against Wirecutter shortly after the sale. And plenty of reports since [1][2].
Rtings is the authoritative source for reviewing anything with a screen and they struggled financially, having to implement a subscription model.
And at the end of the day, taking Wirecutter as an indisputably trustworthy authority in consumer reviews, anyone else on the market has to compete with them with 2 possible options when reviews go head to head: agree and just be an echo, or contradict and go against the indisputably trustworthy authority. Talk about being between a rock and a hard place.
Maybe I'm, too cynical but the rug has been pulled from under me too many times to count by things that started out trustworthy than found the need or just the allure of money. With the internet only becoming more trustworthy over these past years I'm sure I have no reason to worry, right?
Eh. I see what you mean, but I'm more optimistic about GearLab. I think Wirecutter is different for three reasons:
1. Wirecutter has to review everything. GearLab is more limited; they steer clear of non-technical clothing and their tech arm doesn't even really do camera reviews. They obviously know to avoid categories where there are established review sites that most buyers are loyal to. If Wirecutter misses a category, people will complain - that's the curse of being the "everything" site. Rtings has a similar issue.
2. Wirecutter reviewers work for the Times and are unionized; GearLab hires freelancers.
3. The Times is relying on Wirecutter (alongside Games) to prop up their journalism, which is the spiritual core of their business, and the only part that clearly contributes something to society, but struggles to make money on its own. Putting Wirecutter behind the NYT paywall makes people more likely to sign up for a NYT subscription. GearLab isn't paying for any journalists' pensions.
Wirecutter affiliate links make the Times something like $60-70 million per quarter [1].
My impression is that this doesn't show anything. It essentially implies that brand loyalty is equivalent to paid astroturfing, but if you've been around hobby communities on the internet, you know that a lot of people are just brand blowhards. And in any case, by its own admission, none of the results in this article are statistically significant, so it fails to find the effect it implies to have found.
I strongly believe that there's a lot of paid product placement and paid political talking points on Reddit, so it's actually remarkable that this (LLM-generated) article fails to find it. I suspect it's just bad design.
If you're already spending money on tokens, there's a very simple experiment you could do instead: just pay one of these companies to position a made-up product and see what they do.
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
> REDCmts sells one Reddit comment for $9.99 and 100 for $699.99, from what it calls "real, aged accounts", and shows a gallery of brand mentions it says it delivered. Soar says its accounts are "aged and manually warmed" for weeks before a single brand mention. Bazzly advertises automated replies to every post that looks like someone shopping.
Why doesn't Reddit make sure that shilling is disallowed by their ToS, and then sue these companies and all their customers?
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.
It's extremely unrealistic to sue someone for violating your Terms of Service. It's not impossible -- you'd need to sue them for a breach of contract and demonstrate clear financial damages --, but the primary solution is to just refuse to provide them service.
Like, Reddit may know that Bazzly is selling fake comments, which violates Reddit's ToS. How many comments can they prove are tied to Bazzly? How much does an astro-turfed comment financially harm Reddit, and can they convince a jury of that?
Instead, most companies will aggressively shut down the bot networks, if they can identify them, and hope that the astro-turfers focus on other platforms, and/or make it more financially challenging to do it successfully on theirs.
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.
Literally the example in the comment I replied to was an overseas operator. But my point is even if you did go after spam operators, alternatives will simply pop up in other jurisdictions, as has happened with literally every other form of spam.
When I did dev relations I just messaged people who had decent accounts and an email or other contact and offered them some freebies on our platform, which did lead to a decent number of them posting about it, like I solicited ~200 accounts and had ~10 comment or post about it in the next month. Maybe some kind of service where people could opt into offers?
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.
In Germany e.g. Galaxus works fine for many things. Also eBay surprisingly works better for many things because it has more filters, e.g. if you want to buy wood or window shades etc.
eBay has become a cesspool though, with their silly login requiring phone number and so on. I still remember I had a completely fine Kleinanzeigen account at the beginning of the Pandemic, because I wanted to offer math and computer stuff help for students and put an ad for that on kleinanzeigen. (Didn't ever get a request that was worth taking seriously.) Then at some point later, I suddenly was no longer allowed to log in, unless I disclose my phone number. What a shit. Since then that account sits stale or might already be deleted.
Not sure which you're asking about but, for example, Best Buy price matches Amazon for items where they overlap. And then I can go get the product right away without waiting for shipping. Or paying for Prime. Or supporting Amazon.
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
Same. I got banned from mine for basically having the opinion of the median inhabitant of my city (read: politically moderate, appreciates the police, etc) which wasn’t to the liking of the mods. I gave up on that site after that. Whatever LLM I happen to be using can wade through the sewage and fish out the occasional useful info for me.
IIRC the Reddit founders used bots for initial traffic to skip over the cold start problem. I feel like this bit of lore is actually pretty terrible but is treated as a nice anecdote because it worked.
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...
