[chatmasta]

There is almost definitely rampant sockpuppetry in the bitcoin community.

One question I’ve been interested in: is there a way to trick algo traders into buying an altcoin? Perhaps by spamming twitter and Reddit with positive sentiment text about that altcoin?

[anudeep2011]

Those algos, ideally should weigh the twitter handle. Or else it's a stupid algo.

One need to spam through authoritative handles.

Pretty much like tricking google ranking algorithm with site-farms and fake backlinks. But hey, a lot of people were able to do this before Google started to improve its algo.

[chatmasta]

Twitter can’t even tell the difference between an “authoritative” account and whatever the opposite is.

If any bots are scraping twitter for altcoin signals, I would be pretty surprised if there were any checks other than num followers / join date / etc. Determining if a twitter account is a bot, even with minimal certainty, is NOT an easy project. And many of these crypto traders are not exactly John Carmack either.

[eitland]

Possible example: a few months ago when the price tanked after someone gave away < 20 Bitcoin on Reddit.