[nthot]

I get that feeling as well, fartcannon. The meteoric rise over the past year of the subreddit just feels artficial. I don't have any evidence outside of the a rapid increase of subscribers. I'm sure there is a large number of people with that sentiment out there, so I'd maybe put it at 40% or less that this is being coordinated by an external actor.

The whole sentiment around the subreddit really seems to be amplifying a class war attitude in the United States.

I remember reading an article (I think this was it [1]) about reddit getting manipulated by advertisers. Either posting about a product, or upvoting posts that were positive about a product and downvoting negative posts. Imagine what someone with a larger budget could do.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2017/02/20/reddit-i...

[fartcannon]

Some of the manipulation seems obvious. Some of it less so. I always felt like some kind ublock origin style plugin that highlights or removes known instances of PR/manipulation/propanda would be helpful. Perhaps an AI trained on press releases from big corps and governments that performs authorship identification for a start. 'The writing style in this post are an 80% match for a press release by <government body> linked below'. Kind of like those websites that try to identify fake product reviews.

Theres a high chance that would probably get gamed, too, I guess.

[patrickk]

Not quite an AI but you can filter Reddit posts in RES by using keyword filters. Really great for clickbait topics.