Post is slop but I was on a call this morning with our go-getter sales guy (he’s calling himself a gtm engineer now) where he talked about alternately buying Reddit comments and going and placing flyers on car windshields himself at offices of potential customers. Our CEO was enthusiastic.
> If the tail shows up in buying threads only because it posts a lot, random reassignment says it should write about 7.9% of the brand mentions there, and almost always between 6.3% and 10.1%. It wrote 11.3%.
Is it just me or is this just a block of painfully hard to parse text? This is core to the author’s analysis.
Rather than pasting the analysis from Claude, the author should just explain it themselves. Just the core of their analysis. It doesn’t have to be 2000 words. Put an AI;DR at the top and give us the core of your argument. I would take a paragraph from a human any day over an essay from Claude.
A large portion of the "New LLM release" story comments here on HN also appear to be astroturfing ... would be interesting to see a correlation of comment sentiment to IP-derived geographic location!
From my experience, they have been astroturfed quite a lot, its' been that way for a while.
During the Laquan McDonald innocent and trial there were tons of accounts from the_donald, and not-connected to that were pretending to be experts and live in chicago (despite not having history on the sub). In the threads these accounts weren't positively contributing to the conversation, they were spewing:
1. Direct racial slurs
2. Political proganda criticising leadership they didn't like (not having direct experience and not critiqing direct political actions that lead to the event). I.e. "Chicago is a warzone"/etc.
3. Maliciously bad faith arguements. (Non-regulars steering up arguments to push talking points.. these weren't well intention-ed factual/communicative debates)
Since then: There have been heavy agenda pushing on subs. For example scooters and bikes, after the introduction of rentable ebikes and scooters.. there was heavy votes and arguements over people who criticized the business and users behavior. (When the scooters were added to the city, there were lots of posts about destroying them.. now there are not recognizable accounts arguing and attacking you if you comment on this.. a comment about defending yourself against someone riding aggressively near you gets you site wide banned). Note: the attacks in support for scooters aren't consistent.. sometimes you get breakthroughs talking about the negative impact.
On r/privacy, there are groups of people that grief others about "well you can't do anything about this". I'm not talking about people expressing how they feel, I'm talking about direct denialism and griefing in a sub that is expressly meant to be pro-privacy.
Additionally, the DNC did this on r/wisconsin in 2024. They even used social manipulation tactics with calls to actions that "we must do something." There was documentation about this was coordinated efforts.
This has been documented on accounts that are necro-ing old posts for product recommendations as well.
Theres a lot that is claimed on the Ellen Pao == hitler drama actually being a Spez lead campaign in a business lead fight. (Turns out it was spez that wanted to roll out a lot of the restrictive features and sub removals, and Pao was more of a "let's be less resirictive and socially moderated" )
Ads, scams, rage bait, trolls... The internet is pretty broken for almost all sites that pretends to carry conversations between actual people.
I don't understand why so many people and companies feel the need to just spam reviews, SEO and questionable ads. It's like almost no one has the idea that may we start with a good product, then we'll tell people about it. It's always a question of what you can have produced cheaply in China and how do we then trick people into buying it.
As it stand you can pretty much assume that if it's advertised, or is promoted on social media, it's going to be a shit product.
To some extend I'd exclude certain types of YouTube reviews, because they frequently aren't paid by the manufacturer and making a video with real people and real data is to expensive to waste on scams.
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.
> Adding "reddit" to a knife search still gets you humans, mostly. For a couple of brands, a quarter to a third of the buying advice comes from accounts that mostly recommend that brand. Whether those are fans or paid, I do not know, and after reading their histories I lean toward fans and hold the lean loosely.
Very long write up to unconfidently say I don’t know.
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.
> The practical check is the one the data endorses: when a knife recommendation comes from an account you do not recognize, click through and see whether it has ever named a different brand.
This isn't even most of the times possible, since both humans and bot alike on Reddit now hides their comment/submission history, so it just shows a blank page.
No, I think it's best to just default to assuming everyone is a bot, so to say, and read everything critically regardless of what the source may be.
That this was posted by someone who's only here to post his own sites and those sites have never been submitted by another person is like performance art.
Perhaps we can envision a future in which we analyze Reddit data not according to all the positive things people say about a product, but according to the negative things being said.
Shilling can’t prevent dissatisfied customers from voicing their opinions in a properly moderated subreddit, and astroturfing to spread misinformation about a competitor makes companies much more vulnerable to litigation.
Is product astroturfing illegal in any jurisdictions? I can't see a particularly compelling reason for allowing advice from people deliberately concealing a financial incentive.
I'd say it failed in that it became an echo chamber - there isn't real public to shape. It would have probably been more effective if done a bit more subtly, which makes it scary to realize that 'effective' propaganda looks like open discourse to the average user.
Almost a bigger threat than astroturfing is biased parties, be it brands or brand managers, taking over as moderators to sway content and suppress content they don't like. Happened in a bunch of artist and influencer subs.
Isn't there? Especially when crypto was booming, that kind of opinion manipulation definitely existed to deceive people. I've actually seen it in freelance requests before too, and most of the time they run it through phone farms.
