jake
13d ago
Farming karma has gotta be a mix of things. I hate powerusers and would pretty aggressively ban them so I never bothered to talk with them to figure out their motivations, I'm sure it's a combination of things, any, all. Seeing the number go up, seeing all the notifications from comments on a post, seeing it on the front page of /r/All, especially #1. "Being the best" (at reddit, lol, lmao). Po-mo attention seeking, at any rate.
I never cared about the karma game enough to know the tricks. I know that >150 upvotes on a new post in around 15 minutes would usually be enough to get a post on the front page of a sub in old reddit. I don't know what it takes to get an obscure sub's posts to wide visibility. I don't see a reason it couldn't be several people swapping accounts, though the botting there seems easier since presumably it'd take 1-2 people.
TD figured out, or else perfected the technique, that stickying a post would significantly boost its visibility so they constantly rotated stickies. They were absolutely gaming the system, but I think the above is how. The admins worked against them of course, with the infamous example of them screwing up and making like 25/25 /r/All being TD, and later when people figured out via reddit advertising how TD had an audience comparable to /r/politics despite an ostensible order of magnitude fewer subscribers. I don't remember the sequence, but that general time period was when /r/politics had its big changeover in mods, paid actors among them.
A tad late to this but can give info as a former reddit powerjanny (I figure Zorba knows who I am, or will with this mention)
Mods of even the largest subs are given no tools to identify bad users. We were never told by admins when a brigade was happening, we had no method of specifically detecting brigades, we had bots that would ping if a thread was linked and we would sometimes get warnings from other mods, but that's it. My default when I see a locked thread with mods complaining about brigading is the thread was just especially provocative.
Spam is the majority of bad user activity on reddit. If it's a picture of the sort of shit you'd find in a gift shop--like shirts and mugs--in almost every instance it was a spammer. A second account would comment asking "Where can I get this?" and then either OP or a third account would reply with a link. Then there's the submission and comment reposting mentioned here, very common, and accounts we'd label auction accounts. Those accounts followed a pattern so clear you could look at the first page of their profile and know, not that this was hard. It'd be like 2-3 submissions, 2-3 comments made in the last few days from a >6 month old account. These were different than the word-for-word repost bots, as repost bots only very rarely messaged modmail while the latter would frequently message with invariably broken English of such content as "Why ban" or "And why is ban??" (That why.)
There is also the paid political activity on reddit. Some are mods, most don't need to be paid, they happily follow party line. It's easy to look at political subs, especially the new ones that have started popping up this year and will continue to pop up ahead of the election, and see the same usernames in the mod lists, and other usernames posting links to those subs and other political subs, all pushing narrative. I'd imagine if you opened politics right now it wouldn't take long to find a year-old account with more than a million post karma that constantly posts articles hating on the right, that person is paid for what they do. And, yknow, don't forget Ghislaine Maxwell. As to those random subs popping, the paid users either start new ones or take over dead ones, then upvote bot submissions in their critical windows so they're pushed to wider visibility and actual users start upvoting.
As for LSC, I'd imagine most specifically bad use there is spammers and powerusers farming karma, with a minority of the paid users who will post whatever boo Trump or boo Righties article to every possibly relevant sub.
I'd be happy to answer or try to answer other questions. I started before Trump arrived and the site lost its mind, I thought it'd be interesting, it was, it quickly turned terrible. I stayed day-to-day to ban spammers, I stayed long-term to enforce no politics and keep frothing ideologues off the mod list.
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