This astroturfing issue on Reddit is still relevant in 2025!

      • JesusChristLover420@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        1·
        2 days ago

        If sex workers are only advertising in the porn subs, I don’t see the problem. If it were a corporation I’d consider them sinners, but workers giving people free porn with the ulterior motive of making a living wage, I think that’s a win-win.

        • Tollana1234567@lemmy.today
          1·
          1 day ago

          i feel like reddit only started targeting them, is because they arnt getting a piece of the pie of what they are earning, apparently if your an of, or a link dropper to your business you can earn quite a income, assuming you follow the proper procedures to evade the filters, it does cost you money to run legions of accounts and ban evasion methods.

  • The Velour Fog @lemmy.world
    14·
    3 days ago

    A couple years ago there was this shitty wallpaper company called Plasteur or some shit, that ran a guerilla campaign of overlaying a corner of thousands of gifs with their URL and releasing a bunch of bots that only replied to comments using gifs with the injected URL. Those bots were very hard to flag for removal because they operated mostly in the shitposting okbuddy subs, so if you called them out, you were downvoted to hell for “killing the vibe.” Also the bots would block accounts that called them out so you could no longer reply to or report them.

    There are also entire subs that are completely overrun with astroturfing bots, like r/malwares and r/free_vpn.

    This is a problem that has been going on for years and it is magnitudes worse now than ever.

    • Tollana1234567@lemmy.today
      3·
      1 day ago

      the subs that are overrun with bots, they are usually they just to get enough karma or whatever so reddit doesnt ban them with thier anti-spamming botting measures. its a way to “warm up” thier hundreds of accounts at least temporarily.

  • Tollana1234567@lemmy.today
    5·
    2 days ago

    most notable and obvious was increasing russian propaganda bots back in '17 where the sudden rise had made the mods so overly sensitive that you are getting banned very easily. also pointing out such ragebait will get you similar astroturfing.

    • tidderuuf@lemmy.world
      10·
      3 days ago

      My first permaban was years ago for calling out an astroturfing campaign and the power mods who were running it or getting a kickback to stay silent about it.

      There are hundreds of stories like mine on the TheseFuckingAccounts subreddit

  • InvalidName2@lemmy.zip
    10·
    3 days ago

    Way back in the day I was invited to a private sub that tracked various “stealth” advertising / scam / shill rings on Reddit. I guess one of the founding members noticed a comment or post of mine complaining about the very obvious behaviors I’d noticed, and turns out, there were a large number of people in this group keeping track of it.

    I’m not going to bother watching a youtube video, but I have to wonder if it’s pointing out the same kind of stuff we’d been noticing for well over a decade.

  • Novamdomum@fedia.io
    2·
    3 days ago

    I don’t imagine there are any online forums that aren’t being manipulated by professional shills every day. I recently decided to block any community that posted anything political. The silence that has followed has been quite blissful.

    • Tollana1234567@lemmy.today
      1·
      1 day ago

      usually most forums are heavily gatekeeped against that, you arnt going to be able to say thing outside what the forum was meant for a specific subject. IF one is going to political one, you are going to expect an even more harsher control method than reddit.

  • alias_qr_rainmaker@lemmy.world
    811·
    3 days ago

    The only reason I’m here is because since 2011, I’ve racked up so many minor infractions that I am now no longer able to make an account. I’m basically like a guy who got a life sentence for a bunch of speeding tickets.

    We need Reddit reform NOW

    so i can go back