I've also heard it happens in some games as well, but either way, the one I can say for certain is crypto.
There are probably others who think those comments come from bots.
Many long-tenured blog authors claim they don't touch code anymore as well. I think that lends credibility to the veracity of the claim, as shocking as it is to you as an individual.
Yes, yes it does. There's astroturfing of every variety: political, brands, image rehab, you name it.
Just look at how often Bill Gates gets glazing articles posted which receive suspicious rankings. None of the comments mention the Epstein-sized elephants in the room.
Politics is even worse, and it's useless as a platform for taking political temperature. Numerous companies openly admit to this activity and Reddit has never commented on this practice.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> Bring back forums.
Here's an active and good privacy forum: 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: https://discuss.grapheneos.org
"Bring back forums" - I'm with you. I prefer forums as well, but when I think about it a little bit I can't say exactly why. Threaded conversations on specific topics, with moderation? That's basically Reddit (and forums). So what do you think it is that makes Reddit feel icky, versus the forums we've had in days of yore? Is it something fundamental about the system/experience, or is it just a "nobody goes there anymore... it's too crowded" problem?
Maybe the difference is the post/comments framing? Rather than an opening post with sequential follow-up replies? Maybe something about voting? Maybe it's all the bolt-on features?
Part of it I think is that old-school forums tended to have tighter-knit communities that weren’t as prone to shifting around. People had to find the forum in the first place and then register a new account to post, which may sound trivial but presents enough friction to filter a lot of people (including many low-quality posters) out.
Contrast this to Reddit: its search and web searches instantly surface subreddits and one account gets you access to the majority of the site. Friction is nearly nonexistent.
I think forums were also less prone to power-tripping moderation. It was still a problem, but there’s not but so big-headed somebody can get about being a mod for some backwoods niche topic forum that will never get all that big.
Finally, some of it is owed to how forums were dominant during a time when the internet was primarily populated by the sorts of people who owned computers then: academics, nerds, and open-minded early adopters. The dynamic was just different. It’s also the part that’d be most difficult to reproduce today.
Reddit started to become questionably relevant that I am even reading real humans anymore for me I'd say around 2021. Covid caused the internet "grift" of karm-farming, content creators shilling miracle products "they love", and hidden agenda posts with affiliate links to really take off. Slowly over time you'd notice fake sounding or off tangent type comments intertwined into threads. Some subreddits were way worse and some still felt pretty clean around that time.
But LLM's have completely and utterly destroyed Reddit. To the point of it feels like it is 75% FAKE conversations and/or astroturfed with only a FEW real people commenting anymore. Plus the LLM's have gotten so much better I catch myself sometimes wondering if a certain comment is from a real person or not. Just too much mental energy required for Reddit now to the point of I hardly go there anymore for anything other specific technical questions.
It is sad because it used to be a wealth of knowledge and community. All of /r/askreddit is just bot started ragebait questions, karma-farming or stupid hypotheticals now. /r/popular is just trashy. Constantly I notice videos that are sometimes 7-10+ years old getting reposted again like they are new, just to get rage conversation started again.
You cannot search for ANY product recommendations anymore. Fake "Hey I tried this brand and it was game-changing". No subreddit is safe. Look at /r/supplements now, it is full of those type comments to innocent topic starting questions that are also probably fake. Off topic stuff such as "xxx brand Beef liver supplement changing my life" when someone asks what brand of multivitamin others prefer.
Reddit used to have a few real cesspool subreddits one could avoid, but now I consider the whole site one. You can't even browse Reddit anymore without being blocked to download their app to continue. Old-Reddit now requires a login. Ads make it unreadable without a blocker.
Ugh. Just the worst of the internet all on display at Reddit now.
Ya this is me. I used to use the web version now im 'required' to have an account. I just create and delete accounts every couple weeks. I use the generic Word-Word-#### and keep my history private.
Out of curiosity, why? The amount of times I’ve banged out a Reddit or hn response and deleted it is almost uncountable. Why do you bother replying to Reddit comments?
You need an account just to browse old.reddit.com now, there's some extensions that do an okay job of emulating it but it's not quite the same.
Working proxies (though probably the emulation you're referring to):
https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib-instances/blob/main/ins...
They didn't even say they reply to anything. Perhaps they use it entirely to post local news stories.
Unless you have a reliable social network with reach, reddit is still the reliable way to get some answers for one niche or another.
"A", not "the".
Your behavior is even stranger than that which you are questioning. The fact you take the time to type out the response means you also feel the urge to respond, and that urge is strong enough that you don't stop yourself before starting, even though you know you are likely to just delete before sending. It's odd that you would ask why someone would reply to a comment when you should already understand why someone would do that: because they feel the same urge you do, and don't have the compulsion to stop themselves before sending.
> Ya this is me. I used to use the web version now im 'required' to have an account.
Save yourself some trouble, forcing you to sign in is your browsing data stored in cookies. Incognito/private should allow you to browse without being logged in..
