Comment by kmeisthax | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kmeisthax | Hacker News Reader

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While this is absurdly conspiratorial, there is a grain of truth to it: early on in Reddit's history, the admins created fake accounts and posted on them to boost engagement[0]. More recently, after the blackout and user exodus, /r/de noticed a bunch of new German-language copies of popular English-language subs being created with a bunch of autotranslated comments[1]. So Reddit's administration is not above creating fake accounts and content to juice numbers.

How much of Reddit's engagement is faked is up for debate - I suspect it's less than we think. However, it'd be really funny if, say, when Reddit IPOs, someone at /r/WSB catches onto this and triggers a bunch of people shorting the stock.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmeDzx4SUME via https://www.themarysue.com/reddit-fake-account-origins/

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/13p889x/red...

It's one thing to add stories to a startup website and created the illusion of a couple dozen users instead of just zero. But all these years later Reddit has millions and millions of unique users per month and is still one of the top ten most visited websites in the US and has been for many years, beat out only by google/meta properties and wikipedia etc. You can fake "activity" internally but it's harder to fake stats calculated by independent evaluators.

And if it wasn't, everybody would be doing it. What makes you think reddit would have an advantage in doing that over anyone else?

It's not that Reddit is faking their own stats. The conspiracy theory is that these fake users are created by various non-Reddit organizations to promote an agenda, sell stuff, gather intelligence, etc. Reddit's level of awareness and complicity is secondary.

Wouldn’t those same people just do the same thing everywhere on social media across the Internet though? Because if so it’s still doing well in the relative rankings.

If anything, the more popular the site, the more bots and astroturfing it would attract.

It’s also facially absurd to anyone uses Reddit beyond scrolling the front page.

Some malicious actor is fabricating 100 comments a day about the nitty gritty of the New York Times crossword?

Yeah if their AI commenting is all that good/convincing they should get out of social media and start the next trillion dollar company.

They specifically reposed users content from other platforms then pinged them that it was being discussed on reddit. It's what caused me to use reddit for the first time.

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