[bag_boy]

I used to love Reddit, but the astroturfing has become unbearable, especially by political groups.

After this last election, I think political groups realized local subreddits were underutilized and have regrouped accordingly.

While I still trust some appended Reddit searches on Google, I'm losing faith there too. Product/service recommendation threads are really easy to manipulate.

[beAbU]

Reddit is incredibly echo-chamber-y for me, the voting and karma system optimizes for the wrong type of content I feel. I've tried to engage with a few niche-interest subreddits (homebrewing, electronics, musical instruments) over the years and all of them left me generally dissapointed.

My pet theory is that someone who claims reddit is a great place for niche hobbies were never part of an old-school forum with truly passionate and engaging members.

The last 2-3 years this issue just became worse and worse.

Reddit is fantastic for memes though. There are some hilarious subreddits out there. But I rarely engage, just consume.

[MSFT_Edging]

I'd say at least 70% of reddit "hobby" spaces are people buying something with little research, then posting the picture of the thing they bought.

Any real discussion is drowned out so the average post now is "bought these, new to the hobby, what do I do with them?".

The meshtastic sub is a good example of that. People buying hobbyist hardware, without doing any research. They probably saw some youtube video, hit the amazon "buy", then when it arrived, they're stumped.

[whstl]

Yeah, it's just consumption consumption consumption.

Post a photo of your new gizmo: 300 upvotes. Video of you using your widget: 4 votes.

And in subreddits dedicated to actually making things, it's just hustling hustling hustling. With a small percentage of self-help posts like "how I spent 4 years in my boring-ass generic video game and nobody wanted it".

[Aurornis]

> I'd say at least 70% of reddit "hobby" spaces are people buying something with little research, then posting the picture of the thing they bought.

This is exactly what happened to all of the hobby reddits I enjoyed.

Any useful discussion was crowded out by 10 posts per week (or day) of people posting their newest purchase or asking a question that had been answered 1000 times already.

The useful Subreddits have mods who come down hard on these posts. They don’t proliferate as much if people don’t see them everywhere. It’s a lot of work for mods though.

[prawn]

My "favourite" is on the r/vandwellers subreddit with countless people posting a basic photo of a van they just bought with zero information about themselves, their build plans, how they intend to use it. It might as well be the Craigslist vehicle sales section.

[tinier_subsets]

>I'd say at least 70% of reddit "hobby" spaces are people buying something with little research, then posting the picture of the thing they bought.

A really great (awful) example of this that I saw was on the typewriters subreddit (which is already 90% people posting pictures of the same 5 or so overhyped machines):

In the 1950s, Royal used to give out gold typewriters as part of a writing contest.[0] I saw one of these come up on Goodwill’s auction site, saved screenshots for my records and followed it closely, since I knew bids would get really stupid really fast. Sure enough, winning bid was around $1500.

About two weeks after the auction ended (about the time Goodwill’s very slow shipping takes), I saw it pop up on the subreddit, exact machine, identical scratches, blemishes, and all to the one I had screenshots of. The post title? “Found this at my local thrift store for $50. How’d I do?”

That was enough to finally make my delete my account and seriously question anyone who thinks Reddit is actually good for niche hobbies.[1]

[0]https://www.antikeychop.com/gold-royal-quiet-de-luxe-typewri...

[1] Well, that and the fact that and the fact that I was probably going to lose my mind if I earnestly gave detailed advice on repairing a machine I had personally stripped and reassembled, only for someone to get upvoted to the top for posting a confident pseudo answer about some mechanism—that may or may not even exist in that machine—that they only faintly understood from a general YouTube video that they only half watched.

[nitwit005]

I think it's less "echo chamber" than under direct political influence.

It takes a lot of effort to moderate a subreddit. People will post stuff all day, in large volumes.

Who's going to be willing to do that? Sure, some will just be nice people with a ton of free time, but many will definitely be political activists (or even state actors at this point) who have something to promote.

