In 51,129 comments from six knife subreddits, the 5% most brand-heavy accounts wrote 11.3% of the brand mentions in buying threads, against 7.9% expected by chance. For one brand it is 31% against 8%. The full Reddit…
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To give a simple example, one video game franchise subreddit bans any negative discussion on the most recent title. Over 5-10 years, this shielded them from negative feedback. But the franchise has tanked because core users weren't listened to, and they ended up making something nobody wanted.
Reddit's system rewards these low effort posts for some reason. Over time, the platform becomes less and less trustworthy until it becomes something like Quora.
Their own rules forbid low effort posts:
"No off-topic comments, memes, low-effort comments or jokes"
The users themselves are killing it.
Tragedy? Low-effort memes
Someone in high esteem passes away unexpectedly? Low-effort memes
Slow descend into fascism? Low-effort memes
Shareholders want to get paid. CEO wants to get paid.
The primary KPI's are revenue and profit, customer satisfaction will only matter if people actively quit.
I started to get banned from subreddits after giving perfectly polite comments which happened to be contrary to popular opinion, so stopped posting on Reddit and only read it with an ad-blocking browser.
Don't give them content, don't give them your data and revenue. Reddit know full well that there should be an appeal process to user-mod nazi's. But these people obsessively post new content on their forums and so are protected.
Such topics tend to naturally create opinionated flame wars, politics just being the most obvious example, but the subreddit mods often take a side even though the subreddit may advertise itself as the general hub for the topic.
No. I'm not nasty or disrespectful. I just disagree and give the reasons why.
I try to be helpful but I no longer care. I only glance at the titles in case something new shows up. I don't want to sound like I'm bragging but, as I said, I'm an expert in one area and experienced in the other and reddit users lose that. I know others feel the same way and never go there. I wish I wouldn't.
Tried to clear a confusion between DDR5 / LPDDR5 / DIMM standards and cited the relevant JEDEC standards with specific quotes? Get downvoted, all of arguments ignored and replied with more false information.
Tried to argue that, even if given a charitable interpretation, some units of measurement could be confused if not written correctly (on a conversation where such confusion was clearly happening already)? Downvoted.
Explain the difference between latency and throughput? Explain that O(1) ⊂ O(n)?
Reddit is full of idiots who are too confident about things they don't understand and aren't humble enough to admit they're wrong, so they just insist and I just don't care anymore.
And let's not even get started about having nuance and a balance point of view in politics.
This is just the nefarious nature of karma-based systems. It also applies here. I find reddit's shadow banning/shadow hiding especially offensive. (Just think for a moment how utterly disgusting it is that such a feature was intentionally designed, implemented, and is now maintained.)
Not downvoting legitimate (but unpopular) comments is protected by the various rule systems (reddiquette, HN guidelines), but of course rule adherence is (very) low (especially on reddit).
> I wish I wouldn't.
Me too. And here as well.
> 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.
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.
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?
Why so low?
I think it is higher than 99%
> Can't post honest questions anymore without posting obviously phony pandering banter first to increase your karma
Or just buy a "pre aged" account. They're only a few cents each if you buy them in bulk.
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
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.
> Young accounts, or accounts with histories that are hidden or wiped.
DDG search "buy pre-aged reddit accounts" and you will find all of these. You can even search reddit for this.
The author of the article has no fucking idea what they are talking about. Buying "comments" is for chumps.
> I score it this way because an account that keeps bringing up the same brand is the product the vendors above are selling.
Or man, I just like my knife: It's older than my kid, and I've never had to do anything but hone it, and it'll still cut a piece of paper or a tomato no sweat. The next comment will be someone asking what brand of knife it is.
I have a 15+ year old account that has a hidden history because far too many times someone dug through my comments, took something out of context, and pivoted to that instead of the actual conversation.
My take is that people should respond to the comment not the commenter.
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..
it is trivial now to create synthetic multi-platform personas that generate real looking post histories at unlimited scale. the baseline assumption should be that everything on the internet is fake until proven otherwise.
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.
> I wanted to know whether the knife subreddits I read, and scrape for New
Knife Day, show any sign of that. Not a hunch about one suspicious comment,
but something I could count and someone else could recount.
> The practical check is the one the data endorses
The language is so obfuscated that the crude draft would really be better than this. I've just realized that one of the telltale signs of LLMs is: inventing a new terminology like here - tail accounts, never giving a direct definition what it really is, and then going with it, like it's obvious.
OP there isn't a word length requirement on blog posts. You put all the information you learned into your instructions for the LLM. Just post that.
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).
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.
There's an additional problem that if an increasing number of people are getting their search results via AI summaries, the AI fetch bot is obviously including all this astroturfing.
Everyone understands that pretty girl on instagram who has 300,000 followers is getting paid to show that make up in her stories, why on earth would you think the guy with 300,000 karma posting his fits on /r/malefashionadvice isn't getting the same?
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).
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.
IMO it is a net negative.
Unfortunately, what you state is also true and it is now harder to avoid replying to bots, obvious shills, or trolls.
It's a little unfortunate that when marketers see something that is resistant to commercialization they decide to become even bigger liars instead of letting someone tell them "no".
That was a good punchline!
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