It seems to me like some people made it their business to "hack" Reddit with automated scripts. Taking over subreddits, promoting content to the front page, that sort of thing.

Once they got good at that, they had a saleable product, as well as a worldview that treats online discussion as a resource strata to be exploited and shepherded, not nurtured.

Here's a comment thread about "Gallowboob" which documents all this to a T: https://snew.notabug.io/r/interestingasfuck/comments/gitwbo/...

Reddit itself is tracked as a social platform in the same vein as twitter or FB. Its astroturfed to hell and back, and there's no way to know who is posting what.

Reminds me of taking over channels on IRC :)

Oh man, those were some fun days.

I remember taking over a top 10 channel on Efnet because the owner went on holidays and forgot to get someone to keep their account active.

Ha, I imagine it would have been almost a fulltime job to prevent takeovers on large Efnet channels!

It took an army of eggdrop bots for me and Kyle to hold #games on Efnet for years.

Now wholly deleted by moderators.

Could you summarize it? All I see in that thread is people complaining about a popular user they don't like.

I find it crazy people care about this.

A guys takes over some subreddits... unless you're a Reddit admin who cares? There's so much content on the web just avoid the stuff you don't like.

Governments have the resources to dedicate people to doing things like this. Once they have the ability to shape discussions, they will.

Russia doesn't care if Black Lives Matter or not. They promoted inflammatory postings on both sides of the issue simply because chaos and weaking public trust is a goal for them. Sure, you might not care about the issue and don't visit those subreddits, but it still affects you because the community you live in.

I don't think this is a very strong point. In this case we're talking about a Reddit user who has been an active redditor for a long time moderating various subreddits. What's the issue exactly? That he may sell his account or otherwise be influenced by state agents? That also applies to the CEOs and board members of Reddit, the regulators and lobbyists, and polticians. There are plenty of worse things to be concerned about than how many subreddits Gallowboob is moderating.

Someone watching that many subreddits can't have a good grasp on context. They'll end up moderating in a way that seems fine if they don't understand the culture of the subreddit.

Realistic example: someone makes a comment about something nice his boyfriend did. Someone else replies "sounds pretty gay, dude." Could one of these supermods understand that this is a normal and silly thing for queers of a certain age to say to each other? Maybe. I wouldn't count on it. They can't go and dig into each poster's history to see that they post in the same communities and often swap silly comments. The volume in their mod inbox is just too high.

You assume that the user account is anything more than a user-Agent. Accounts do not at all bind one-to-one with people. They never have, never will, and the push to try to make it so is a fool's errand.

That account could just be the tip of the spear of an entire department of information warfare specialists.

This is why the old tongue in cheek wisdom "On the Internet, no one knows you're a {dog,child,FBI Agent,Special Information Warfare Directorate Agent,Nymphomaniacal Grandma} " never stopped being relevant. User-Agents!=Users.

Don't get into the habit, lest the ones who don't run circles around you.

I will never cease to find it hilarious adults are afraid of Russians (as opposed to "Russia") posting on Reddit or Twitter, or buying a few ads on Facebook or whatever. Not, say, Israelis or Saudis or the Mujahedin-e Khalq buying congress and actively bribing our politicians: Russians posting on Reddit.

I didn't say it was only Russia. I wasn't writing a dissertation, and picked Russia as the most obvious and document example.

Also, countries don't post, people do. It is a well documented fact that Russian had a full time time operating thousands of fake accounts. Russians are posting those messages and spreading memes, but it it is in their official capacity of Russian agents that they do it.

I'm not worried about random Russian citizen posting their thoughts.

>Russians are posting those messages and spreading memes, but it it is in their official capacity of Russian agents that they do it.

I realize it's a popular, even government approved conspiracy theory, but it seems more like psychological projection (the US is absolutely doing such things, and has been long before the internet existed -for example[1]) rather than anything for which there is actual evidence.

Whether or not Russian agents are posting official FUD on Reddit is kind of irrelevant. The idea that anything on Reddit (or twitter for that matter) matters at all is what is so bloody funny about it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_Italy

Saying that the US intelligence does these things in not way refutes the point I was making. "Your honor, yes, I'm covered in exploding ink-pack stains, but Bonnie and Clyde have stolen from lots of banks."

What aren't you willing to dismiss by invoking the magic words "conspiracy theory?" Is this just a joke?

https://intelligence.house.gov/social-media-content/

Reddit, along with twitter and Facebook, were hugely influential in the election, if you you think it is "bloody funny."

>What aren't you willing to dismiss by invoking the magic words "conspiracy theory?" Is this just a joke?

Lol, well, I'm definitely willing to dismiss the idea that reddit, twitter and facebook are why Trump is president if that's what you mean. I suppose Obama won the 2008 election because of some dank memes posted in 4chan, and Bush won in 2000 because of funny things some weeb posted on Usenet.

