This astroturfing issue on Reddit is still relevant in 2025!
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.
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.
Reddit is a marketing platform. Manipulating users is it’s function and purpose.
has been for a decade.
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
100%. For example, never mention monsanto or GMOs on reddit because the shills will swarm… Probably wayyyy worse now.
The thing is if they go too hard it becomes obvious which ruins it
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.
What does Spez care? Guy is a billionaire now, off of the backs of those shills.
It’s especially obvs now, but this was published in 2018!
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
You sound like an addict. I think it’s time to go cold turkey…
i have a super addictive personality, when i find something i like doing, i wanna keep doing it. probably cuz i don’t like doing most things
nah bro i’ll just switch to discord, it’s an even stronger high. cleaner too
How are you unable to make an account on Reddit now? I would imagine your IP address from the early 2010s would be different from what you have now.
not sure, some kind of admin black magic
Fuck Reddit. Don’t go back. Let that platform die
not gonna lie i am REALLY fucking sick of it
i don’t miss it one bit, this place is a lot nicer. it’s so nice making posts that get past the filters
We need Reddit reform NOW
lol. they been “reforming” it since inception. this is the goal.
yeah, don’t think that’s gonna happen dude
