> Are people farming karma to later sell the accounts to shill products?

Yes.

Any self-respecting bot shiller knows their accounts need to look as genuine as possible. Broad subreddit use and commenting, harmless comments. Then whammy with the sponsored post when the time is right.

The more harmless the better. The more comment karma the better.

It's not Reddit pumping their numbers. They don't need to and after Elon's MAU crusade prior to buying Twitter they likely wouldn't want that kind of scrutiny when it comes to selling up.

I think Reddit will reinforce their user sign up pipeline in the short term to cut down on the bots. They'll have more data on it and I doubt any of it is good for them. They want real humans with cash to be posting popular comments, not bots.

I'm fairly certain my account is being AB tested for only visiting it on a web browser on Android, for how much a user will put up with before just leaving the site and not downloading the app lol.

Use old.reddit.com it is a lot cleaner

> Are people farming karma to later sell the accounts to shill products?

> Yes.

I wonder who buys though. I had an account which was 9 years old, over well over 100k karma and I decided I would delete it. Before doing so and out of curiosity, I contacted a couple of accounts that said they bought accounts. I was offered $20 (twenty) dollars. No more. Deleted the account.

If that is a representative amount then it's a lot of 'work' for no real gain.

Couldn't the karma farming also be automated with fairly inoffensive "hey, really cool work!" types of comments?

That would (1) take an amazing amount of time and (2) an account just saying that type of stuff would be noticed and shadow-banned or downvoted.

The interesting thing is that looking through the history I’ve never noticed any of them actually shill a product yet - maybe they’re the bots that upvote the shill posts, or maybe it’s just that they’re so cheap you can run 100 of them for ages before you even think of putting them in use.

Reddit, like twitter, realiz3 they benefit from the bots cresting engagement.

I imagine the problem inside the company looks like this:

1) data science team collects numbers to suggest that the problem of Botz is catastrophically widespread

2) said numbers are presented to management. If they acknowledge the numbers are true, then they are indirectly under a fiduciary duty to report this to advertisers, which would cause a catastrophic drop in annual revenue figures.

3) Management panics and asked the data science team to look at the numbers again just a really really really really make sure that they are over blowing the problem. Meanwhile, they are hoping to fix the problem before any of this shows up any more in the revenue cycles.

As others note it is the same for years, even before LLMs.

They just scan the older posts, take the upvoted comments and when they see the most appropriate surrounding - they just post them verbatim.

More so, half of the posts you see on the frontpage are the reposts from the years ago. Made by bots, commented by bots. And every couple of years they repost the reposts. Circle of botlife.

If Reddit's search weren't so shitty you could've easily checked it, but as anyone understands Reddit owners are not in the position to actually improve the search in any way, it doesn't worth it for them.

> never noticed any of them actually shill a product yet

Well, you won't notice it till they actually respond to you.

But there is a product what is shilled to you all the time and you probably don't even notice. It's in r/worldnews, a couple of subs topical for the current geopolitical situation and whatever the hot topics what hit the frontpage.

It's the same everywhere I look, the dead internet theory is in full effect.

Instagram and twitter are particularly bad too, overall I never know if something was posted by a 70 IQ politically brainwashed person, a troll, a 11 years old kid or a bot, it's virtually impossible to tell anymore

> to shill products

You’re thinking too small. Swaying political sentiment is another option. Imagine thousands of accounts all repeating the same talking points and the same “facts” across all of Reddit. They can also be used to drown out certain contentious topics such as a political scandal.

> Of course, this sounds like a setup to a joke about what the average Redditor posts

Indeed, this isn’t new¹. And I don’t just mean the atrocious (lack of) quality of real Reddit comments, but companies have been using Reddit for covert promotion for a while. I remember someone showing me the types of posts. Someone would recount some crazy story and a product as key without saying what the brand was—e.g. “and if not for my boots, I would have died”—so other people would then ask for information and the commenter could then shill the product in a way that sounded natural.

People (including on HN) often claim they add “reddit” to every internet search they do, as if that’s some secret sauce unknown to companies, scammers, and other pursuers of profit. It isn’t.

¹ Though the scale permitted by LLMs is certainly worrying.

Reddit isn't the one doing it, although they're complicit and they know it's happening and they're potentially getting paid for it.

People are farming karma to sell accounts. Marketing and PR firms dominate reddit. Think of the site at it's peak, I'd say about 6 or 7 years ago was the end of it's plateau, how valuable would it have been to control the fan community for your book, show, movie franchise, sports team. What about if you're a product maker in a category, say you're REI and you want a presence on buy it for life. Political campaigns, everything, reddit was just such a huge target, easily manipulated and full of people who think they're talking to other humans. It was bound to happen.

Of course just like SEO, it went too far and now it's uncanny, the site is in heavy decline due to this and you can go on most communities, they get one or two new posts a day and they're almost always botted to the top and PR/marketing.

Pretty common here too, esp. in threads about Windows or Tesla, lol. And China.

After a while it's easy to see common themes in the replies. Many are coming from established accounts with lots of one-liners, often to discussions that are a couple days old and that get little attention -- slick.

Suck up all of the existing answers, GPT-them into something that matches the common threads, and then post it to build credibility.

> Reddit trying to pump up the site with fake accounts to juice growth

I don't think they need to anymore but that's how Reddit started.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddi...

They do whole fake subreddits now. They take an English subreddit, machine translate the entire thing into German and present it as a German subreddit full of German speaking people.

Real question. Assuming that mastodon got super popular, would it be at risk of the same or is it someone more immune to this sort of thing?

Every server has their own policy, so there will always be reasonable places on Mastodon.

That is assuming spam can be solved. Not really sure if this can be done without a budget. Maybe it also is not possible even with a massive budget.

I think there's also an element of herd mentality. People I know who use Reddit also have reduced the quality of their comments to similarly inane one-liners and throwaway jokes of a dubious standard.

While I have no doubt that there are bots there, there are also a bunch of sheeple following the lead of the bots.

people are capitalizing on the fact that google ranks reddit so highly, but are also bringing the quality down as a result.

The irony of reading those complaints here.

Yeah. But Reddit has been drifting in this direction for a long time, the LLM Bots have just accelerated it. Long ago it used to be the place to go for authentic discussion, now it all just feels like one big spammy botfest.

> They just post inane one line comments in response to the article headline. They often have some corny joke or something like that, but it's never anything more than two sentences, and those sentences never, ever say anything insightful or even controversial - it's just an incredibly surface level and uncontroversial reaction to the headline.

I haven't used Reddit in years, but this was Reddit pre-LLMs.

Agree. And of course it's always something "surface level and uncontroversial", anything else gets you downvoted. Most subreddits (with a few exceptions) are huge echo-chambers.