> This article was drafted with AI from my outline
Maybe just post your human outline and the data, where the data processing and viz is AI assisted if you like.
The synthetic prose is not a value-add over your outline. It takes time to read, and reduces the bit-rate over your intentions.
AI loopity. Where AI is used to generate unnecessary prose that others summarize via AI. This exacerbates lossy communication.
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).
> 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've made recommendations a lot more often than that back when I used reddit just through being active in a specific niche-ish subreddit and regularly answering questions with answers that end up saying 'buy [well-known good product that solves this exact problem you want solved]'. Then again, my account was several years old by that point, and I was recommending probably 4-5~ different products depending on the question, all from different sellers, not to mention that I'd answer all kinds of different questions, building goodwill and recognition, so accusing me of being a bot (or just a human who has a financial interest in promoting certain products) probably wouldn't do much, but if you want assume ill-will, it'd be really hard to truly disprove that kind of accusation.
This is why Reddit is a low value high effort distribution channel. When your userbase is hostile and suspicious constantly to any commercial introductions, advertising there becomes just an exercise in futility. The demographic also is problematic on Bluesky. Same on hackernews. Astroturfing is certainly a response to this friction and in turn it only creates more of it.
Also specifically with Reddit they have allowed hiding comment history which makes it even harder, I imagine they did this for boosting ad business
There are much better platforms to spend your effort on like X. X requires many users to purchase a subscription account and thus acts as sort of a litmus test (people who can afford low amount of money per month).
> Also specifically with Reddit they have allowed hiding comment history which makes it even harder
Such a terrible change, and it's apparently the default for new users. I have no way to check if the person I'm about to spend 3 minutes typing a reply to is just bleep-bloop.
> There are much better platforms to spend your effort on like X
That was a good punchline!
"The corpus, and the refresh that changed the answer" ... hello Opus 5.
I found the article very hard to read. I have never used Opus 5 so not even negatively biased.
It wasn’t just the LLM language, the sections “The corpus” and “What the data supports” were disjointed and unconvincing. Likely due to lack of human wrangling. Unfortunately they were the core of the analysis.
The article does state clearly first that it was first drafted with AI, I appreciate the author's honesty. I wish all AI-assisted articles would do the same.
Even better would be if the draft were written _first_ by a human, then edited in collaboration with AI.
My brain at some point refused to read past paragraph 3 and I just felt defeat.
An article talking about astroturfing but so tone deaf as to not even rewrite its ai generated content to be human readable.
It truly feels like the dead internet.
Well done on getting that far. I noped out after the first sentence, and kicked myself for not realising it just based on the title.
EDIT: oh, hang on, I read some other comments, and it turns out there's an AI disclaimer - and, now I check again, it's true! There is! Well, fair enough then, but I think this disclaimer should come literally right at the start
Niche topics like linux feel somewhat safe from bots. But the last time I checked the more popular subs.. yikes..
When I see 2-weeks old account "Incendiary-Leg-8592" responding to a post by another weeks old user "Pivotal-Kitchen-0498", I have a hard time believing they are humans behind them.
Maybe some niche subs are safe-ish from targeted bots, but I'm seeing some niche subs constantly hit by bots who misunderstand what the sub is actually about and post something that maybe matches the words of the sub's name ... but not the actual intent of the sub. Basically lost bots, and they don't stop.
Also the software / programming subs are just spam hell now.
it's a little funny to see just how much astroturfing there is for some software, and how creatively it can be worked into some posts.
>Also the software / programming subs are just spam hell now.
"i got tired of x so i built y" is my entire feed. none of my niches are safe. heartbreaking
In the electrician subreddits, it’s painfully obvious whenever something is a bot, since… nobody ever really has anything terribly positive to say about any new brands. There are a few established brands with respect like Fluek, Knipex, and Klein. But it’s mostly a community of haters.
Periodically an account shows up promoting something asinine and it sticks out like a sore thumb.
Doesn't even have to be bots. Just dumb humans who see a sub name like 'fostering' and don't bother to read far enough to see 'CHILDREN' so they post about giving away a dog.
They're not lost. They're building up a history of non-spam posts.
Do you use the "old" reddit view? Reddit introduced display names separate from account usernames, but old reddit doesn't show them. The user that shows up as Incendiary-Leg-8592 on old Reddit might have simply accepted reddit's suggestion when they created their account, and appear to everyone else (whatever the old/new reddit breakdown is) as something less spammy looking.
Assuming you do indeed still use "old" reddit, the next time you see such a comment, open their account page in a private window (or any browser that isn't logged in). They might look different to themselves and most others.
old reddit is only accessible by blocking access to www. Account pages are also dynamically hidden and it can be difficult to do that.
Oh no its not. It's just less invaded.. it will get worse with the more people that use it.
Word-Word-#### have become the norm ever since they've been pushing mobile users to use reddit. They also are a good source of questionable users.
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.
This seems like a bad shibboleth.
