is reddit itself using upvote and repost bots now?
is reddit itself using upvote and repost bots now?
I used to be a lot on r/travel. Back then there were posts with pictures that had upvote ls in the triple to quadruple digit range. There were also user questions, usually in the double digits.
Now the majority is just discussions that mysteriously have thousands of upvotes. And some of them quite boring. That must be bots or fakes directly by reddit. No way this happens naturally.
Is this common practice now or is that something r/travel did specifically?
Bot armies have been all over reddit for years manipulating votes and the larger the community, the larger that problem is.
I think the real reason they got rid of the 3rd party apps is that some apps (particularly the mod tools) make it easier to detect when the site's own bots are active.
Oh that's interesting, thanks. I hadn't considered that or honestly know enough about the mod tools to have considered that.
People manipulating the site as well. I documented a user's spam network and dozens of alts where they basically ran a network of spam subs to promote their books, had different personas for different political viewpoints, etc. Admins banned them so many times but they just start new subs and change their personas again. Basically every other sub knows about them and bans them too cause they just spam the same shit constantly 24/7. They also harassed a bunch of co mods and are a narcissistic egomaniac.
🌏🧑🚀🔫🧑🚀
Reddit has quite literally been using them since they were first founded. To get the site off the ground, links, votes & engagement was artificially populated for years as the userbase grew. Reddit has never been organic. And anyone who believes reddit ever stopped manipulating those numbers after their "seed phase" to make the site look better is no more than a sweet summer child.
Can you source me on this? I don't know what to Google to find information on this topic.
I don't fault them for seeding content to get a totally blank site off the ground. But spez definitely never stopped manipulating everything that's followed.
I only go back occasionally for a fap, and even my old favourite subreddits are just reposts of old content, it's dead to me.
That's all they really are, a porn aggregator.
a spez one, at that
Or people are boring.
Until recently, Reddit has been seeing an increase in active users. That has made upvotes more available, causing karma inflation.
Also, Reddit has been taking a lot of effort to kill the default sub list, so it is distributing people to subs they wouldn't normally go to.
Since votes are private by default, reddit wouldn't need bots to manipulate voting. They can just show or report on the API whatever number they want.
I'm seeing a huge ratio of upvotes to comments lately on reddit.
Like 30k upvotes, 200 comments.
Happens here too but not as extreme.
I've also seen weird upvote/comment ratios on Lemmy, but I think there are still bugs in the system.
I have seen a post with a sus upvote count and no comments from a different instance. When I view it on the post's home instance, I see plenty of comments from users who's instances that are federated with mine, but my instance's version of the post has few or no comments. It's happened more than once, but I bet it's just temporary strangeness at play when it happens.
I've said this and I'll say it again. Anyone that's on Reddit still, doesn't make quality content or have comments that are worth a shit. All those people went to mastodon, lemmy or somewhere else. Same applies with facebook, xitter, or any other corpo social media.