[phoronixrly]

I've come accross many posts from this subreddit that hit the front page. Let's just say I hope reddit is keeping an eye on foreign and domestic troll farms as many of the most popular posts seem suspiciously like fiction to me...

[dang]

Please don't post this sort of evidence-free insinuation to HN. They're against the site guidelines, and have been for years, because they almost never amount to anything, but do have a poisonous effect on the ecosystem as users rile each other up about them.

"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email [e-mail] and we'll look at the data."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29867733.

[akvadrako]

Not everyone knows that most posts on Reddit are fiction; it's good to point this out on stories about reddit.

[dang]

That's quite beside the point.

[_8j50]

You are not exactly the first person to say this on this thread. How do I know you yourself are not part of a discredition campaign? Can you substantiate your speculation by pointing out inauthentic popular posts or accounts at least?

[abduhl]

You're not the first person to question people questioning whether the antiwork echo chamber is being manipulated by state actors. How do I know you aren't part of the counter counter espionage? Can you substantiate your speculation by pointing out inauthentic posts or accounts?

What a stupid post. If your first reaction to someone questioning a broad social movement in 2022 as a conspiracy theory is to go directly into a deeper conspiracy theory then it's pretty likely you've already made up your mind about the underlying topic and aren't approaching the discussion in good faith anymore.

Edit: this is especially true after watching 4 years of the federal government waging an internal war between two factions about how much "influence" a foreign power had over our social media and elections.

[fivea]

> What a stupid post. If your first reaction to someone questioning a broad social movement in 2022 as a conspiracy theory (...)

From where I'm standing, the stupidity that stands out is how some people are desperately trying to gaslight themselves and everyone around them by trying to depict people chatting about workplace abuse as being something outlandish and utterly inconceivable.

I happen to stumble upon posts from /r/antiwork and I have to say that personally I had the misfortune of experiencing far worse than what's reported there on any random day, and in western European countries where workers rights actually exist and are enforced.

[sombremesa]

> What a stupid post.

I don't think someone who puts this in their bio is qualified to make that comment:

> One of my favorite low key social engineering hacks is that I used to have a keylogger installed on every machine I own. Whenever a friend needs to hop on my machine to show me something, they'd log into an account they own and I would have their password.

You're lucky that not many people will tell you exactly what they think of that, thanks to HN guidelines.

[abduhl]

My bio is a quote of a post by shalmanese specifically put there so that other people can see how ridiculous the comment was. The original post is at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14921120. Thanks for making sure everyone else in this thread reads it as well. Here it is in full. You'll find my reply at the given link telling him "exactly what [I] think of that" in the thread as well as many other people (regardless of the HN guideliness), in case you didn't find it already with your deep dive of my profile.

shalmanese 1 hour ago | undown | parent | flag | favorite | on: Operation Luigi: How I hacked my friend without he...

One of my favorite low key social engineering hacks is that I used to have a keylogger installed on every machine I own. Whenever a friend needs to hop on my machine to show me something, they'd log into an account they own and I would have their password.

Then I'd do the same Luigi-like low key messing with them for a while. My favorite was when a friend had a VNC server running on their machine with control capabilities. I would sit next to them and subtly jerk the mouse pointer right before they were about to click on something and it drove them mad for a good 20 minutes before I couldn't hold onto the giggles anymore.

edit: To add a bit of context, this was in the Windows 98 era, before the age of social media where we started putting all of our secrets onto our machines. And it was among a group of friends where everyone was trying to hack everyone else and pretty much anything was considered fair game. All of us were high school kids so there wasn't some super serious reputation we had to protect.

[phoronixrly]

Lol yeah, I've been hired by low level US businesses to discredit antiwork on... HN of all places :)

Sorry, just excercising a safe amount of scepticism with regards to social media.

[_8j50]

Being a sceptic is fine but when you pose it to others you need to substantiate

[pydry]

Most of the more "out there" posts line up with /r/legaladvice, which is my bellwether for the kind of shit that goes down in the low-end American workplace (spoiler : goddamn awful,).

