Reddit is being manipulated by big financial services companies
forbes.com
forbes.com
https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/5vwt2g/israel_de...
Top thread (minus auto-summary bot's) erroneously declares the title misleading.
The thread under that amplifies some seemingly very flakey accusations a different employee at that organization maintains ties to a terrorist organization renounced decades ago.
Derail accomplished! Threads about Russia being bad usually lead with how the US is bad. Threads about Syria often debate whether Bashar al-Assad is not so bad. I am usually annoyed I read the comments in that subreddit.
Look at this awesome 2 day old account's comments -
https://i.redditmedia.com/C87zcWzT3KPN0Sdo4YfMIe2Rd0oLWTwBsX...
Sometimes the fake accounts will even have identical comments and only post in each others comment chains.
I thinks the problem; many browsers don't care to fact check, or even click through to the articles underneath. Indeed I just scroll through the list a few times throughout the day, and might click on anything that sounds interesting. But with the constant and obvious BS it all gets a bit tiresome. If there was an alternative site where they had rules in place to deal with the problem, I'd switch in a heartbeat.
It's pretty obvious first comments on HN that are generally upvotable tend to accumulate views, votes, and thereby become undisplacable from the top of the sort. In addition to drowning out lower comments as threads aren't collapsed.
From a pure game perspective, not reading the article / skimming and posting a comment as quickly as possible strictly dominates reading the article, if you're optimizing for karma.
This has the advantage that even posting much the same comment into different subreddits using different accounts in each subreddit is detected.
This is the danger with just being in an echo chamber, because you yourself become part of the echo.
But now with the pay-to-get-upvotes scams going on, we get utterly biased and even ridiculous stories constantly on the front page. And how to even start on the comments, which just read like blurbs to the title. A great example on the front page at the moment:
"Donald Trump's war on media is 'biggest threat to democracy' says Navy Seal who brought down Osama Bin Laden".
I almost feel like this stuff is AI generated at this point, just throwing together keywords that get clicks. As someone across the pond looking in, the bias is laughable obvious. I just hope that more people realise that manipulation is present, and remember not to believe everything they read.
What is this an example of? This sounds like exactly the kind of thing that I would expect on the front page if there was no vote manipulation.
Is that a pun? Because obviously reddit has a leftist bias.
Perhaps I'm not familiar with the situation. What similar subs have been banned?
(I dare not link to it. It is quite toxic.)
https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/5vx3af/ (NSFW)
I don't think I've ever seen anything like that on the politics subreddit.
The reasoning behind this is that r/politics doesn't ban people or articles that the mods disagree with. It's the community itself that downvotes pro-Trump stuff. r/The_Donald, on the other hand, bans people who make comments critical of Trump and people who submit anti-Trump articles. Similarly, r/enoughtrumpspam or r/communism should also be banned from making it to the default front page (I don't know if they actually are).
I don't understand all these people complaining that reddit does not have enough differing opinions. What the hell? Do you expect users of a site to conform to your beliefs?
Why don't you go find a different site that reflects your beliefs.
I don't go on HN and complain there's not enough discussion about camping.
And neither title is all that surprising withing the context of the echo chamber that exists there, but for a little while you'd see the same types of posts just circulating the page for days when suddenly the entire direction went to the next phase or tactic, there was actually quite little variety in my opinion.
Reddit is largely regurgitated news stories. The news entities are all famously easy to manipulate and care more about speed and quantity over quality. A lot of news organizations are shamelessly partisan too, more so than ever.
I avoid the political subreddits even when they align with my political ideology because they are mostly filled with controversy driven stories rather than any useful political debate. You can't fill 24hr news cycles without filling it up with useless drama, so it's better to not get caught in that trap and just wait for the actually good stories float to the top.
Every single part of the title is true.
People pay very little attention to the fragility that has arisen in the Web 2.0 economy. Once there is widespread understanding of the gaming, cheating, and botting, these social network institutions will crumble. There will be piecemeal attempts to reduce botting, but they will annoy end users, and annoy investors and shareholders as they come to realize XX% of their user base never existed.