[wavewrangler]

You know how certain professions are known for attracting certain pathologies? CEOs/narcissism, car salesman/ lmachiavellianidm and surgeons/God? Reddit moderator/d-bag is not exempt from that phenomenon and for reasons unknown to me, because it’s volunteer (Ok, I can’t say 100%, but mostly it’s volunteer) seems to be some kind of mental illness XP multiplier attractant for the role. Perhaps it empowers people because they’re giving so much of their lives to their own perceived cause, that no one asked for. But there are a lot of good, great even, mods out there. Surely. But anyhow, I’m going back to irc.

[NegativeK]

I used to think that the up voting mechanic was the future of the internet.

Now I think that it's a perverse incentive that requires very heavy handed moderation to not suck (AKA more free labor), and that time decaying posts can discourage quality, in-depth discussions.

Corollary: necroing forum threads isn't necessarily bad.

[Enginerrrd]

>Corollary: necroing forum threads isn't necessarily bad.

I've always agreed with this. It was usually considered bad etiquette at best on forums, but I never really understood why.

[NegativeK]

I'm sure it'd be content specific, but in a thread about technical discussions (_especially_ in fields with information that can be just as valuable a decade later) it seems totally fine. Those forums seem to be okay with it, though...

[layer8]

I fully agree, but still upvoted you.

[donnachangstein]

What's ironic is this thread is full of comments agreeing that Reddit sucks because the voting/karma system is flawed and shadow banning is toxic and deranged yet all those very features and policies exist here. In fact, HN is mentioned in the Wikipedia article for shadow banning as an early adopter of the practice. (Yes I agree it sucks but that's not the point of my comment.)

So what changed or what makes this place different? I would argue it's not the forum software but rather run differently, not placing in charge of every subreddit a cabal of unemployed fringe lunatics wielding power and waging war against their users because it's all they have.

Or maybe the forum software does suck and some just naturally migrated to a text-only low-bandwidth version of Reddit?

[Goronmon]

So what changed or what makes this place different?

Mainly it's niche/less popular. There is less of an incentive for outside interests to care.

Not having any real way for the audience to expand (there is only one "subreddit") definitely helps with that.

[sepositus]

> So what changed or what makes this place different?

It's an interesting question. Primarily, I think it's because HN doesn't allow you to downvote instantly or even after a lengthy period of time. I think it's tied to total karma, but someone would have to provide more information there. Regardless, that single change probably makes a big difference.

Compared to Reddit, I've had some comments go into the tens of negative karma points within five minutes of posting. It wasn't because it was low quality, but because it wasn't the "correct" view to have in whatever subreddit I was engaging in. The downvoting there is practically militant.

However, as someone who usually holds a minority view on HN, I don't think the system here is perfect either. Usually an echo chamber forms because the dissidents don't last long and leave. If you reward the ones that stay the longest with downvote capabilities, it would explain my general experience quite well. But again, it's nothing compared to Reddit.

Note: I recognize this is a conversation on karma, which has a rule associated with it, but I hope we can make an exception here given it's a good faith discussion between Reddit/HN :)

[intended]

There’s 4 things that are disastrous topics for any community, the horsemen of the apocalypse if you like. Politics, Religion, Identity, and Meta.

There’s several natural filters that promote healthy communities - Highly informed users, Active mods, Small community sizes, “Get stuff done” type conversations. In essence, communities where it’s easy to identify BS, and discourage navel gazing, have high signal to noise ratios. They are actively hostile to lazy posting.

A good example of this type of community is r/badeconomics, or was the last I checked, and askhistorians.

A separate note, There’s a 2024 paper that showed that that estimated that young adults spent a smaller portion their time online on high cognitive load reading. A majority of the time would be spent on “timepass” content.

[r721]

>I think it's tied to total karma, but someone would have to provide more information there.

According to https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented "After users reach 501 Karma, they gain the ability to downvote another comment."

I often wonder whether "limited downvotes" scheme would work: (let's say) 30 downvotes per 24h are free to use and after that each downvote decreases your karma by 1.

[Tarsul]

My personal opinion is that downvotes, upvotes and algorithms are design decisions that often stick before the best one is found. It's a shame really, because I think it's not only really important (e.g. to combat fake news/users etc.) but most interesting. Nonetheless, HN did good with their version where the max. downvote of a comment is -4 and where the up/downvote of a comment is not listed publicly. All functions that help with community building. However, I fret the moment when AI users and shills take over (especially since throwaway accounts are so easy to create).

