
Reddit is being manipulated by big financial services companies - callumlocke
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2017/02/20/reddit-is-being-manipulated-by-big-financial-services-companies/
======
codingdave
I'm not sure how anyone can think discussions on reddit are not manipulated at
this point. If you watch carefully, you see the exact same verbiage used from
multiple accounts on the same topic used to steer conversations. And as new
responses come up, there will be a multi-hour delay, then new verbiage will
get posted simultaneously to multiple accounts. There is clearly behind-the-
scenes writing efforts going on, then being distributed to accounts. And if I
see this just as a casual observer, I can only imagine what you would find if
you really dug deep.

~~~
edgarvaldes
Do you have an example?

~~~
benologist
r/worldnews is full of divisive commentary that shapes discussion in stupid
and toxic ways.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/5vwt2g/israel_de...](https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/5vwt2g/israel_denies_human_rights_watch_work_visas_due/)

Top thread (minus auto-summary bot's) erroneously declares the title
misleading.

The thread under that amplifies some seemingly very flakey accusations a
different employee at that organization maintains ties to a terrorist
organization renounced decades ago.

Derail accomplished! Threads about Russia being bad usually lead with how the
US is bad. Threads about Syria often debate whether Bashar al-Assad is not so
bad. I am usually annoyed I read the comments in that subreddit.

Look at this awesome 2 day old account's comments -

[https://www.reddit.com/user/Supercootur](https://www.reddit.com/user/Supercootur)

------
hacker_9
It's a shame this has happened. It used to that aggregated news was the best
news because it wasn't opinionated. It also didn't need to focus on the big
ticket items (murder, sex, drugs) like newspapers, as sales weren't a concern,
so you have science, tech, and I kid you not, actual good news to read about!

But now with the pay-to-get-upvotes scams going on, we get utterly biased and
even ridiculous stories constantly on the front page. And how to even start on
the comments, which just read like blurbs to the title. A great example on the
front page at the moment:

 _" Donald Trump's war on media is 'biggest threat to democracy' says Navy
Seal who brought down Osama Bin Laden"_.

I almost feel like this stuff is AI generated at this point, just throwing
together keywords that get clicks. As someone across the pond looking in, the
bias is laughable obvious. I just hope that more people realise that
manipulation is present, and remember not to believe everything they read.

~~~
vostok
> "Donald Trump's war on media is 'biggest threat to democracy' says Navy Seal
> who brought down Osama Bin Laden".

What is this an example of? This sounds like exactly the kind of thing that I
would expect on the front page if there was no vote manipulation.

~~~
Drumlin
It comes from the politics sub, which - to put it mildly - is one of the most
suspect subs for manipulation on Reddit. They let that sub appear on the
homepage, yet they ban a lot of other similar subs that are on the other side
of the spectrum. It's one of those issues where I look at Reddit and think...
something isn't right.

~~~
edgarvaldes
>something isn't right.

Is that a pun? Because obviously reddit has a leftist bias.

~~~
accountface
According to the right, basic concepts like logic have leftist bias

------
strgrd
Link to this post in three years and ponder in its prescients... Web 3.0 will
be born in the death of the heavily botted social networks. Reddit, Facebook &
Instagram, Twitter... are all basically pay-to-win schemes at this point,
benefiting greatly in terms of adoption from the grey market pay-for-likes
botnets, where marketers and propagandists know they can make their content
highly visible if they're willing to pay.

People pay very little attention to the fragility that has arisen in the Web
2.0 economy. Once there is widespread understanding of the gaming, cheating,
and botting, these social network institutions will crumble. There will be
piecemeal attempts to reduce botting, but they will annoy end users, and annoy
investors and shareholders as they come to realize XX% of their user base
never existed.

