I get that feeling as well, fartcannon. The meteoric rise over the past year of the subreddit just feels artficial. I don't have any evidence outside of the a rapid increase of subscribers. I'm sure there is a large number of people with that sentiment out there, so I'd maybe put it at 40% or less that this is being coordinated by an external actor.

The whole sentiment around the subreddit really seems to be amplifying a class war attitude in the United States.

I remember reading an article (I think this was it [1]) about reddit getting manipulated by advertisers. Either posting about a product, or upvoting posts that were positive about a product and downvoting negative posts. Imagine what someone with a larger budget could do.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2017/02/20/reddit-i...

Some of the manipulation seems obvious. Some of it less so. I always felt like some kind ublock origin style plugin that highlights or removes known instances of PR/manipulation/propanda would be helpful. Perhaps an AI trained on press releases from big corps and governments that performs authorship identification for a start. 'The writing style in this post are an 80% match for a press release by <government body> linked below'. Kind of like those websites that try to identify fake product reviews.

Theres a high chance that would probably get gamed, too, I guess.

Not quite an AI but you can filter Reddit posts in RES by using keyword filters. Really great for clickbait topics.

>I still cant help but feel that the anti-work stuff on reddit seems coordinated.

What sounds off to you? It seems pretty straightforward how the "fake posts" can arise out of uncoordinated behavior. Antiwork discusses various grievances that reddit's demographics has (capitalism, under/un-employment, poor working conditions). Readers are more likely to engage with topics that they're passionate about, so the subreddit becomes a great place to farm karma/upvotes, and content creators happily oblige.

I don't think so. Humans are pretty good at keeping in sync with one another. This story and most on antiwork are likely fake and people are just keeping in sync to play reddits upvote game.