A Reddit Bot Drove Me Insane

Re:A Reddit Bot Drove Me Insane by jayd16 on Sunday April 13, 2025 @05:58PM (#43676167)

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A Reddit Bot Drove Me Insane by Aurornis on Sunday April 13, 2025 @06:16PM (#43676265)

> 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.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A Reddit Bot Drove Me Insane by Suppafly on Monday April 14, 2025 @12:22PM (#43682996)

>/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.

[ Parent | on HN ]