Web 3.0 will be the death of anonymity, with social networks and APIs that
are, by design, hard to automate, and even harder to hide your true identity
from. There will be CAPTCHA-like systems (possibly tied to hardware) that
facilitate this. This will of course promise to fix the problem of botting,
while heavily benefiting surveillance, for state, and for advertisement. There
will be a new breed of social networks built around ensuring the content you
are seeing is genuine or "organic", and yet the incentives will be much more
perverse, and their networks, much more invasive.

~~~
chadwittman
I think strgrd must be from the future, I strongly agree with your prediction
of the future.

There feels like there is an analogy to our civilization. We existed as very
primal beings operating in a world of high anonymity. A real world with high
anonymity meant a more dangerous environment (theft, murder, assault, etc). In
order for us to congregate & live a collectively improved life, we decreased
anonymity. We did this with the idea of names, roles (sheriff), & printed
records.

New complexity emerged from this. We needed to collect funds via taxes, make
and enforce rules. We needed to know who each other were in order to give the
rules some repercussions. Eye witnesses were crucial because of their
"ability" to remove anonymity.

These steps of stripping anonymity were done with the intention of improving
society. This point here is debateable, feel free to challenge.

We're at a unique moment in time where there's a highly dense "locale" that
has full anonymity. What's even more interesting about this locale is that
it's permeated across our "real world" society. The implications of this
reality are immense, we live in two worlds that are interwoven — one that has
little anonymity & the other with abundant anonymity.

As technology increases in power & importance (it will) this is tipping the
scales. In general, I don't have much faith in humanity's ability to live
within an anonymous world without devolving into very primal pre-civilization
behavior (see: 4chan /b/).

I'm not sure this is a stoppable (or advisable to stop) process.

~~~
josho
> I don't have much faith in humanity's ability to live within an anonymous

I can imagine being comfortable with an anonymous free future. This future
would require much strengthened privacy protections, and even a very different
looking government before I'd be comfortable however. I don't see those
institutions giving us the protections we'd need.

I suppose this thread has made me realize that an anonymous world is only
required when our laws and institutions don't fully protect us as individuals.

------
rm_-rf_slash
I can only see one cure to this pervasive issue that affects every website on
the internet that allows for user comments:

First, verified accounts, like Twitter, are visually separate from non-
verified accounts. The distinction has to be visible on every place the
username is displayed or when their post is displayed.

Second, only verified users have upvote/downvote privileges. To me it is
downright foolish to allow any jackass or botnet to make a ton of accounts and
up/down vote the conversation as they please.

I have seen this forum management all over the web and it's turning me off
from social media more and more by the day. Newspaper comment sections used to
be insightful, and now they are generally cesspools of shills and bots. Double
or more for forums like Reddit. I even see it on Hacker News.

We can have open discussions and we can have discussions free of paid
influence, but I do not believe it is possible to have both.

------
Zaheer
Trend to watch in next few years: Phony Actors

This same thing happens on all social networks - facebook, instagram, reddit,
twitter, etc all have accounts on them that may have naturally grown and are
now paid to post / influence content on their respective platforms. I've seen
this first hand on Instagram how large of an effect it can have in promoting
apps, products etc. Previously disclosing affiliations / paid promotions was
limited to a much smaller set influencers. Now, these platforms give anyone
from a kid with spare time to a professional marketing agency a means to build
accounts and leverage the vast reach of these networks for their own gain.
Facebook is _starting_ to realize this and clamp down on it for fake news. But
there are many more avenues and it'll be interesting to see how this really
gets solved if at all.

~~~
kakarot
This is a lot more serious than most people think. And a lot farther along
technologically. Most of what has been exposed in the wild so far just falls
under Level 0 Character.

If you asked me how we could potentially combat this coming information
implosion? I would say you fight fire with fire.

[http://wiki.project-
pm.org/wiki/Persona_Development#Persona_...](http://wiki.project-
pm.org/wiki/Persona_Development#Persona_and_Content_Development)

------
Animats
I'd noticed something like this on HN a few years ago. A negative comment
about Apple might be voted up at first. Then, about an hour after posting,
there would be many negative votes. The timing on this was consistent. After
that, no more negative votes, and the rating would float up again.

