

Reddit hacking for votes and profit - fseek
http://hackaday.com/2010/10/08/reddit-hacking-for-votes-and-profit/

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wardrox
As a Reddit Mod, this doesn't seem to counter one of the best defences against
people spamming their own content: training the spam filter to hate a specific
URL.

This system would only seem to work if the URL got through the spam filter, so
isn't much use to the kind of voting rings you tend to find already operating
on Reddit.

Though it's still a very valuable proof of concept.

~~~
keefe
the URL being linked need not necessarily go directly to the target site.

also I cringe at the fact that this is called a "hack".

~~~
fungi
hack a day was bleeding cash so owner made it more mainstream

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SkyMarshal
Link to the actual article:

<http://www.esrun.co.uk/blog/cheating-reddit-auto-votes/>

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adn37
More info on the technical side would have been far more interesting, ihmo.

command control system implementation, software stack, coupling the capta with
a captcha filling service...

(I do not support this kind of scheme)

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StavrosK
This is odd, considering how reddit bans the submission as soon as two
accounts vote on it from the same IP.

EDIT: Hmm, the page in the video says "unique IPs", so it looks like they are
used remotely. Odd.

~~~
terra_t
I knew this purple-haired superheroine who did this to a certain "Zone" which
is famous for vapid and incoherent blog postings written in broken English.

She made about 1000 fake accounts and used Tor to make them appear to come
from multiple IP addresses. The fake accounts were made with a statistical
model that generated plausible usernames, real names, profile pictures and
everything -- it could even pair up the gender of the first name and of the
picture... most of the time.

Once she wrote a blog post she'd just set the sequencer and her posting would
hit the front page in about two hours. She found it was a very consistent way
to get 5k page views, sometimes better if the blog posting was good and it got
picked up on other social media sites like proggit.

She'd gotten a few of her blog posts to be "all time favorites" on this site,
but then another project eclipsed her blogging and she lost the credentials
for the fake accounts in a hard drive crash.

Today, this "Zone" is dominated by other people doing the same thing. If you
know what to look for, there's a quite unmistakable signature.

She thought about doing the same for reddit, but it was clear at the start
that reddit had much better defenses -- it would have been a bigger project,
and she probably would have burned some of her proxies before getting it
right.

Note that you can get around the IP address problem in several ways. One of
them is that you can rent SOCKS5 proxies for $3/month/IP address.
Supervillians use bot nets.

~~~
jacquesm
For every good thing that you could create on the internet there are going to
be people hell bent on screwing it up.

Your 'friend' and her copycats think they are somehow entitled to that
traffic, which in the long run is responsible for the famous eternal September
feeling that many websites have.

Gaming the system is like the internet equivalent of slash-and-burn
agriculture.

I don't care whether it works or not, or whether you consider it justified
because her content was good I think it sucks.

If you want to have that traffic start your own social site, promote that and
make it work, then feel what it is like to have people come out to game the
system and use your knowledge of how such systems can be gamed to put a stop
to it.

~~~
terra_t
It's hard to say.

The toughest problem people have starting community sites is getting the
community. Dealing with problem behaviors is something you worry about after
you've got the community. Just as casinos hire shills, many community site
operators use Mechanical Turk or statistical models to get the ball rolling...

Who knows, we might soon have replicants that are more satisfying to interact
with than ordinary humans.

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kylec

        ...as long as the article is interesting, this can be quite successful.
    

If the article's interesting you don't need to game the system - people will
vote on it naturally.

~~~
terra_t
Not necessarily.

Most people find success on social media sites is capricious; not a lot of
people read the "new" queue, so your first few organic votes are a matter of
luck. Downvotes on reddit make this go double. Even great content can get
buried if it doesn't get noticed.

For instance, there's a certain blog on a three letter domain name for which
I'll sometimes see two or three posting on the front page at HN. That guy's
got a voting ring. You might call it something else, like "I have a twitter
account with a lot of followers who use HN", but that's what it is. This sort
of practice takes some of the chance and variation out.

An advanced method is to recognize the role of "social proof" in social media.
My informant has collected behavioral data sets from certain social media
sites and discovered that the C.T.R. on articles increases as the number to
the left increases: even if the headline is uninteresting, the high number
makes people think that it "has to be good;" in experiments where the number
of "ringer" votes was varied, she discovered that the ratio of "organic" to
"ringer" votes got better the more "ringers" there were.

~~~
katovatzschyn

             the high number makes people think that it "has to be good;"
    

I will claim guilty to this. Whenever a thing is esteemed by many, especially
people respected, I will always contemplate its worth far longer than if I
passed by something unannounced and unawares.

"If an intelligent man delights so in this, why don't I?"

... and the pause is probably enough.

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Stevenup7002
I really don't see the point any more, almost everyone who uses these sites
can pretty much automatically tune themselves out from spam now. Give up.

~~~
terra_t
The people who do things like this, those who do any social media operations
(SMO), are smart enough to use it to promote 'acceptable' content that won't
be flagged as spam.

If it comes down to a war with the operators of the site, you will lose. If it
gets personal, they'll burn you.

Successful SMO promotes content which, plausibly, you'd imagine succeeded
organically. Sometimes the content is excellent and sometimes it's a little
substandard, but it doesn't stick out as spam. It decorates itself in a pretty
cloak to look legitimate.

Unethical tactics in SMO are like steroid use in sports: Steroid users aren't
lazy people taking a shortcut, they're people who train hard, can play a good
game honestly, but are looking for an edge that will keep them in the market.

It's a tough business because social traffic isn't good traffic for people who
play the numbers game. You've got to relentlessly produce fresh content and
relentlessly promote it. If you stop, you could be left with little permanent
traffic. You'll get hooked on social traffic, however, by the ego rush you get
the first time you get a burst of it and it crashes your server.

~~~
stcredzero
If you replace SMO with propaganda, your comment makes an even more thought
provoking read.

~~~
terra_t
Good insight. My thinking today has moved beyond SMO more in the directions of
public relations.