[likpok]

Legaladvice is also a place people love to put creative writing, so I’m not sure how much you can take from that.

[acheron]

All personal stories on Reddit should be assumed to be lies. I can’t believe there are people out there taking anything on it seriously.

[scotty79]

Wow, so many literary creative individuals doing unpaid work for fun is way more plausible explanation than random people being just fed up with their lives and wanting to vent.

[effingwewt]

You would be surprised. I've seen several stories get called out and the authors then say, invariably- 'Oh yea forgot to mention I'm a writer, maybe that's why blah blah'.

I don't know if they try and add these things to their portfolio, but it definitely makes a perverse sense, ie 'look my writing even fooled X people on reddit!'

Honestly I believe nothing anymore without some digging, and really it's something that's gotten worse as every year I feel like we are living in a world of lies- politics, ads, fucking everything.

Now, I do honestly believe there are many people that are legitimately unhappy and venting in that sub- I know more than a few people in real life living out some of those stories.

Just...use critical thinking skills. And try not to let it kill you inside. I am become jaded and cynical, but because I'm a realist.

[pydry]

99% of the sub is stuff like this car towing post:

https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/s0auu4/apartme...

If these repeated posts about the same tedious things are grist for creative writing classes there are some really realistic sounding, terrible writers out there.

It sounds like you might be extrapolating from one or two pieces of spurious anecdata.

[jimmygrapes]

I'm not a writer and I make up shit all the time on anonymous and semi anonymous comment threads. It depends on my mood and the atmosphere of the thread. I avoid it here because I have some sense that this is an "adult" place to be where common sense opsec is reasonable but I don't have to invent anything to fit in or comment. On reddit or other such things though, hell yeah I'll drink a pitcher of Miller Lite while watching a football game and shitpost the devil's advocate or contrarian position under a pseudonym with no attribution. I justify it by calling it social research.

[pydry]

https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/s07uk4/i_work_at_...

So what exactly seems inauthentic about the top story on the forum? Who would make that up and why?

"It's the internet lol everything is made up" is, frankly, a bit edgelord as a rationale.

If you want made up look at the vote counts for any picture with a coke bottle or a UPS truck in it.

[scotty79]

Have you thought about making shit up in the form of actual book?

[pydry]

Do you have a list of recent examples of this where it is clearly true or is this just you assuming that something being on the internet means it's made up?

Coz Im struggling to see how you could believe that the 99% of overwhelmingly mundane stories about e.g. giving notice or how to deal with health and safety issues at work would become grist for creative writing.

It makes zero sense.

[likpok]

I stopped reading a couple years ago after it was clear that many of the most interesting posts were fictional. There was a series written by someone styling themselves as the "troll queen" (all under different accounts). In general I think the increasing popularity driven by bestoflegaladvice made things worse.

Yes, the boring posts are probably real and I never claimed otherwise. But the posts people remember and engage with are not the boring posts and have a much more mixed track record. There have been cases both of "someone creates updates with an impossible resolution/schedule", "post describing the opposite point of view of a recently popular post comes up" and "post touching on hot-button internet arguments". You can argue that only the first category must be a fake, but the rest pop up with a suspicious frequency.

Similarly, you could see a big jump in the number of legal issues relating to whatever excited bestoflegaladvice recently. It doesn't seem likely that there's a sudden uptick in the number of people who have neighbors cut down their trees, or who have a landlocked property.

[quickthrowman]

I assume every story on Reddit is fiction, r/legaladvice and r/relationship_advice posts are as likely to be real in my estimation as r/nosleep (creepypasta) stories.

[throwntoday]

I'm still convinced reddit's userbase is heavily composed of GPT-3 bots. There was a poster here that identified a large amount of accounts as bots by sending them a DM with a link and seeing how fast they opened it.

Reddit opinions/posts tend to be predictable enough and most users don't notice the repetitive comments, or just don't care.

[gruez]

>There was a poster here that identified a large amount of accounts as bots by sending them a DM with a link and seeing how fast they opened it.

source?