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- Hacker News
- 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.
by socializer - 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.
by PyWoody - 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.
by rithdmc - 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.
- "The corpus, and the refresh that changed the answer" ... hello Opus 5.by smcleod
- Ask HN: what would you do if you were operating reddit?
What are some good counter measure, besides ban hammer?
by est - 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).
by DharmaPolice - > Thin accounts: few comments, low scores, no real standing in the subreddit.
> Young accounts, or accounts with histories that are hidden or wiped.
Nope, this is no longer an indicator of a bot account. Many that I've looked into will have active posts to local town/region subreddits (often times multiple!) and different sports subreddits, sometimes getting unusually high amounts of karma in them (which suggests a network).
Turing test is looong dead, so no reason to assume the small fractions of a cent to make comments, to get a reasonable history, isn't being taken advantage of.
by nomel