- Joined
- Feb 2, 2019
This is true. Less than 1% produce content online. The rest consume.
reddit General
- Thread starter SpessCaptain
- Start date
- Joined
- Apr 30, 2016
/r/politics has obviously been a few retards among massive astroturfing ever since a) David Brock admitted he was doing it, and b) the entire subreddit flipped opinion 180 degrees when Hillary passed out at a 9/11 service on a Sunday and her campaign couldn't agree on what story to give the shills until Monday morning.
- Joined
- Feb 2, 2019
4chan is definitely filled by bots. You can get past the captcha by buying a pass, so it's literally part of hiro's business model.
Even if it wasn't there are plenty of ways to get humans to solve the captcha through various reward sites, so your bots can bypass them.
- Joined
- Oct 28, 2015
If there is a huge amount of bot activity on Reddit, it has to r/made me smile. Everyday multiple unremarkable pictures get tens of thousands of upvotes and just as many rewards for having sob stories attached. These posts are highly visible on the front page and helps cultivate Reddit’s wholesome100 image.
- Joined
- Jan 10, 2020
It's really fucking weird how quickly Reddit constructed this "wholesome" face for the site. This is a community that came from subs like r/jailbait being freely allowed just a few years ago, and r/watchpeopledie being live for long after. Pretty sure it started with the creation of r/wholesomememes, which is also fakey as hell.
- Joined
- Oct 6, 2016
Don't use outdated examples. They're the community that makes death threats against disabled children for liking the wrong video game. They're the community that has subreddits of people fantasizing about causing harm to random animals.
But yo! We're sOcIaLlY cOnScIoUs!!!
- Joined
- Jan 10, 2020
I don't know about you, but I just upboated and gave wholesome gold to a post of someone kicking a chihuahua into a blender on r/dogfree
- Joined
- Aug 28, 2019
Has this been posted before? I had this picture for a while, and I read the original thread about it (the one in the image) and it got me thinking, big time. FYI I'll be schizo posting a bit here, and yes, I did take my medicine. If you don't want to read my schizophrenic essay, just read the image then.
Have any of you heard of the "Dead Internet Theory"?
AFAIK it boils down to, since the development and innovations in the fields of AI, algorithms and software, a big portion of internet traffick has been entirely fake. Fake as in, bots, advertisements, even outright fake accounts having fake discussions with other fake accounts. Bots talking to bots and maybe even entire websites. And at this point I truly believe it.
Reddit has a "subreddit simulator" where bots will take words and sentences used frequently to talk with eachother, with each "user" being a bot that repressents a subreddit
And since we are at the point where bots and algorithms can create entire papers
And also realistic texts based on simple inputs
What's to say that internet forums like Reddit don't use anything like that? We know the technology is here. So why would they? First of all, shilling. We know companies like to use realistic accounts to advertise products,
r/HailCorporate
r/HailCorporate: /r/HailCorporate is to document times when people act as unwitting advertisers for a product as well as to document what appear to …www.reddit.com
Using an automated bot is much easier and can do multiple accounts at the same time.
Second of all, politics. We know that Shareblue for example spends millions on their online propaganda and political shilling.
Another one, to fake traffick and make a website more desirable to users. Forums thrive on their users, they need them. We've seen so many forums die when something better pops up. Given how much money companies like Tencent invest in Reddit, I doubt they'd let their investment go to waste. Saidit, a reddit competitor deals with constant DDoS'. And they're not some far right site like /pol/ neither. The guy who runs the site claims it's most likely done because they're a Reddit competitor, and growing.
He also claims that the website has "cultural" attacks aswel, due to these websites having accounts that don't require an image or whatever and are thus easy to make and exploit. And unlike sites like 4chan, Reddit, Saidit and similair don't use captchas - making it easier for bots to spam. After all, even 4chan has spam despite the captcha.
So we know the techology exists to fake traffick on a forum, we know Reddit has the money and capabilities to do so and we know that Reddit/Tencent have very good reasons to dabble in that area aswel.
So now, I genuinly feel like some Reddit users are bots.
And there's proof of it too, sort of atleast.
Read through this:
View attachment 1629775
Are most mods on Reddit automated bots? Software? Algorithms? Maybe even rudimentary AI? At the very least a big portion of Reddit moderators have no actual people behind them, that's for sure.