[layer8]

HN is okay-ish, but you still can’t have long-running discussions on it, or explore some topic in depth, like it is par for the course on old-style forums. One reason is the time cutoff (can’t reply anymore after a day or so), another is that there is no mechanism for tracking which comments you’ve already read and which you haven’t.

[d0gsg0w00f]

> a cabal of unemployed fringe lunatics wielding power and waging war against their users because it's all they have.

Speaking of which, does anyone know if there are any good articles/documentaries/exposés on reddit moderators? I really just want to know what one is like.

[beAbU]

HN is not much different (or better) in my opinion

I dislike the voting mechanism here. It incentivises me to optimize my posting to things that will maximise the votes, rather than things I think will add value to the community, even if it's controversial.

On a forum, if I say something stupid/against-the-grain, I am called out by the forum members, or we have a debate about it. On HN and on reddit, I'm downvoted into oblivion with very little in the way of any discussion that helps me learn and improve.

The only thing that makes HN better than reddit for me is the community of like-minded people, a general respect for the rules, and the fact that here we have fantastic moderators.

But I maintain that the underlying _system_ that is managing discourse here is flawed in it's design. I wonder what HN would look like if voting was abolished, and /active was the homepage, where the most actively discussed posts are the ones that filter to the top of the list.

[ryandrake]

I basically have switched to /active. IMO it's a stronger and more relevant set of articles, and tends not to be clogged with all the "Here's a thing, but with AI!" blogspam and endless number of "I ported this angular script to rust" turds that always seem to make it to the normal front page.

[93po]

part of the echo chamber is also instant shadow bans on many of the major subs, and especially political ones, unless you consistently comment (shadow banned) comments and eventually get whitelisted by a mod or bot who's determined you to be the "right" sort of commenter. and again an instant shadow ban again the second you trigger any "bad" keywords

[gruez]

That's presumably an anti-bot/astroturfing measure. As bad as that is, I'm not sure what the alternative should be. Allowing anyone to post with a 1 minute old account? Implement real name verification?

[mvdtnz]

I can't speak to every local subreddit but I can tell you for sure that while it may have started as an anti-bot measure, on /r/newzealand it is absolutely used as a way to gatekeep the wrong opinions from being present on the subreddit.

[ipaddr]

Normal people signup to post not to hang around and scroll and like until the account is warmed

[hangsi]

This seems untrue, especially for reddit?

Using the 1/9/90 split [0] for creators/commenters/readers, it seems farfetched to suggest that reddit accounts (which benefits readers making an account to curate subreddit subscriptions) can't follow this pattern where many legitimate human users do not comment often.

[0] "The 1% Rule", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule

[Suppafly]

Plenty of people don't comment often, but the impetus to sign up for an account is often to comment, which subs then either disallow or delete because they don't want new accounts commenting.

[93po]

they don't care about bots, they have endless bots posting pro-whatever on the subs, and directly work with campaigns to facilitate this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correct_the_Record

[alexjplant]

> My pet theory is that someone who claims reddit is a great place for niche hobbies were never part of an old-school forum with truly passionate and engaging members.

This. On forums you recognize members by their funny avatars and the hyper specific advice that they have (useful or otherwise). Stickied posts like "timbit2's Guide to Vintage Frobulators" or "New to Frobs? Not Sure Where to Start? READ" abound. There are usually decades of easily-searchable posts accumulated. People reply to your threads helpfully. The marketplace forums are full of well-cared-for gear.

On Reddit you get a lot of beauty shots and question posts with replies like "bro just get the new Vinculum x Chadbert420 frobber. Shit is [fire emojis]". There's usually a woefully out-of-date wiki or sticky that you can only access from one interface or another. There's no sense of community, just upvotes of pictures for clout.

Of course these are contrived straw men versions of their respective communities but in my experience they're correct more often than not. I have been dipping my toe into various Discords that seem to have a better sense of community but Discord doesn't seem to lend itself to longer-form content as forums do... I wonder whether this is something the Discord platform could be augmented to facilitate.