It’s actually easier for astroturfers to pick non-autogenerated names when they create accounts because they won’t feel any pressure to put much thought into it.
I would also bet that the vast majority of human users don’t bother to pick their own name because they don’t initially intend to post, they’re just creating an account because that’s all but required just to even read Reddit these days. Some fraction of them might later be motivated to comment, but by that time the account already exists.
Then you're blocking most people that sign in with Apple or Google, which is what Reddit first suggests. It's still probably a reasonable filter, for tech related people, but not in general
Maybe isn't of hiding, it can colour highlight it. At least then, you have some potential context.
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 think the items listed under "What astroturfing would look like" were a pretty narrow scope. If I were designing a ~spam system~ astroturfing solution, I'd engineer out these four simple indicators as soon as I could.
* Those accounts naming one brand almost every time they name any. * Thin accounts: few comments, low scores, no real standing in the subreddit. * Young accounts, or accounts with histories that are hidden or wiped. * Links to a store or an affiliate page.
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.
I was only thinking about detection evasion. The indicators listed would stick out like a sore thumb.
I gave up on any product related reviews on Reddit a decade ago. It can still be useful for guides that may describe what type of products you should look into, e.g., woodworking tools, skincare, etc.
For product reviews, I've been using GearLab (https://www.techgearlab.com/) for years with pretty reliable results. I have no affiliation with them.
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.
Man, this comment is getting way more attention than I expected lol
Yes, they work on an affiliated model. From their About[0] page:
[0] https://www.techgearlab.com/aboutI 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.
From their About[0] page:
Again, not affiliated; just a satisfied user.[0] https://www.techgearlab.com/about
At the top of the home page:
> When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission, which helps support our testing.
That’s what the parent comment was referring to
Yes, I assume when they choose "who to test" affiliate commission is factored in.
These days there are central clearing-houses for affiliate links that support basically every store, for the rare case where a product isn't available on Amazon/Best Buy/etc. Matic seems to use something called Impact.com. I don't see why that would be a concern.
Are you suggesting that all retailers even boutique/smaller ones use affiliate codes regularly?
That's an interesting development. I was under the impression that outside of larger retailers, affiliate codes weren't as common.
I'm curious then why did techgearlab not choose to review the matic which is certainly a new interesting player in the robot vaccuum game. I'll have to reach out!
Most items are available from retailers like Amazon or Best Buy that have affiliate programs that work on all items. (They may not have the very best price, but that at least gives the review site something to link to, and more price-conscious people will shop around.) Other retailers participate in clearing-house programs like Impact, and others with charming names like Skimlink, Geni.us, etc.
For the minority of products that are only sold directly by the manufacturer (which includes Matic), yes, I think it would be very unusual not to have an affiliate program. Matic even has a crappy one for consumers. For one thing, YouTubers, who keep absolutely no distance between business and editorial, aren’t gonna talk about your product unless they can put an affiliate link in the description. Sometimes manufacturers will use something like Impact, other times a publisher will need to reach out directly.
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.
Project Farm (https://www.youtube.com/@ProjectFarm).
> 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.
Because they are not a review aggregator? They purchase the products themselves, do extensive testing, and then publish their results. You can find more about their process on their About page here: https://www.techgearlab.com/about.
I was editing my comment but I can go into detail about what I mean here.
I understand how they operate (it's in the middle of their main page) but that actually makes it more difficult for them. The site commits to test thousands of products each year and they don't do sponsored content, free samples, or ads.
They're walking on a beaten path, see Rtings [0] (even the methodology and visual style, which is a good thing). Everyone eventually needs to look for alternative revenue streams to support themselves especially when the competition is fierce and doesn't always play fair. Affiliate link revenue via Amazon.com is not a reliable long term financing strategy for a review website which has to constantly purchase new stuff and pay qualified reviewers.
Most people search the local market for the product and buy the best deal. It doesn't need to be Amazon.com and in many cases, it can't.
[0] https://www.rtings.com/company/revamping-our-membership-prog...
Why not? Wirecutter is a cash cow for the Times; if you can keep people's trust, recommending (and affiliate-linking to) products in semi-luxury categories is a lucrative business!
Don't ignore survivorship bias.
> Wirecutter is a cash cow for the Times
Wikipedia says the Wirecutter implemented a metered paywall a few years ago as additional source of financing. With the weight of the Times behind them they branched into other areas like podcasts and partnerships with countless other sites. This fits well into what I said in my earlier comment. Running this kind of business is hard and someone with deeper pockets will find an interest in it.
Just a few years after founding and shortly before selling to the Times for 1 year's worth of revenue, Wirecutter trialed a deal with Amazon for sponsored posts, along with exploring other revenue streams [2] like kickbacks.
> if you can keep people's trust
Trustworthiness and money don't always go hand in hand. Facebook is a cash cow and keeps people's trust as they keep coming back. Would you call it a trusted source of information? I remember the pendulum swinging against Wirecutter shortly after the sale. And plenty of reports since [1][2].
