its astroturfing by for profit companies. after the election, they realized: a) that folks were filtering out the astroturfed subreddits in /r/all, and b) that r/all's filter list has a hard limit of 100 subreddits. so, they switched tactics - by astroturfing >100 subreddits, they can guarantee to their clients that their posts will make the front of r/all for everyone.

Back when Pushshift was publicly available, I used to check the mod actions on some subreddits. What I found was that the subreddits that I thought had biased moderators were simply undermoderated. Pretty much every mod action I saw was fair and there were also a lot more than expected, but clearly the issue was that total comment volume was far more than the mod team could handle.

> You're at the mercy of a small number of users who have the most free time to post all day. Some times I'll get an unusually angry response on Reddit and click on their profile out of curiosity. It's often someone who has been commenting for the last 10 hours straight.

These people are also masters at toeing the line of forum or subreddit rules when trashing others, constantly baiting people to cross the line in replies and get themselves moderated. It's worse in forums where downvoting isn't available.

> I really doubt most of it is astoturfing. You can find bot accounts, obviously. However, the Reddit hivemind has a very intense echo chamber.

There have been discord servers made public where the entire point was to game the reddit algorithm to favor one political candidate.

Its fully astroturfing. The trick is to implement non-member/non-flaired rules to block most folks from the discourse. Then you can just focus on hitting the front page, which you can juice with other rules like only members can down vote. Now you can just focus on hitting the front page and suddenly you get a very biased thread with a lot of eyeballs and no response. /r/The_Donald used this to much success and there have been others.

> Its fully astroturfing. The trick is to implement non-member/non-flaired rules to block most folks from the discourse.

The number of subreddits that do this is small. Hardly representative of typical Reddit behavior.

Everyone knows by now that /r/conservative isn’t a real subreddit because it’s “flavored users only”.

However, too many people make the leap from “astroturfing exists” to “everything I don’t like is astroturfing” way too quickly. It’s right up there with accusing people you disagree with of using ChatGPT or being paid shills.

The truth is, a lot of subreddits are the way they are because that’s just what Reddit’s user base thinks, not because a shadowy cabal is making them say those things.

>/r/The_Donald used this to much success and there have been others.

I read a post from a former reddit admin a while back that was talking about they managed that. Apparently they had one sticky post each day, and sticky posts are blocked from being on the frontpage but since they'd change the main post each day, once they un-stickied it, it'd immediately get picked up by the algorithm for the frontpage, inadvertently gaming the whole system.