[layer8]

Discord is a chat platform, not a forum, and its contents are closed-off, not discoverable via web search. It’s a modern form of IRC chats, not of web forums. The two serve different needs and audiences.

[hattmall]

Reddit was definitely an amazing place for Niche hobbies. Forums were great too, but the layout and having an "orangered" beat out forums. Plus you could be on so many forums at essentially the same time. Prior to reddit I had basically the same setup with RSS feeds for like my top 10-15 forums. But reddit basically copied and eclipsed that and the forums pretty much all died.

Forums were great too, but reddit made it really easy to get access to new niches quickly. Without having to join a new site, learn the forum slang and etiquette, etc.

Reddit is awful now though. IDK what the alternative is either. I'm in a few discords and Facebook groups that cover most topics but they both offer a much poorer user experience imo.

[Aurornis]

> My pet theory is that someone who claims reddit is a great place for niche hobbies were never part of an old-school forum with truly passionate and engaging members.

In my experience, Reddit can be an okay place for niche hobbies until the reddit becomes semi-popular. Then it's a lost cause for anyone but newbies posting the same question every day and old timers who take pleasure in yelling at them.

[jval43]

I was an active contributor to /r/espresso for a while, but in the process of the hobby I realized I disagree with some of their advice and best practices. Minor stuff really.

I would not describe the sub as toxic or anything, but it's literally impossible to get a dissenting opinion across on Reddit. Other hobby subs were the same.

Every single time I mentioned an opinion differing from the "hive-mind" consensus it was downvoted to hell, with no responses, counter arguments or anything resembling discussion. I would have liked to trade experiences but that's not possible.

While at the same time some of the other posters giving advice freely admit they don't actually have experience with what is discussed and are just repeating older posts.

There is no real value in that, and nowadays you can get mostly the same experience by just asking ChatGPT. Both have no clue and no real opinion of their own when it comes to details.

I take part in a few forums now, and it's a breath of fresh air. Much better experience and a lot more personal as well.

[ryandrake]

Everywhere you let the masses upvote and/or downvote, you're going to have the hive-mind problem. We have it here, too.

I'd propose having a separate UI for users to agree/disagree, vs. for users to flag rule breaking posts, like spam, flamebait, insults and so on. The agree/disagree count would just display a vanity number, but the rule-breaking UI would actually downweight the article or comment. You could audit occasionally and remove voting privileges from people abusing the rule-breaking UI as a "Mega-disagree."

[pupppet]

Leading up to the election Reddit fed me stories about Kamala’s huge rally turnouts, Trump‘s tiny rally turnouts, and endless links to stories about positive signs she would win. It was a forgone conclusion to me it was going to be a blowout for her.

[selfmodruntime]

Same. And for about 12 to 24 hours after the election loss it was... quiet. A few people coming to terms that the illusion had disappeared, but not in any way comparable to the interactions beforehand.

Then it returned with a vengeance.

[scarab92]

The default subs are filled with left-wing conspiracy theories these days.

A consequence of years of reddit allowing its mods to shadow ban centrist voices.

It’s hard to see how reddit escapes this mess. They need more normal people and less political zealots, but the site is already so far down the echo chamber path that its overt political partisanship scares off potential new normal users from participating.

[selfmodruntime]

> It’s hard to see how reddit escapes this mess

I don't see why they would. Rage drives engagement, and they just got the number one rage inducing factor back into public office for the next 4 years. This form of engagement also works better on progressives I think.

[firesteelrain]

Honestly, the internet is killing us all slowly. It was better not to argue with our neighbors on the Internet or even social media. Or fellow citizens or even foreign ones CONSTANTLY

[losvedir]

As someone with a reddit account old enough to vote, it's always been like that. If you only browsed reddit it would have been a sure bet that Bernie Sanders would be the democratic candidate, and Ron Paul was going to win before that.