Rtings is the authoritative source for reviewing anything with a screen and they struggled financially, having to implement a subscription model.
And at the end of the day, taking Wirecutter as an indisputably trustworthy authority in consumer reviews, anyone else on the market has to compete with them with 2 possible options when reviews go head to head: agree and just be an echo, or contradict and go against the indisputably trustworthy authority. Talk about being between a rock and a hard place.
Maybe I'm, too cynical but the rug has been pulled from under me too many times to count by things that started out trustworthy than found the need or just the allure of money. With the internet only becoming more trustworthy over these past years I'm sure I have no reason to worry, right?
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/08/wirec...
[2] https://www.xdesk.com/wirecutter-standing-desk-review-pay-to...
Eh. I see what you mean, but I'm more optimistic about GearLab. I think Wirecutter is different for three reasons:
1. Wirecutter has to review everything. GearLab is more limited; they steer clear of non-technical clothing and their tech arm doesn't even really do camera reviews. They obviously know to avoid categories where there are established review sites that most buyers are loyal to. If Wirecutter misses a category, people will complain - that's the curse of being the "everything" site. Rtings has a similar issue.
2. Wirecutter reviewers work for the Times and are unionized; GearLab hires freelancers.
3. The Times is relying on Wirecutter (alongside Games) to prop up their journalism, which is the spiritual core of their business, and the only part that clearly contributes something to society, but struggles to make money on its own. Putting Wirecutter behind the NYT paywall makes people more likely to sign up for a NYT subscription. GearLab isn't paying for any journalists' pensions.
Wirecutter affiliate links make the Times something like $60-70 million per quarter [1].
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/06/business/media/new-york-t...
Why are you answering questions for this site and pointing to their official material?
Presumably because it's a good site and the qualms people are expressing with it here have no basis in reality.
My impression is that this doesn't show anything. It essentially implies that brand loyalty is equivalent to paid astroturfing, but if you've been around hobby communities on the internet, you know that a lot of people are just brand blowhards. And in any case, by its own admission, none of the results in this article are statistically significant, so it fails to find the effect it implies to have found.
I strongly believe that there's a lot of paid product placement and paid political talking points on Reddit, so it's actually remarkable that this (LLM-generated) article fails to find it. I suspect it's just bad design.
If you're already spending money on tokens, there's a very simple experiment you could do instead: just pay one of these companies to position a made-up product and see what they do.
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
Ask HN: what would you do if you were operating reddit?
What are some good counter measure, besides ban hammer?
Behavioural analysis of how the user uses the site to identify real people.
Then, textual analysis to detect when they’re promoting something specific. This is not hard to detect across the set of all active posters.
> REDCmts sells one Reddit comment for $9.99 and 100 for $699.99, from what it calls "real, aged accounts", and shows a gallery of brand mentions it says it delivered. Soar says its accounts are "aged and manually warmed" for weeks before a single brand mention. Bazzly advertises automated replies to every post that looks like someone shopping.
Why doesn't Reddit make sure that shilling is disallowed by their ToS, and then sue these companies and all their customers?
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.
YCombinator is not a social company. They actually do a ton to try to stop this stuff, it's just hard.
Maybe they weren't before they IPO'd.
> Because the only metric that matters for social media is engagement
True, but what if a third party existed to measure and compare other metrics that users would actually care about across popular platforms?
It's extremely unrealistic to sue someone for violating your Terms of Service. It's not impossible -- you'd need to sue them for a breach of contract and demonstrate clear financial damages --, but the primary solution is to just refuse to provide them service.
Like, Reddit may know that Bazzly is selling fake comments, which violates Reddit's ToS. How many comments can they prove are tied to Bazzly? How much does an astro-turfed comment financially harm Reddit, and can they convince a jury of that?
Instead, most companies will aggressively shut down the bot networks, if they can identify them, and hope that the astro-turfers focus on other platforms, and/or make it more financially challenging to do it successfully on theirs.
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 think that reddit's recent change to allow hiding comment history is exactly to help support shilling.
It makes it hard to see what's a bot and what's a legitimate account.
Yep.
Owners of Reddit also own these companies.
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.
Overseas operators? Nonsense.
I know US people who do this for a living
Technically this is something the FTC could get involved in as it's illegal to advertise without making it clear you are.
A few years back a bunch of influencers were fined for doing just that.
Literally the example in the comment I replied to was an overseas operator. But my point is even if you did go after spam operators, alternatives will simply pop up in other jurisdictions, as has happened with literally every other form of spam.
Humans get paid to make astroturfing comments on old Reddit accounts? And make enough for a living?Where do I sign up ?
What does it cost for Hacker News comments? Is there no YC startup for manipulating this discussion?
A lot of these services are sold privately. I have no doubt it exists for HN
When I did dev relations I just messaged people who had decent accounts and an email or other contact and offered them some freebies on our platform, which did lead to a decent number of them posting about it, like I solicited ~200 accounts and had ~10 comment or post about it in the next month. Maybe some kind of service where people could opt into offers?
