I used to be a lot on r/travel. Back then there were posts with pictures that had upvote ls in the triple to quadruple digit range. There were also user questions, usually in the double digits.
Now the majority is just discussions that mysteriously have thousands of upvotes. And some of them quite boring. That must be bots or fakes directly by reddit. No way this happens naturally.
Is this common practice now or is that something r/travel did specifically?
Yes vote manipulation is common on reddit.
It’s not just common, it’s the entire basis of the platform.
Every dumb fucking talking point they want their users to regurgitate in the real world goes to the moon. Speak the truth and be silenced.
It’s a nightmare platform.
Which is funny if you have a home computer and two people upvote the same thing from different accounts on it. Moda will absolutely drop a ban hammer.
Bot armies have been all over reddit for years manipulating votes and the larger the community, the larger that problem is.
I think the real reason they got rid of the 3rd party apps is that some apps (particularly the mod tools) make it easier to detect when the site’s own bots are active.
Oh that’s interesting, thanks. I hadn’t considered that or honestly know enough about the mod tools to have considered that.
Reddit has quite literally been using them since they were first founded. To get the site off the ground, links, votes & engagement was artificially populated for years as the userbase grew. Reddit has never been organic. And anyone who believes reddit ever stopped manipulating those numbers after their “seed phase” to make the site look better is no more than a sweet summer child.
Can you source me on this? I don’t know what to Google to find information on this topic.
I don’t fault them for seeding content to get a totally blank site off the ground. But spez definitely never stopped manipulating everything that’s followed.
What are you talking about? I did not do anything, it is the fault of {TEAM_NAME}. {TEAM_NAME} is the reason why {SITE_NAME} is entirely fake. Do not blame me, BLAME THEM!
🌏🧑🚀🔫🧑🚀
I only go back occasionally for a fap, and even my old favourite subreddits are just reposts of old content, it’s dead to me.
That’s all they really are, a porn aggregator.
a spez one, at that
Or people are boring.
Until recently, Reddit has been seeing an increase in active users. That has made upvotes more available, causing karma inflation.
Also, Reddit has been taking a lot of effort to kill the default sub list, so it is distributing people to subs they wouldn’t normally go to.
But upvotes on discussions there are literally 100 times what they used to be just half a year ago. No way that happens naturally.
Yeah, but that wouldn’t be Reddit doing that.
It’s absolutely Reddit doing that. Buts use API calls, and Reddit has API calls locked down now. Bots have to request access, at the very least.
And given Spez et al’s overwhelmingly stalwart commitment to honesty, transparency, and not fucking over his user base (lol) how are you so sure it’s not Reddit doing that, when that’s exactly what they did to boost numbers when Reddit was new?
Huffman and Ohanian first began Reddit by submitting links from various fake accounts.
B[o]ts use API calls, and Reddit has API calls locked down now.
That is if bots used the API directly, which may or may not be the case. It wouldn’t be that hard to automate using Reddit’s UI. You also had botmakers who relied on the API given months to transfer to webpage scraping.
And while Reddit did create and upvote posts in the beginning, the site seems to be large enough that I don’t see Reddit being able to scale upvotes based on content alone without a massive AI army.
I don’t see Reddit being able to scale upvotes based on content alone without a massive AI army.
You say that as though Reddit cares about the content of a post when manipulating its upvotes, AND as though you have no idea who Sam Altman is or that he was on Reddit’s board for several years.
Of all the things Reddit can’t or won’t do, AI is absolutely NOT one of them.
I say it as knowing that Reddit can change how upvotes work. They’ve done it in the past and it is a lot easier to change a formula over creating bots to upvote and downvote.
Reddit has also shown its ability to frame and curate both the default steam and r/all by removing porn and limiting political posts.
I don’t know why Reddit would deal in bots when it has more powerful tools at hand.
I don’t know why Reddit would deal in bots when it has more powerful tools at hand.
Cheap, easy, impossible for outsiders to quantify, approaching IPO and cash to be made, keeping ad revenue the same without revealing how many actual users have fled the site, etc.
Since votes are private by default, reddit wouldn’t need bots to manipulate voting. They can just show or report on the API whatever number they want.
I’m seeing a huge ratio of upvotes to comments lately on reddit.
Like 30k upvotes, 200 comments.
Happens here too but not as extreme.
I’ve also seen weird upvote/comment ratios on Lemmy, but I think there are still bugs in the system.
I have seen a post with a sus upvote count and no comments from a different instance. When I view it on the post’s home instance, I see plenty of comments from users who’s instances that are federated with mine, but my instance’s version of the post has few or no comments. It’s happened more than once, but I bet it’s just temporary strangeness at play when it happens.
I’ve said this and I’ll say it again. Anyone that’s on Reddit still, doesn’t make quality content or have comments that are worth a shit. All those people went to mastodon, lemmy or somewhere else. Same applies with facebook, xitter, or any other corpo social media.
Yeah, reposts have become a lot more common over the past year.