[swores]

Reddit's algorithm of what to show you is based in part on what you've chosen to follow and in part on what is most likely to get you to stay on the site and engage with the content. It's not designed to give you an accurate view of upcoming election outcomes, and is not at all surprising that it might show someone mostly content from one side's fans, regardless of whether they side is going to win or not.

[gruez]

>Reddit's algorithm of what to show you is based in part on what you've chosen to follow and in part on what is most likely to get you to stay on the site and engage with the content.

You see the same phenomena on /r/all, which isn't personalized.

[harvey9]

'you' would mean the average user on /all rather than you personally.

I deleted my account ages ago to break my own habit.

[NooneAtAll3]

I lost faith in reddit algorithm when Silksong got announced, got 30k+ upvotes in multiple places... and /r/all was politics-only

[tanjtanjtanj]

I actually found out about the Silksong “announcement” from it being number one on the r/all feed followed by several other switch 2/games announcements in the top 5…

You have to remember that there was some pretty nutso tariff news right about the same time, not that strange for it to be highly represented on the front page.

[dinero_rojo]

Reddit’s algo is doing an astonishingly bad job if they want me to stay engaged based on the things I follow. I’ve got two seperate accounts one for general stuff, the other intended strictly for NSFW purposes and meeting people with similar interests. I spent maybe half an hour yesterday on the NSFW account blocking everything that wasn’t in my interests, but more and more unrelated (and general) subreddits kept being recommended to me. After a while of this, I gave up and deleted the app, which I can’t imagine is good for Reddit’s bottom line. I’ll probably be back at some point as it is still in my experience the best way to see that stuff and meet like-minded people, but I was kinda shocked at how difficult (impossible?) it was to just keep one account restricted to specific interests that I do kinda want to be engaged with.

[93po]

there is no part of the reddit algo that ever promotes pro-trump stuff, ever

[mvdtnz]

There was a brief moment when pro-Trump content would occasionally surface on the algorithm, at which point the site operators hit the panic button and banned the offending subreddit.

[firesteelrain]

r/Conservative is still popular. It never makes front page though

[amiga386]

By which you mean /r/The_Donald

The reason for deliberately antagonizing them, and eventually banning them, was that /r/The_Donald's moderators were directly telling their membership to upvote specific posts so they'd rocket to the front page. "Inorganic results", "vote manipulation", "gaming the algorithm", whatever you'd like to call it.

So the admins had a reason to ban it, even if no doubt they and most of Reddit's users saw Trump supporters as "the enemy".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/The_Donald#Prominence_on_Red...

Also, as this article has reminded me... 'member that time Spez admitted that he invisibly edited users' comments?

https://old.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/5frg1n/tifu_...

[selfmodruntime]

> Reddit's algorithm of what to show you is based in part on what you've chosen to follow and in part on what is most likely to get you to stay on the site and engage with the conten

That's not the whole truth. Subreddit Moderation is the key point that's vulnerable to abuse. I block all political subreddits. My blocklist has 120 entries. 10 of those are of inherent political nature. The rest is just like /r/pics - enshittified rage bait about Trump.

[jayd16]

There was certainly a lot of optimism but I don't think you can really say the mood was a clear blow out. Anyone mentioning such a thing would get many replies of "doesn't matter...vote anyway!"

I think Kamala actually did have the lead in Reddit's demographics.

[hattmall]

I would absolutely get that same feeling from reddit. But like do you not interact in the actual world? Trump would have a rally and areas 45 minutes away are backed up with traffic for 8 hours. Kamala had one and you can't even reliably figure out how to get tickets and other than motorcade closures traffic is nothing.

So much anti-Kamala and pro-Trump stuff in the communities that are supposed to be strong for her.

That Kamala did as well as she did was really shocking to me. I mean it wasn't close, but Kamala couldn't even make past the very first debate in 2020 and her list of accomplishments is basically nothing. I never met anyone in real life with an actual compelling or supportive argument for her. At best it was "she's not Trump".

Taking Biden out and having no primary is probably the worst thing Democrats could have done.

[parineum]

> having no primary is probably the worst thing Democrats could have done.

I'd argue the 15 years of identity politics that both led to Harris as VP and prevented them from being able to commit the faux paux of possibly passing her up by letting their constituents decide if they liked her was their worst decision.