I'm assuming it already falls under rules 2 and 5, content manipulation and deceptive interactions
Feel free to share your detection method!
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.
> For the same reason Amazon doesn't solve fake reviews.
Just like scam ads for Google and Facebook.
> left for better options
Please name one
Genuinely asking
In Germany e.g. Galaxus works fine for many things. Also eBay surprisingly works better for many things because it has more filters, e.g. if you want to buy wood or window shades etc.
eBay has become a cesspool though, with their silly login requiring phone number and so on. I still remember I had a completely fine Kleinanzeigen account at the beginning of the Pandemic, because I wanted to offer math and computer stuff help for students and put an ad for that on kleinanzeigen. (Didn't ever get a request that was worth taking seriously.) Then at some point later, I suddenly was no longer allowed to log in, unless I disclose my phone number. What a shit. Since then that account sits stale or might already be deleted.
Not sure which you're asking about but, for example, Best Buy price matches Amazon for items where they overlap. And then I can go get the product right away without waiting for shipping. Or paying for Prime. Or supporting Amazon.
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
Why are they calling its primary funtion a problem?
Yes.
I do it locally to nudge political discourse. Doesn't take much to sway a lot of people.
I'm glad I agree with what I'm doing because its effectiveness is terrifying.
You just sound like a bad person?
If trying to nudge public opinion makes you a bad person, aren't you guilty of the same with this comment?
I'm almost certain a small group of uni aged kids are doing this to my local subreddit.
Same. I got banned from mine for basically having the opinion of the median inhabitant of my city (read: politically moderate, appreciates the police, etc) which wasn’t to the liking of the mods. I gave up on that site after that. Whatever LLM I happen to be using can wade through the sewage and fish out the occasional useful info for me.
IIRC the Reddit founders used bots for initial traffic to skip over the cold start problem. I feel like this bit of lore is actually pretty terrible but is treated as a nice anecdote because it worked.
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...
and then the Digg tidal wave
Post is slop but I was on a call this morning with our go-getter sales guy (he’s calling himself a gtm engineer now) where he talked about alternately buying Reddit comments and going and placing flyers on car windshields himself at offices of potential customers. Our CEO was enthusiastic.
This is why you need to write your own content.
> If the tail shows up in buying threads only because it posts a lot, random reassignment says it should write about 7.9% of the brand mentions there, and almost always between 6.3% and 10.1%. It wrote 11.3%.
Is it just me or is this just a block of painfully hard to parse text? This is core to the author’s analysis.
Rather than pasting the analysis from Claude, the author should just explain it themselves. Just the core of their analysis. It doesn’t have to be 2000 words. Put an AI;DR at the top and give us the core of your argument. I would take a paragraph from a human any day over an essay from Claude.
Sounds interesting but I find it kind of annoying the github source either has been nuked or never existed in the first place.
Reddit added an option to hide your post history, making it harder to figure out if the account is a bot.
Artic Shift stills show reddit post and comment history even if it's hidden on reddit:
https://arctic-shift.photon-reddit.com/search
I'm sure reddit will kill it at some point like they did Reveddit and Unddit, but it works for now.
Why would I trust an article written in Claudish with a broken link to a github repo?
The AI writing makes this unreadable.
A large portion of the "New LLM release" story comments here on HN also appear to be astroturfing ... would be interesting to see a correlation of comment sentiment to IP-derived geographic location!
Don't you just have to use Reddit to learn the answer is yes?
The sooner you realize the internet is dead (and has been), the less anxiety you'll have.
From my experience, they have been astroturfed quite a lot, its' been that way for a while.
During the Laquan McDonald innocent and trial there were tons of accounts from the_donald, and not-connected to that were pretending to be experts and live in chicago (despite not having history on the sub). In the threads these accounts weren't positively contributing to the conversation, they were spewing:
1. Direct racial slurs 2. Political proganda criticising leadership they didn't like (not having direct experience and not critiqing direct political actions that lead to the event). I.e. "Chicago is a warzone"/etc. 3. Maliciously bad faith arguements. (Non-regulars steering up arguments to push talking points.. these weren't well intention-ed factual/communicative debates)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Laquan_McDonald
Since then: There have been heavy agenda pushing on subs. For example scooters and bikes, after the introduction of rentable ebikes and scooters.. there was heavy votes and arguements over people who criticized the business and users behavior. (When the scooters were added to the city, there were lots of posts about destroying them.. now there are not recognizable accounts arguing and attacking you if you comment on this.. a comment about defending yourself against someone riding aggressively near you gets you site wide banned). Note: the attacks in support for scooters aren't consistent.. sometimes you get breakthroughs talking about the negative impact.
On r/privacy, there are groups of people that grief others about "well you can't do anything about this". I'm not talking about people expressing how they feel, I'm talking about direct denialism and griefing in a sub that is expressly meant to be pro-privacy.
Additionally, the DNC did this on r/wisconsin in 2024. They even used social manipulation tactics with calls to actions that "we must do something." There was documentation about this was coordinated efforts.