As far as why people continue to say it: as I said, it's projection. The US has done 1000x worse than whatever imagined ridiculously effective Reddit posts the Rooskies have done. The fact that adult humans with day jobs who are somehow able to feed themselves without choking to death on their tongues are able to believe in such nonsense will never ever cease to amuse me.

If you actually believe such things, you really need to learn how to count.

Russians who hacked Eglin Air Force Base have indeed invaded Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/1dz470/most_red...

Oh yeah I forgot about the Smith Mundt Modernization act. Probably because of Russian mind control.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Defense_Authorization...

Your other concerns aren't without merit. You can add the Chinese government and its agents to that list.

However, you can't reduce Russia intelligence operations to that kind of satire when it's been a concerted active operation for several years now.

This is an interesting read: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html

A pretty visible example of this is Iran on r/worldnews. Back when there was the US-Iran conflict in early January, the front page was filled with pro-Iranian content [0]. This is after hundreds of civilians were killed for protesting. It could just be that the people on that subreddit support Iran, but given that on many of the posts the comments were full of people saying they disagreed, and given that Iran has been previously found spreading propaganda on that subreddit in particular [1], I think it is suspicious. The posts seemed to mostly stop after they decided to shoot down a civilian airliner.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20200107185156/https://www.reddi...

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/volunteers-found-iran...

In all fairness this can be abused by any country not just Russia or China. US and Israel could just as well use it to shape and support the endless wars and warmongering. It could be used by left/right wing extemists just as well to push their own narative. The fact that it can shape what is seen by your average joe to that extent is the problem regardless of who does it.

'Could' and 'Currently has a well know and active program dedicated to' are two entirely different things. Kind of moot to worry about hypotheticals when the existing reality is problematic enough.

Reddit is one of the largest international websites in the world and many careers, lifestyles and organizations have sprung up from it. If millions of dollars are being spent on this and the industry continues to swell, blaming passive observers for being concerned seems to be backwards.

If you are not using the mod account then you are not actively modding the subreddit, so sounds like the system works exactly as it should.

What if it doesn't need modding though? I feel the rule should also take into account the number of posts/comments, not just number of days.

How would they know if they don't log in to see mod mails? Also spam bots posts everywhere.

That ("if the creator/mods haven't had had public activity in 60 days") doesn't appear to be accurate. From the sidebar:

> Note that “activity anywhere on reddit” IS NOT limited to publicly visible posts and comments.

Reddit's admins can presumably see things like last visit, use of the moderator tools, etc. that aren't in the public feed.

That policy (and an explicit push to revive dead/zombie subreddits) was the final of many nails and straws for me:

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/dt527o/no_this...

(Post mentions/links to discussions of others, notably https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/20yhxc/reddit_... )

The neonazi takeover of /r/xkcd was a stark warning sign.

Of course, a similar issue afflicts any proprietary publishing venture, see the long sad saga of American Mercury:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_American_Mercury

> potential value of subreddits and all the work it takes to grow one.

Isn't the monetary value of a subreddit zero to everyone but Reddit corporate?

Some companies (like gaming companies) "sponsor" a subreddit and give out prizes and benefits in small contests and whatnot. Those subreddits employ moderators who will delete, alter or chastise any negative content relating to that company and ban anything but positive reinforcement of that company.

cough Stadia cough - it is against Reddit ToS that employees (or at least reddiquette) to have a paid employee of a company moderating a subreddit for that company's product [1].

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/modhelp/comments/2v0dpa/moderating_...

Companies pay big money to get posts up in certain subreddits.

Or get paid to suppress content.

I still consider this to be the best item ever posted by The Register:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/05/09/official_register_2...

Moderators can't get posts up, they can only take them down.

It is a known fact that gallowboob will repeatedly repost and delete something over and over while deleting competing posts until his gains traction

They can pin posts to the top of the subreddit though can’t they? I have to imagine that increases post traffic/upvotes/interaction.

Yes, but I've never seen this done for normal posts, just rule announcements and such.

Speaking from experience as a Redditor and Reddit mod, it does happen - just some subs are more diligent about avoiding shills than others.

Huh, I have the same experience and we never did it on my subreddits (and I rarely saw it, but I usually browse /r/all)...

how come ? can you give some examples of how this works?

You are a brand selling soda:

* /r/aww -> cat playing with a toy with your brand

* /r/HumansBeingBros -> a guy helping poor people by bringing free pizza and free soda to a shelter.

* /r/Fitness -> how about a gif of a clever workout then the main character drink a sip of your soda. After the effort the comfort.

* /r/DIY -> look what I achieve with 7919 cans!