[Suppafly]

Your entire post reads like a bot post on reddit. Not sure if you're trying to prove the point and forgot the /s or actually believe the nonsense you've posted.

[raxxorraxor]

There are some niche forums still, but they have to be really small. Mostly related to very specific media as general topics are affected by astroturfing. These communities often don't live as long, but they can be active, helpful and interesting.

But it isn't worth reading anything else anymore.

[VeninVidiaVicii]

Niche content for sure is the best thing Reddit is for. I only go there for info on my favorite instruments, and a few other shitposting communities for games and shows I watch.

[fennecfoxy]

Human beings are echo chambery tbf.

[ok123456]

I'm amused by how over the top it always is. A high-scoring submission on my local Reddit gets maybe +70 votes. Then, some random political-related submission —and it's only ever political-related—will have +2000 votes. They're so overt that they don't even care.

[hackyhacky]

Why is that a sign of astroturfing? More likely, there are more people who read (and upvote) posts on the default subs, than niche local subs.

[parineum]

He's talking about a politics related post in a niche sub.

[therealdrag0]

Why is it a sign of astroturfing and not just hyper political climate?

[ok123456]

Well, if broadly popular organic posts net about 100, I would expect organic partisan posts to have a ceiling of +50. Still, more realistically, the net would be about zero because half the people would downvote them.

But, somehow, partisan posts in one direction always seem to net over 1000 or 2000, yet partisan posts in the other direction net about zero.

Even with a skewed distribution, I would only expect maybe +20 to be the ceiling.

[hackyhacky]

> the net would be about zero because half the people would downvote them.

Why would you assume that? It's a fallacy to assume that political opinions are evenly distributed. People seem to agree that different sites attract people of different political persuasions. A post that gets highly upvoted on Truth Social might get highly downvoted on Reddit, and vice versa. That's not astroturfing, that's just self-selecting communities.

> partisan posts in one direction always seem to net over 1000 or 2000, yet partisan posts in the other direction net about zero.

Again, it depends on the audience. This is not a new phenomenon. 50 years ago, you would get a different response to certain political statements depending on whether you made them at a Grateful Dead Concert or at a meeting of the Fraternal Order of Police. Why should today be different?

> I would only expect maybe +20 to be the ceiling.

Why? People feel strongly about their political believes. It's polarizing and engaging in a way that a post about crockpots or guitar strings isn't.

[jhp123]

If a submission appeals to random people browsing r/all, i.e. politics, sex or memes, then it can get way more upvotes than a niche topical submission.

For example one of the top r/aviation posts is a meme about airbuses with "slutty eyeliner" (87k points), and it far outpaces shop talk type submissions like "why does the landing gear not get retracted at the same time on this 777?" (2k points)

[ok123456]

Posts from a regional subreddit, where world events seldom happen and traffic and roadways are the prime topics of conversation, are not making it to /r/all or the front page.

Yet political posts get +2000 out of nowhere and an influx of commentators who don't usually comment in that regional subreddit or don't even likely live there.

[jhp123]

You're incorrect, this is the normal way that the reddit algorithm functions, it promotes highly-engaging content from niche subreddits.

The top post of all time on r/toledo is about a police officer harassing a woman. It's highly engaging but not overtly political. It has 100x the upvotes of a normal r/toledo post about traffic or what have you.

One of the top posts of all time in r/sanjose is a video of someone trying to jimmy a hotel door open using a hook contraption. Highly engaging, not overtly political.

These were the first two city subreddits I checked. It's literally just how reddit works, highly engaging content bubbles to the top and can reach a much larger audience.

[ok123456]

Why does it ONLY happen to political posts, and why does it ONLY happen to posts that reinforce a particular viewpoint?

Either this is the design of the black box "algorithm," or it's not real engagement. There's no need to miscorrect me about something so hamfisted and overt.

[lazystar]

> After this last election, I think political groups realized local subreddits were underutilized and have regrouped accordingly.

its not that. they realized: a) that folks were filtering out the astroturfed subreddits in /r/all, and b) that r/all's filter list has a hard limit of 100 subreddits. so, by astroturfing >100 subreddits, they can guarantee to their clients that their posts will make the front of r/all for everyone.