This has been documented on accounts that are necro-ing old posts for product recommendations as well.
Theres a lot that is claimed on the Ellen Pao == hitler drama actually being a Spez lead campaign in a business lead fight. (Turns out it was spez that wanted to roll out a lot of the restrictive features and sub removals, and Pao was more of a "let's be less resirictive and socially moderated" )
https://reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/2zcbyq/what_is_go...
Ads, scams, rage bait, trolls... The internet is pretty broken for almost all sites that pretends to carry conversations between actual people.
I don't understand why so many people and companies feel the need to just spam reviews, SEO and questionable ads. It's like almost no one has the idea that may we start with a good product, then we'll tell people about it. It's always a question of what you can have produced cheaply in China and how do we then trick people into buying it.
As it stand you can pretty much assume that if it's advertised, or is promoted on social media, it's going to be a shit product.
To some extend I'd exclude certain types of YouTube reviews, because they frequently aren't paid by the manufacturer and making a video with real people and real data is to expensive to waste on scams.
>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.
> Unfortunately, advertisers are getting smarter and using bots...
I honestly thought this was a nag asking me to turn off my ad blocker!
> Adding "reddit" to a knife search still gets you humans, mostly. For a couple of brands, a quarter to a third of the buying advice comes from accounts that mostly recommend that brand. Whether those are fans or paid, I do not know, and after reading their histories I lean toward fans and hold the lean loosely.
Very long write up to unconfidently say I don’t know.
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.
> The practical check is the one the data endorses: when a knife recommendation comes from an account you do not recognize, click through and see whether it has ever named a different brand.
This isn't even most of the times possible, since both humans and bot alike on Reddit now hides their comment/submission history, so it just shows a blank page.
No, I think it's best to just default to assuming everyone is a bot, so to say, and read everything critically regardless of what the source may be.
That this was posted by someone who's only here to post his own sites and those sites have never been submitted by another person is like performance art.
No one reads my blog, should I never post my own articles?
And (at least some parts of) the article is clearly written by AI.
Perhaps we can envision a future in which we analyze Reddit data not according to all the positive things people say about a product, but according to the negative things being said.
Shilling can’t prevent dissatisfied customers from voicing their opinions in a properly moderated subreddit, and astroturfing to spread misinformation about a competitor makes companies much more vulnerable to litigation.
That's just ad products. I am convinced brands do this one their own subreddits all the time.
Saying postive or neutral statements, say a negative thing, not downvoted but zeroed.
Dead internet is absolutely true
Is product astroturfing illegal in any jurisdictions? I can't see a particularly compelling reason for allowing advice from people deliberately concealing a financial incentive.
https://www.theverge.com/tech/975398/reddit-ai-rules-hub-mod...
I was banned by their new AI moderation system. Then I appealed it and got a message saying "Our slop banned you by mistake." (paraphrased)
Then I was banned again by their new AI moderation system.
Then I deleted my post history using Power Delete Suite and stopped using reddit.
https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
Let their bots moderate bots.
anyone who ever says no to this hasn't ever posted on reddit.
Per Reddit itself and Google, astroturfing is especially bad in political subreddits. Attempting to shape public perception is a big business.
I'd say it failed in that it became an echo chamber - there isn't real public to shape. It would have probably been more effective if done a bit more subtly, which makes it scary to realize that 'effective' propaganda looks like open discourse to the average user.
Almost a bigger threat than astroturfing is biased parties, be it brands or brand managers, taking over as moderators to sway content and suppress content they don't like. Happened in a bunch of artist and influencer subs.
Isn't there? Especially when crypto was booming, that kind of opinion manipulation definitely existed to deceive people. I've actually seen it in freelance requests before too, and most of the time they run it through phone farms.
I've also heard it happens in some games as well, but either way, the one I can say for certain is crypto.
All this time I've been oblivious to this. To this day I still write site:reddit.com in my searches to get information from people. SMH.
Am I the only person who thinks many of the various "I don't touch code anymore" comments here come from bots?
There are probably others who think those comments come from bots.
Many long-tenured blog authors claim they don't touch code anymore as well. I think that lends credibility to the veracity of the claim, as shocking as it is to you as an individual.
I think a lot of them came from people who never touched code in the first place.
Absolutely. For example, the blatant ads for Stake https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/1s3yscz/how_reddit_us...
Yes, yes it does. There's astroturfing of every variety: political, brands, image rehab, you name it.
Just look at how often Bill Gates gets glazing articles posted which receive suspicious rankings. None of the comments mention the Epstein-sized elephants in the room.
Politics is even worse, and it's useless as a platform for taking political temperature. Numerous companies openly admit to this activity and Reddit has never commented on this practice.
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
A truly load-bearing article that reassures us that Reddit is not astroturfed.
Of course, AI coding agents, which the author works on, would also never be astroturfed on Reddit!
You know, astroturfing on Reddit also comes from long time accounts with moderator support.
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.