~~~
wtbob
I'll often see a similar pattern: I'll post something which disagrees with the
common wisdom here on HN, it'll get a flurry of downvotes, then over time
it'll get more upvotes. I figure that it's _probably_ just the result of a few
folks who are HN addicts, and that over time more reasonable heads prevail.

~~~
solnyshok
I think it is human nature. When I see a comment being downvoted, and I think
it does not deserve that, I would upvote it.

------
mrfusion
If you were designing Reddit today what would you do to prevent this kind of
stuff?

~~~
codingdave
Tiered subreddits. You would need to earn credibility in open discussions, and
earn your way up into more serious discussions. So there would end up being
multiple layers of credibility, with only vetted accounts participating in the
highest levels.

~~~
wcarron
This approach is probably the most reasonable. Stackoverflow seems to have
implemented it fairly well.

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
I can't agree. Stackoverflow does some things well, but there are reasons that
it hasn't caught on outside a certain cohort who were either there first, or
who are very dedicated to cultivating their karma.

HN user jfc said it better here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7650975](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7650975)

~~~
wcarron
I have to disagree. Those invested solely in cultivating karma are the reason
to institute systems like "earned privileges". Any forum with a voting system
will always be misused and abused by those who don't have the priority of the
community in mind.

Moreover, jfc has valid points about negativity and unhelpful responses, but
it remains anecdotal. As a counter, my own anecdotal experience has largely
been positive on SO, and I rarely run into those problems. I am definitely not
part of the cohort that was there first, and think it's a rather fair system.
For example, preventing downvotes until a certain level of reputation is
reached is a small check on those looking to farm karma by blanketing out
competing answers. Obviously it isn't foolproof, but it at least ensures that
you have actually contributed to the community at least a few times.

Perhaps his comment speaks more to the quality of the userbase than to the
efficiency of the voting system?

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
I'll grant you that there are many high quality answers / discussions at SO. I
also have no problem asserting that SO is infested with karma whores. They
also have terrible moderation, and chippy pithy users with all manner of
unproductive discussion habits. In other words, they suffer the same types of
faults as other forums. I'm glad for you that you that you've had a positive
experience on SO, obviously some users do; so have I, to the extent that I
don't bother engaging in discussion, but rather just use the place to find the
answer I want, and then just leave as soon as I am done with my research. As
far as the anecdotes in that HN thread I posted earlier go, jfc isn't alone,
there are pages of similar anecdotes in the same thread in addition to plenty
of similar criticism elsewhere in the internet.

------
Aardwolf
Reddit is awesome for tons of small game communities, I hope whatever happens
on those apparently more important subreddits won't ever affect that

~~~
xraystyle
Niche interest subreddits are about the only thing Reddit is good for anymore
as far as I'm concerned. I don't subscribe to a single default sub and never
check the front page.

I subscribe to subs like sysadmin, woodworking, ruby and bicycling. The front
page and defaults are just horribly toxic.

------
josho
We've seen this before. Usenet was killed from spam as it didn't have a
defence against those seeking to profit from the audience.

This is today's equivalent of the same problem. The difference is it is now
two monied interests battling for the audience.

I long for a modern usenet newsgroup equivalent that has some kind of
protection from monied interests, I suppose a small audience is a guard.

------
existencebox
Previous discussion here.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13714159](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13714159)

(I would like to give a more substantive comment, so I'll leave the somewhat
jaded perspective of rephrasing the title: "<social channel> is being
manipulated by <anyone who participates in social engagement/growth
hacking/perception management>". The question I contemplate is where we draw
the line of what social engagement is above the bar acceptability. (To answer
my own question, I typically consider "disclosure" the answer to that))

------
zython
I think it goes without saying that a social media site with millions of users
and place 23 on the Alexa rankings is an interesting advertising platform, and
that it happens on a regular basis and a large distributed scale across the
platform.

The far more important problem in my opinion in this situation is to be able
to differentiate a "normal" user submitted post from an advertisiement, a
skill that is missing in 80% of today's youth:

[http://fortune.com/2016/11/23/stanford-fake-
news/](http://fortune.com/2016/11/23/stanford-fake-news/)

~~~
rhizome
It's not fair to call it a missing skill when the other side of that equation
is a $500B+ industry of university-educated advertisers with decades of
experience who are working to obfuscate the difference between ads and
content, if not practice outright deception.