[Numerlor]

Ha, I got them beat with RES and filtering out every generic subreddit that touches politics

[thegrim33]

After the last election, one smaller local subreddit that has had the same overall culture for many, many years, seemingly overnight, at the snap of some fingers, lurched completely to the extreme opposite direction. If you dare to share any of the same ideas that were once widely accepted there for many years on end, now you instead get absolutely pummeled, ridiculed, downvoted out of existence.

It's just so blatantly, demonstrably, obvious the level of manipulation which was targeted at the sub. Somebody, somewhere, added it to a list of subreddits to be manipulated. But you can't even discuss it there, because how are you going to use a compromised communication channel to communicate about how it's compromised?

The majority of the population seemingly can't even notice that sort of communication manipulation, it's gotten so sophisticated. Bot accounts used to be much easier to detect, now they all have very cleverly built-up account history and posts that are near indistinguishable from humans. And of course not all manipulation is bots/AI, there's coordinated shill/sockpuppet/astroturf campaigns with real people being tasked with doing the manipulation.

The smart people have already left and gone on to the next place, which will never be allowed to grow large enough or significant enough without the propaganda fire hose eventually being turned on it too. The only way to fix things is a radically different framework for communication.

[bag_boy]

One thing I have noticed about many of the astroturf accounts is a long gap, like 3-5 years, in posting history.

[clown_strike]

Those are old accounts that were stolen by large-scale password spraying attacks. I've lost a few to this.

[genghisjahn]

Which subreddit? How do we know that what you say is true?

[BrenBarn]

> The only way to fix things is a radically different framework for communication.

What do you think that might look like?

[joshvm]

Back to conventional forums with threaded, sequential, discussion? We managed fine for years and well-moderated forums seem to deal with spam/bots better.

[degrees57]

I agree with you, and think that if Slashdot were to do a rebirth, it might succeed. Of course, they'd have to figure out what went wrong and put in mechanisms to prevent that.

But the five vote options (insightful, interesting, funny, off-topic, troll) were _useful_. Having a feed based on the score of votes plus friend bonus, friend-of-a-friend bonus, foe penalty, friend-of-a-foe penalty gave me a super news feed I stuck with for almost a decade.

I could see a more complex voting rule set being helpful. But basically, it was really good until it wasn't, and that was a problem of the people behind the scenes there, and not the system itself.

[BrenBarn]

Isn't (for instance) Reddit threaded, sequential discussion?

[layer8]

The default sorting on Reddit usually isn’t sequential, and there is no way to track how far you’ve read along the sequence or subthread. In addition, threads get “archived” and you can’t reply anymore. In old-style forums, threads get usually sorted by last activity, meaning that active threads, including resurrected ones, are reliably at the top (sequential by last activity, if you will). On Reddit, orderings like Hot and Best give you some unreliable heuristics, unsuitable for keeping track of current discussions.

[BrenBarn]

Ah, I see, I thought you meant linear within a thread. So you mean some kind of deterministic/transparent sorting (like "most recent activity"). I agree that would improve things.

[selfmodruntime]

Getting rid of anonymous powermoderation.

[BrenBarn]

Why do you think that's the issue? On old-school forums, the forum owners had total moderation power.

[degrees57]

Yes, and in my opinion, this was what killed Slashdot.

[selfmodruntime]

Who knew that giving power to unpaid volunteers who don‘t necessarily have the users or the companies‘ best interest in mind might turn out to be a bad business practice.

[Aurornis]

> I used to love Reddit, but the astroturfing has become unbearable, especially by political groups.

I really doubt most of it is astoturfing. You can find bot accounts, obviously. However, the Reddit hivemind has a very intense echo chamber.

Everyone learns very quickly that if you write something that doesn't match the popular opinion of Reddit, you're going to get downvoted quickly. Strike a nerve and you'll even get angry private messages or people going through your post history and trying to extend their argument into old comments.