And if they are, what's to say the users are not? There's no capcha, and a plethora of reasons why Reddit would create fake traffick. Tencent gave them millions of dollars, they certainly don't lack the funds and the technology exists too.
What are you thoughts on this? I genuinly feel like a schizo typing all this but surely there's something fishy here, right?
Edit: This is the dead internet theory btw:
A bit more crazy than what I wrote, but it makes some interesting points
You aren't crazy. I'm old enough to have seen some of this stuff they talk about there firsthand. The one that stands out most to me is "Digg Day" which I just tried to Google so I could find some of the old posts for you guys and it looks like a lot of the old posts I remember aren't even showing up in casual search. Weird.
Anyway, once upon a time Digg was bigger than reddit. Then digg changed their presentation and algorithm and everyone got pissed and moved to reddit. I remember seeing that influx of users and wondering how it was even possible for reddit to go that fast that quickly. It didn't seem like this was all just people from Digg. It was like twice as many people joined as had been on Digg in the first place. It would have been the perfect opportunity to start rolling out bots, then as the site grew they could just add more fake-users in a way that looked natural to advertisers.
- Joined
- Jan 10, 2020
I'd buy it. It does seem especially weird to me, that despite Reddit making several mistakes similar to what Digg has done, none of Reddit's competition has blown up despite several mass exoduses of users. Them having botted the site in the first place is something I'd definitely buy especially since Reddit seems absolutely fine with letting corporate shill bots run rampant.
- Joined
- Apr 30, 2016
that's just normie retardation, not astroturfing. /r/pics did that all the time pre-2016, before they became spammed with political whining.
Reddit mucks with things a fuckton but the main userbase is still retarded.
- Joined
- Jan 12, 2019
They're the community whose most notable power-mod was Ghislaine Maxwell, alleged child trafficker.
Jar-Jar Fanboy
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- May 22, 2020
I've actually thought this about r/pics for the longest time. The most mediocre, Facebook-tier bullshit gets thousands and thousands of upvotes, and a lot of the comments are just generic shit. Like on a couple's wedding picture: "Wow, congrats!" "She looks beautiful!" or on a cancer pic: "Fuck cancer." "Good luck!" just shit like that. However, once in a while, you'll find sone lame post with 50K upvotes, check the comments, and an overwhelming amount of them are just shitting on the post, and wondering how it got so many upvotes. Are the upvotes from bots, mentally-deficient normies, or a combination of the two? Really gets the noggin joggin'
- Joined
- Jan 12, 2019
For a long time it was well known that /r/pics was a good place to farm karma for account sellers. There were even guides in the "exclusive" high karma subreddits on how to do it most effectively.
- Joined
- Sep 15, 2016
That's fucking pathetic.
- Joined
- Jan 10, 2020
There's even multiple subs out there for cataloguing the terrible, mundane content from pics that gets thousands of upvotes for mentions of "cancer" "disabled" "immigrant" etc. There's even r/nocontextpics made for the sole reason of avoiding the idiotic karma farming that occurs there with the sob stories. Wish I could remember the name of the cataloguing and the parody ones, though. Pretty hilarious the lengths that Redditors will go to.
- Joined
- Sep 19, 2013
The sad thing is, people have actually taken pity on him and recorded themselves hitting the seek button, etc. etc. and uploaded the video to Youtube for him to watch, only for him to just ask for another one with another year, sub-model, etc. of Elantra.
I did find his Twitter and Youtube and Pintrest, though. He's a sped street shitter who is obsessed with the early 2000s and a long defunct music store in Canada called CD Warehouse. He really gives me Erik Mokrachek vibes.
(archive)
(archive)
(archive)
Original Reddit account: https://snew.notabug.io/user/randyravivann
Edit: He's now IP banned from /r/Elantra and too much of a sped to use Tor and VPNs, so now he's spamming/r/Elantrasport. People are sending him links to rickroll and goatse, and he's responding with the usual Engrish gibberish along with incoherent rants about how everyone has do everything he says because he has autism and it upsets him if they don't.
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- Joined
- Mar 24, 2017
Honestly you just summarised this whole thread.
- Joined
- Mar 11, 2020
Summarized Reddit
- Joined
- May 18, 2014
I don't use plebbit often so do the Karma points actually do anything or is it just online auto fellatio?
- Joined
- Jan 17, 2019
Make you more appealing to account buyers at least, but nothing concrete I know of. Even an old account with about 20k karma (video-game memes my dudes) got a few offers in broken English.