Web 3.0 will be the death of anonymity, with social networks and APIs that are, by design, hard to automate, and even harder to hide your true identity from. There will be CAPTCHA-like systems (possibly tied to hardware) that facilitate this. This will of course promise to fix the problem of botting, while heavily benefiting surveillance, for state, and for advertisement. There will be a new breed of social networks built around ensuring the content you are seeing is genuine or "organic", and yet the incentives will be much more perverse, and their networks, much more invasive.
The bot vs captcha arms race will continue, but I would be very surprised if the captchas started winning.
By definition, shill accounts have different patterns than normal user accounts. Step 1) Deal with new accounts (preferably in an anonymous way). Step 2) Mine the actions of older accounts to detect patterns that point back to shilling.
Not insurmountable.
There feels like there is an analogy to our civilization. We existed as very primal beings operating in a world of high anonymity. A real world with high anonymity meant a more dangerous environment (theft, murder, assault, etc). In order for us to congregate & live a collectively improved life, we decreased anonymity. We did this with the idea of names, roles (sheriff), & printed records.
New complexity emerged from this. We needed to collect funds via taxes, make and enforce rules. We needed to know who each other were in order to give the rules some repercussions. Eye witnesses were crucial because of their "ability" to remove anonymity.
These steps of stripping anonymity were done with the intention of improving society. This point here is debateable, feel free to challenge.
We're at a unique moment in time where there's a highly dense "locale" that has full anonymity. What's even more interesting about this locale is that it's permeated across our "real world" society. The implications of this reality are immense, we live in two worlds that are interwoven — one that has little anonymity & the other with abundant anonymity.
As technology increases in power & importance (it will) this is tipping the scales. In general, I don't have much faith in humanity's ability to live within an anonymous world without devolving into very primal pre-civilization behavior (see: 4chan /b/).
I'm not sure this is a stoppable (or advisable to stop) process.
I can imagine being comfortable with an anonymous free future. This future would require much strengthened privacy protections, and even a very different looking government before I'd be comfortable however. I don't see those institutions giving us the protections we'd need.
I suppose this thread has made me realize that an anonymous world is only required when our laws and institutions don't fully protect us as individuals.
First, verified accounts, like Twitter, are visually separate from non-verified accounts. The distinction has to be visible on every place the username is displayed or when their post is displayed.
Second, only verified users have upvote/downvote privileges. To me it is downright foolish to allow any jackass or botnet to make a ton of accounts and up/down vote the conversation as they please.
I have seen this forum management all over the web and it's turning me off from social media more and more by the day. Newspaper comment sections used to be insightful, and now they are generally cesspools of shills and bots. Double or more for forums like Reddit. I even see it on Hacker News.
We can have open discussions and we can have discussions free of paid influence, but I do not believe it is possible to have both.
This same thing happens on all social networks - facebook, instagram, reddit, twitter, etc all have accounts on them that may have naturally grown and are now paid to post / influence content on their respective platforms. I've seen this first hand on Instagram how large of an effect it can have in promoting apps, products etc. Previously disclosing affiliations / paid promotions was limited to a much smaller set influencers. Now, these platforms give anyone from a kid with spare time to a professional marketing agency a means to build accounts and leverage the vast reach of these networks for their own gain. Facebook is _starting_ to realize this and clamp down on it for fake news. But there are many more avenues and it'll be interesting to see how this really gets solved if at all.
If you asked me how we could potentially combat this coming information implosion? I would say you fight fire with fire.
http://wiki.project-pm.org/wiki/Persona_Development#Persona_...
Only way I can think to fix it is to tell people to stop talking about HN. If you want to keep HN good, keep it to your very close friends and family. We don't want this to turn into reddit or digg.
HN user jfc said it better here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7650975
Moreover, jfc has valid points about negativity and unhelpful responses, but it remains anecdotal. As a counter, my own anecdotal experience has largely been positive on SO, and I rarely run into those problems. I am definitely not part of the cohort that was there first, and think it's a rather fair system. For example, preventing downvotes until a certain level of reputation is reached is a small check on those looking to farm karma by blanketing out competing answers. Obviously it isn't foolproof, but it at least ensures that you have actually contributed to the community at least a few times.
Perhaps his comment speaks more to the quality of the userbase than to the efficiency of the voting system?