Large forums have always been like this. You're at the mercy of a small number of users who have the most free time to post all day. Some times I'll get an unusually angry response on Reddit and click on their profile out of curiosity. It's often someone who has been commenting for the last 10 hours straight. You just can't compete with someone with infinite free time and a lot of anger to get out. Eventually they all sync up to drive away differing opinions

[jayd16]

Its fully astroturfing. The trick is to implement non-member/non-flaired rules to block most folks from the discourse. Then you can just focus on hitting the front page, which you can juice with other rules like only members can down vote. Now you can just focus on hitting the front page and suddenly you get a very biased thread with a lot of eyeballs and no response. /r/The_Donald used this to much success and there have been others.

[Aurornis]

> Its fully astroturfing. The trick is to implement non-member/non-flaired rules to block most folks from the discourse.

The number of subreddits that do this is small. Hardly representative of typical Reddit behavior.

Everyone knows by now that /r/conservative isn’t a real subreddit because it’s “flavored users only”.

However, too many people make the leap from “astroturfing exists” to “everything I don’t like is astroturfing” way too quickly. It’s right up there with accusing people you disagree with of using ChatGPT or being paid shills.

The truth is, a lot of subreddits are the way they are because that’s just what Reddit’s user base thinks, not because a shadowy cabal is making them say those things.

[Suppafly]

>/r/The_Donald used this to much success and there have been others.

I read a post from a former reddit admin a while back that was talking about they managed that. Apparently they had one sticky post each day, and sticky posts are blocked from being on the frontpage but since they'd change the main post each day, once they un-stickied it, it'd immediately get picked up by the algorithm for the frontpage, inadvertently gaming the whole system.

[lazystar]

its astroturfing by for profit companies. after the election, they realized: a) that folks were filtering out the astroturfed subreddits in /r/all, and b) that r/all's filter list has a hard limit of 100 subreddits. so, they switched tactics - by astroturfing >100 subreddits, they can guarantee to their clients that their posts will make the front of r/all for everyone.

[ack_complete]

Back when Pushshift was publicly available, I used to check the mod actions on some subreddits. What I found was that the subreddits that I thought had biased moderators were simply undermoderated. Pretty much every mod action I saw was fair and there were also a lot more than expected, but clearly the issue was that total comment volume was far more than the mod team could handle.

> You're at the mercy of a small number of users who have the most free time to post all day. Some times I'll get an unusually angry response on Reddit and click on their profile out of curiosity. It's often someone who has been commenting for the last 10 hours straight.

These people are also masters at toeing the line of forum or subreddit rules when trashing others, constantly baiting people to cross the line in replies and get themselves moderated. It's worse in forums where downvoting isn't available.

[selfmodruntime]

> I really doubt most of it is astoturfing. You can find bot accounts, obviously. However, the Reddit hivemind has a very intense echo chamber.

There have been discord servers made public where the entire point was to game the reddit algorithm to favor one political candidate.

[unethical_ban]

The Texas subreddit recently got "taken back" by normal, older mods. It had been run by an account "annatrashpanda", who banned anyone critical of the Democrats, who let generic copy/paste national memes take over the board, and so on. I see they have now deleted their account. This all happened about two weeks ago.

I say this as a liberal, the artificially partisan takeovers of local subs is a real thing. It's one thing to ban trolls and consistent shit-talkers from a community. And frankly it's one thing to have some bias. But it was just so obviously hostile, and I was happy to see the sub get back some authenticity.

[_qua]

There was a recent panic/hysteria there about banning Twitter from many subreddits because of hate speech. It was incredible how quickly people were begging to have a website banned when they could either choose not to visit it or down vote posts they didn't like. Really soured things for me by illustration how much the median values changed from when I started using the site.

[clown_strike]

This was about Elon's "Nazi salute" and both so incorrect and blatantly astroturfed I haven't returned to Reddit out of disgust.

A ton of near-dead subreddits with no activity and no reason to link to x.com for any reason suddenly had thousands of people show up demanding links to x.com be blocked like it's an everyday problem for the sub.

The quiet beneficiary of this campaign are those who benefit from Reddit's groomed narrative and their competing platform Bluesky.