What exactly are "today's youth" supposed to know in the face of that?

------
tootie
I don't understand why "financial services" are called out in the headline.
They're being manipulated by shady digital marketing companies who have some
financial clients among many others.

~~~
Rmilb
Financial services account for a substantial portion of the US GDP and some
may argue has big sway in the way our laws are written, and now in steering
conversation about them on a popular site.

~~~
tootie
I think that's a big assumption. Financial services firms are not usually
savvy marketers and the big wall street firms everyone hates almost never try
to appeal directly to consumers and would have little to gain from swaying
opinion on reddit. I'd wager retail firms are far more active on social media.

------
choward
This is a fun subreddit to subscribe to:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/HailCorporate/](https://www.reddit.com/r/HailCorporate/)

------
pmoriarty
This is a very old phenomenon called sockpuppetry[1]. Any online forum of
sufficient size and popularity is bound to be a target of it. It's no surprise
at all that Reddit would be targeted.

Most reputable forums try to deal with it somehow, but it's difficult to stamp
it out completely -- especially if the site administrators are ever themselves
compromised.

[1] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sockpuppet_%28Internet%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sockpuppet_%28Internet%29)

------
jasonkostempski
Has anyone ever tried something like a captcha for upvoting? Upvoting isn't
really something that needs to be done conveniently in rapid succession.

------
paulpauper
A much more insidious spam but very common are fly-by-night 'news' sites that
copy paste content from reputable sources and then get up-voted to the top of
popular subreddits, generating adsense revenue for the webmasters. Adsense is
such a pox on the internet. I know companies need to make money but it also
gives rise to soooo much spam.

------
benologist
If anyone wants to play a game of "how could HN be manipulated" ...
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13718417](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13718417)

------
woliveirajr
And I wonder which discussion forum isn't... the closer any site gets to money
(example: stock discussions), the more is at worth with manipulative
conversations.

------
unlimit
Ok, its manipulated but why by financial service companies? Are they trying to
trigger stock price movements?

------
ffef
IIRC didn't reddit use fake users and content when they launched?

~~~
Eupolemos
I think that is a pretty standard and often needed tactic when starting a
forum or community. A community is pretty binary; it's either dead or it
isn't, so a it needs to be jumpstarted.

~~~
CM30
Yep, this is most communities are started. Either through literal fake users
(sometimes set up by the staff, sometimes 'imported' from other sites) or by
deals and exchanges with other communities (aka you use my site for a bit and
I'll do the same on yours).

Not surprising at all that Reddit did the same thing.

------
Fjolsvith
So that's why all my NSFW subreddits have started looking weird!

------
dowjones
And HN and other tech sites are somehow exempt from this phenomenon? With
billions of dollars at stake at Uber and its various competitors, is it
impossible to think, for example, that Susan Fowler had professional authoring
help, or was offered compensation to publish her recent blog post? Or that
paid/professional/fake commenters downvoted, attacked, and drowned out any
voice who simply requested documentation, or cautioned that judgment should be
reserved until both sides of the story were made public?

~~~
oconnore
In Susan Fowler vs. 5.5 billion dollar company, why on earth would you suspect
that Susan is the one contracting with reputation management firms?

~~~
DanBC
Dowjones is advancing the conspiracy theory that The sinister BigTaxiCartel
want to see Uber done in, so they pay for writers to create blog posts for
disgruntled ex-employees.

(It's not something I believe).

