Does Reddit have an astroturfing problem? What the data suggests

There have been a few cases posted to the theoryofreddit subreddit where it's obvious that there were sets of accounts which were blanket recommending specific products a disproportionate amount of time. The user accounts involved were often banned shortly afterwards (or were deleted). These were (upon examination) really obvious though, often promoting extremely niche products using very exact terminology.

This I think leads to a sort of toupee fallacy - where because you can spot the really bad examples you feel confident that you can identify the much better, more subtle examples. If an account which has only made 50 comments (all of which are very generic) makes 20 comments in a single month explicitly recommending ImageGeneratorDeluxeProMax then sure, you can guess they might not be legit. But if an account runs for a longer period of time and makes a lot more general organic contributions then if 1 in 500 of their comments are in favour of a particular product then it's harder to say.

I think ultimately account age is the only thing that will be difficult to replicate at scale. I know people buy older accounts but there is still a fundamental difficulty in obtaining them in sufficient numbers. And yes, obviously that will mean disregarding the many millions of legitimate accounts that are under (say) 2 or 3 years old. There is also no easy way of hiding accounts under a certain age when searching Reddit via Google.

By allowing uses to hide user profiles Reddit has also made detecting potentially bad actors that little bit more difficult. And from experience it feels like a large proportion of accounts now have hidden post histories. (It might also be the default for new accounts, I'm not sure).

Niche topics like linux feel somewhat safe from bots. But the last time I checked the more popular subs.. yikes..

When I see 2-weeks old account "Incendiary-Leg-8592" responding to a post by another weeks old user "Pivotal-Kitchen-0498", I have a hard time believing they are humans behind them.

I think the items listed under "What astroturfing would look like" were a pretty narrow scope. If I were designing a ~spam system~ astroturfing solution, I'd engineer out these four simple indicators as soon as I could.

* Those accounts naming one brand almost every time they name any. * Thin accounts: few comments, low scores, no real standing in the subreddit. * Young accounts, or accounts with histories that are hidden or wiped. * Links to a store or an affiliate page.

> REDCmts sells one Reddit comment for $9.99 and 100 for $699.99, from what it calls "real, aged accounts", and shows a gallery of brand mentions it says it delivered. Soar says its accounts are "aged and manually warmed" for weeks before a single brand mention. Bazzly advertises automated replies to every post that looks like someone shopping.

Why doesn't Reddit make sure that shilling is disallowed by their ToS, and then sue these companies and all their customers?

My impression is that this doesn't show anything. It essentially implies that brand loyalty is equivalent to paid astroturfing, but if you've been around hobby communities on the internet, you know that a lot of people are just brand blowhards. And in any case, by its own admission, none of the results in this article are statistically significant, so it fails to find the effect it implies to have found.

I strongly believe that there's a lot of paid product placement and paid political talking points on Reddit, so it's actually remarkable that this (LLM-generated) article fails to find it. I suspect it's just bad design.

If you're already spending money on tokens, there's a very simple experiment you could do instead: just pay one of these companies to position a made-up product and see what they do.

Yes.

I do it locally to nudge political discourse. Doesn't take much to sway a lot of people.

I'm glad I agree with what I'm doing because its effectiveness is terrifying.

https://www.theverge.com/tech/975398/reddit-ai-rules-hub-mod...

I was banned by their new AI moderation system. Then I appealed it and got a message saying "Our slop banned you by mistake." (paraphrased)

Then I was banned again by their new AI moderation system.

Then I deleted my post history using Power Delete Suite and stopped using reddit.

https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite

Let their bots moderate bots.

I gave up on any product related reviews on Reddit a decade ago. It can still be useful for guides that may describe what type of products you should look into, e.g., woodworking tools, skincare, etc.

For product reviews, I've been using GearLab (https://www.techgearlab.com/) for years with pretty reliable results. I have no affiliation with them.

Sounds interesting but I find it kind of annoying the github source either has been nuked or never existed in the first place.

Reddit added an option to hide your post history, making it harder to figure out if the account is a bot.

A large portion of the "New LLM release" story comments here on HN also appear to be astroturfing ... would be interesting to see a correlation of comment sentiment to IP-derived geographic location!

IIRC the Reddit founders used bots for initial traffic to skip over the cold start problem. I feel like this bit of lore is actually pretty terrible but is treated as a nice anecdote because it worked.

Why would I trust an article written in Claudish with a broken link to a github repo?

Ads, scams, rage bait, trolls... The internet is pretty broken for almost all sites that pretends to carry conversations between actual people.

I don't understand why so many people and companies feel the need to just spam reviews, SEO and questionable ads. It's like almost no one has the idea that may we start with a good product, then we'll tell people about it. It's always a question of what you can have produced cheaply in China and how do we then trick people into buying it.

As it stand you can pretty much assume that if it's advertised, or is promoted on social media, it's going to be a shit product.

To some extend I'd exclude certain types of YouTube reviews, because they frequently aren't paid by the manufacturer and making a video with real people and real data is to expensive to waste on scams.

> Unfortunately, advertisers are getting smarter and using bots...

I honestly thought this was a nag asking me to turn off my ad blocker!

That this was posted by someone who's only here to post his own sites and those sites have never been submitted by another person is like performance art.

Perhaps we can envision a future in which we analyze Reddit data not according to all the positive things people say about a product, but according to the negative things being said.

Shilling can’t prevent dissatisfied customers from voicing their opinions in a properly moderated subreddit, and astroturfing to spread misinformation about a competitor makes companies much more vulnerable to litigation.

anyone who ever says no to this hasn't ever posted on reddit.

Am I the only person who thinks many of the various "I don't touch code anymore" comments here come from bots?

Per Reddit itself and Google, astroturfing is especially bad in political subreddits. Attempting to shape public perception is a big business.

All this time I've been oblivious to this. To this day I still write site:reddit.com in my searches to get information from people. SMH.

Isn't there? Especially when crypto was booming, that kind of opinion manipulation definitely existed to deceive people. I've actually seen it in freelance requests before too, and most of the time they run it through phone farms.

I've also heard it happens in some games as well, but either way, the one I can say for certain is crypto.

Absolutely. For example, the blatant ads for Stake https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/1s3yscz/how_reddit_us...

Yes, yes it does. There's astroturfing of every variety: political, brands, image rehab, you name it.

Just look at how often Bill Gates gets glazing articles posted which receive suspicious rankings. None of the comments mention the Epstein-sized elephants in the room.

Politics is even worse, and it's useless as a platform for taking political temperature. Numerous companies openly admit to this activity and Reddit has never commented on this practice.

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A truly load-bearing article that reassures us that Reddit is not astroturfed.

Of course, AI coding agents, which the author works on, would also never be astroturfed on Reddit!

You know, astroturfing on Reddit also comes from long time accounts with moderator support.

> Adding "reddit" to a knife search still gets you humans, mostly. For a couple of brands, a quarter to a third of the buying advice comes from accounts that mostly recommend that brand. Whether those are fans or paid, I do not know, and after reading their histories I lean toward fans and hold the lean loosely.

Very long write up to unconfidently say I don’t know.