“Doritos are the best for walking tacos.” “Fritos make the best walking tacos.” Lord savior Jesu i never even had heard of walking tacos until this morning but then leave it to reddit to first inform me of something new and then to tell me the specific products I should use.

My poor colleague was incredulous when I told him reddit was gamed. Dear summer child, it is not just the obvious product placement for Doritos. It is also entire subs that are heavily modded to the point of being useless. r/sanfrancisco is endless pix of the gg bridge, thanks mods! It also divides the discourse into red team blue team with red team bad blue team good. High karma users sell their handle so trolls and sock puppets can have a vernier of credibility. Like San Francisco fromwhere it originates reddit is a cesspool that if you practice active denial, selective ignorance, ignore cognitive dissonance and pretend like all the bounders, freaks, fairies, bohos, hippies, punks, transhumanists, burners, and hackers that came before that everything is beautiful man, its a great place that can still surprise and delight on occasion.

Let me give you a different example. The main Indian subreddit r/india has been taken over by information warfare specialists and actually anything that does not match left leaning viewpoints are deleted. You can see all the power abuse chronicled on a subreddit called r/indiadiscussion. One mod is actually a Pakistani !

Shouldn't country subreddits be sacred ? Should'nt there be a due process to call out mod excesses, some kind of quasi legal means. Instead they continue their information warfare unabated banning anyone that goes against their viewpoints. They also actively browse people posting in other subreddits and ban them.

The beauty of federations of user-managed communities like Reddit, 8chan or Mastodon is that the friction to "voting with your feet" is low enough to be practical. Migration of user communities from hijacked subreddits happens all the time.

While I agree that there should ideally be a process to deal with obviously maliciously confusing community names, a country is an entity too big and diverse to have a single centrally-moderated conversation platform for anyway. Control of the exact country-name subbreddits could be offered to official governments, but is that in any way interesting? We already have country TLDs as official government communication platforms on the web.

They may not be handled over to the Govt, however the mods should not get so powerful that they create their own quasi dictatorship in terms of what is allowable and what is not. There should also be recourse for people to raise their issues at a neutral subreddit where supermods can arbitrate.

IMO, a little transparency into the subreddits' mod activity would alleviate this completely. People don't leave subreddits that are modded in a heavily biased way because they have no way to know.

I don't see why I shouldn't be able to unhide all modded posts if I choose to.

that's the secret sauce of the information warfare era. Keep non curious people in their own bubble without a way to find out if there are other options there. They cannot leave the bubble due to network effects and no one can do this all the time. Always project that your bubble is the cleanest one.

The abuses of mods in some subreddits if it were happening in real life would be subjects of class action lawsuits.

You don't need to be a mod to post those, however.

But beeing a mod you could delete comments, pointing that out.

Lots of people get advice on what to buy. Imagine if company’s are able to manipulate buyitforlife, HomeKit, personalfinance, babybumps, travel subreddits etc.

Probably the best form of advertising. Have people just insert your products in random stories.

“I remember back when I was a kid and mom would make a cake with Betty Crocker icing”

I’m automatically suspect of any post mentioning products. Probably happens on hacker news too. And instagram. And everywhere else. We have ad blockers, but now the ads will move into the content itself.

browser extension idea: Brandomizer - it detects brand names in text on pages, and replaces it with random other similar brand names.

“I remember back when I was a kid and mom would make a cake with Duncan Hines icing”

And watch the marketing people move into the Brandonizer business

Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat

Absolutely. And it is already the case, look closely at movies, TV shows, podcasts...

Product placement has had its teeth in movies/TV for a quite a while now. In some aspects it does help movies add more to its budget.

There’s product placement, and then there is inserting a literal advertisement into the story itself and having the actors talk about it, e.g. watching a car commercial when they get in a car and discuss all of its features.

The Oreo placement in Lost In Space was oddly fitting. If I'm off to another planet, that's the kind of thing I'll pack.

r/hailcorporate is full of examples, although beware:

1. Users on that subreddit can be quite paranoid 2. You'll become paranoid yourself if you spend enough time on that subreddit.

Hmm, browsing "top" of last month just kind of convinced me that real "hailcorporate" material is much much more rare than I expected

Could be that the subverting of posts has gotten better and the users who submit there are still looking for gifs of guys drinking refreshing cans of Pepsi™ after a crossfit workout

And people aren't always on the lookout, specially in casual conversations.

reddit.com/r/hailcorporate

There’s also value in controlling messaging in a community. You can really affect community think by controlling what messages they see.

I doubt it, they drive traffic to all sorts of places. I imagine the porn Reddits make a ton of money for people.

You can pin advertising and so on..

the sub owner can sell advertising? Or is it done under the table?

You can pin posts. A post can be advertising something just as easily as it can be a story or a link to a news article.

Yup, have had quite a few subs taken over. Really quite annoying for random small niche subs that just get nuked with weird stuff.