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Notes -
It's All Astroturf
I came across this post today comparing two Reddit threads on LateStageCapitalism, posted 10 months apart, with essentially the exact same content, including top level comments and replies but with different user names.
Discussion on HackerNews.
The posters on HackerNews, ever blinkered, theorize that this is some sort of effort to farm karma in order to promote products. That theory is almost certainly not true. There is minimal commercial value to Reddit accounts.
The alternate explanation seems obvious. Hacktivists are manipulating Reddit to promote far-left ideas, creating fake accounts to post and vote. This does not take much imagination. In fact, Trump supporters were doing the very same thing in 2016 prior to being stomped by the site admins.
You'd have to be pretty simple to think that most of the political stuff you read on Reddit or Hacker News isn't deeply manipulated. It doesn't take many votes to sway things in one direction or another. All it takes is a few downvotes to keep dissenting voices from even appearing in front of real users. On the other hand, with a few upvotes, your own content will be featured front and center. It's comically easy to achieve.
It's been said that most of what you read on line is written by crazy people. I think it's worse. I think it's written by people who are trying to manipulate you.
Your rebuttal makes no sense. The argument is that these accounts are pretending to be people to sway people's decisions on the products they buy. The commercial value of an account doesn't factor into it.
Did you read the threads? The comments were all political, not selling products.
Also, as a Reddit user, I can tell you that I almost never encounter any "bots" shilling products. It simply doesn't work. You can go into a user's history quite easily. And if someone posts 10 comments for "Product X rules!", someone else will notice, post that, and they'll be downvoted to oblivion.
There is value to be had in chilling the room and creating a false consensus in an overall community.
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The argument is that this is how they gain provenance. Since people are suspicious of new accounts, gaining karma and age by commenting is the solution. The bots don't care who they are copying, only that there is someone to copy.
Secondly, the fact that a person can go into another's history doesn't mean they will, and it doesn't mean that you'll be able to pick out a pattern. What if an account just belongs to someone who is both deadset on the products they like and genuinely provides them as support. No one is out here saying "Product X rules!", the examples on HackerNews literally involved "talking" about the issue and what is supposedly "good" to use.
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