After the initial adopters had been outnumbered, but long before reddit was popular enough to attract legions of professional marketers, popular subreddits were dominated by puns, memes, highly biased politics, emoting, etc. It's what people upvote, and it doesn't require a reputation system.
People who are picturing crowds coming in and messing up such a system aren't really getting the idea -- it is a closed system. Above the lowest layer, it is read-only to the public, unless you are given permission to contribute. The other commenter who said people don't want a system like this may be correct... but that might be a good thing. Catering to the crowds isn't the goal here. Finding the much smaller groups that are willing to put in more work to manage themselves, and engage in meaningful dialogue is exactly what might make places like /r/politics meaningful.
I think the general population is becoming more aware of how intrusive ad networks are, possibly moving the needle on making a pay service more viable. But I don't think I know any non-tech people that would be willing to pay for a Twitter/Facebook/Reddit type service today.
So, I have no good solution. But I sure hope someone figures out a good solution. The whole concept of "pick your own truth" has some terrifying consequences.
Give an allowance of votes per day/week. More can be bought for very cheap, like 2 cents?
Votes are a commodity that can be accumulated and used to vote others. The more popular your posts are the more votes you have pooled to use on others. Votes are slowly dissipated over time to prevent hoarding.
You'd have to find a way to deal with shills/bots. No easy solution here, invite only will stifle growth. Collecting too much personal info will stifle growth. Maybe extreme blacklisting techniques for anyone found to be manipulating?
If you could pull it off then advertisers would actually have to pay to manipulate your site, not perfect but better than reddit's free accounts to manipulate thing they have going on now.
Every time a "what would kill off Reddit" thread comes up limiting up/downvotes and paying for more comes up. I feel it would kill off Reddit. (But I'm not a Reddit fan so I wouldn't stand in their way if they wish to add it).
2. Give out X invites to everyone.
3. Every user now has a reference pointing to who invited them.
4. Require that you must vouch for the behavior of the people you invite, and their behavior may impact your participation.
5. Use tree traversal and analysis for pruning bad sections of the population of users. (i.e. If you see a series of bad users, go up the tree to find the source and prune it there.)
6. Work on algorithms and moderator tools to improve said analysis.
7. Give merit and incentive to those who contribute. (See: Slashdot and Everything2 systems.)
8. Add anonymous meta-moderation. (Again, see Slashdot.)
9. Give ranks and small power to users based on their merit and participation, and somewhat based on their invited friends.
I can keep going. It's a bit harsh, but I feel it'd work.
I've considered making an example app, but the hard part would be getting a critical mass of users and content. Reddit, for example, faked posting content for their first few years to seed their community. It's hard to grow a new community, if even possible.
P.S. If anyone has a lobste.rs's invite, lemme know. Curious to see how their invite-only website has progressed.
As you mentioned, it is too difficult to get off the ground with an invite system, but it may be interesting if an existing community became invite-only. Unfortunately the high risk of torpedoing your business is a deterrent.
I subscribe to subs like sysadmin, woodworking, ruby and bicycling. The front page and defaults are just horribly toxic.
This is today's equivalent of the same problem. The difference is it is now two monied interests battling for the audience.
I long for a modern usenet newsgroup equivalent that has some kind of protection from monied interests, I suppose a small audience is a guard.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13714159
(I would like to give a more substantive comment, so I'll leave the somewhat jaded perspective of rephrasing the title: "<social channel> is being manipulated by <anyone who participates in social engagement/growth hacking/perception management>". The question I contemplate is where we draw the line of what social engagement is above the bar acceptability. (To answer my own question, I typically consider "disclosure" the answer to that))
The far more important problem in my opinion in this situation is to be able to differentiate a "normal" user submitted post from an advertisiement, a skill that is missing in 80% of today's youth:
What exactly are "today's youth" supposed to know in the face of that?
Most reputable forums try to deal with it somehow, but it's difficult to stamp it out completely -- especially if the site administrators are ever themselves compromised.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sockpuppet_%28Internet%29
Not surprising at all that Reddit did the same thing.
However HN is tiny compared to reddit it doesnt fracture itself into small subreddits. Things are much more managable this way. When shill content does pop up it's pretty obvious and it's usually called out.
(It's not something I believe).
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13724990 and marked it off-topic.