
How To Go Viral By Using Fake Reddit Likes - scribu
http://www.hack-pr.com/library/how-we-hacked-reddit-to-generate-5-million-media-impressions-in-3-days
======
jawns
The entire stunt appeals to people's sense of moral outrage over businesses
buying influence in the form of political donations. The reason people find it
morally outrageous is because it corrupts the political process: politicians
are supposed to represent their constituents, not the whims of the highest
corporate bidder. Politicians who engage in this kind of quid pro quo behavior
put selfish gain ahead of the good of the community.

Which is why I found it particularly galling that the PR firm relied on
people's moral outrage about paying for influence to peddle their message
("tell them you like our initiative and are TIRED of politicians taking legal
bribes") -- while doing exactly the same thing: paying for influence, in the
form of purchased Reddit upvotes, which corrupts the upvote process and puts
selfish gain ahead of the good of the Reddit community.

Normally, when PR firms use "hacking" to describe their techniques, they're
talking about novel approaches to getting coverage, sort of like how "life
hacks" are novel solutions to life's problems. But in this case, the firm is
using "hacking" very literally -- infiltrating and taking control of a system
by illicit means. They are black hats, and we should view them not only as
morally bankrupt but also very dangerous.

I'm expecting that any day now they'll run a follow-up post, "How we hacked
the U.S. media to help an anonymous powerful Russian client sway the
presidential election."

~~~
JumpCrisscross
Almost _every_ modern campaign takes advantage of our hairpin tendency to get
outraged. Hell, this entire thread is people getting outraged about "cheating"
using millenia-old social tendencies.

The solution isn't getting outraged about outrage. It's designing systems that
compensate for this tendency. Unfortunately, that often means slowing down
sensitive discourse.

~~~
tedmc
I think a good solution would be to get up early in the morning, assess what
you'd like to influence or draw attention away from, and then craft a message
that takes advantage of this tendency.

Build windmills, not windbreaks.

------
0x00000000
People get extremely defensive on Reddit if you insinuate that this is common.
But it really doesn't take a whole lot of skepticism to see though the more
blatant ones.

Reddit is still a really great site when you unsubscribe from all default subs
and any sub that has gone "critical shill" at about 100k or more subs.

~~~
Algent
Some subjects touched anywhere on Reddit are huge instant bot/PR magnet. On
top of my head I can think of: Fracking, Glyphosate (or anything related to
Monsanto/Endocrine Disruptor), Turkish Politics.

~~~
43224gg252
Definitely fracking and Monsanto. I've also noticed some software and hardware
products seem to have a shill presence.

I think we all remember that 6 month period where Microsoft decided to shove
VSCode down every ones throat. It was impossible to get away from. New vim
released? "Yeah vim is good but now I use VSCode TM". New sublime? New Atom?
Same thing. They were aggressive with that one.

~~~
TheRealDunkirk
I once implied that Microsoft was targeting HN as part of that astroturfing
campaign, and was threatened with banination.

~~~
hellbanner
On Reddit?

------
paultopia
Didn't they just massively throw their client under the bus? Not hard to find
the guy's name, and now everyone knows:

\- his big political stunt wasn't even his own idea, and

\- he paid people a ton of money to fraudulently promote it.

What a way to burn your clients...

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
The PR firm isn't at all ashamed of what they've done, in fact they are
publishing this as an example of what a great PR firm they are. After all, it
shows their "hustle". It's odd, but not at all surprising, that someone in the
PR/marketing world can fail to even see how something might be morally wrong
with their scummy methods.

~~~
tunetine
Is that hustle? His last ditch effort was to use Reddit and was lucky it
worked. No experience or expertise, and now potential clients know how little
it cost.

~~~
gondo
have you read the article? @hn_throwaway_99 was referring to the wording in
the article: "This gave the campaign the boost we needed and it was all the
direct result of one thing: _hustle_ "

------
illys
Is this article for real?

On a topic where one would expect citizens chasing for public good, we find
marketers and advertisers working for a wealthy businessman paying a
convictionless campaign to become famous!

And the advertisers are so proud of it, they give all the details of their
Reddit cheating, and worse, all the details of the absence of political
conviction of their wanna-be-politician client.

Maybe the story is real, but I cannot believe the advertisers are dummy enough
to be the ones writing this article.

I would better think of someone related to Fiverr.com behind... [edit: or an
enemy/competitor of the politician]

~~~
gfody
My thoughts exactly. Otherwise what's the point of mentioning fiverr.com
specifically.

------
flashman
Look, I give them credit for coming clean to the public. And a lot of people
use Reddit to promote their business, band or other brand (though they do it
honestly, not by purchasing a boost). But the more well-known the technique of
buying upvotes becomes, the worse the site will be for myself and other users.

Early paid upvotes are the seed for later organic upvotes. You don't even need
to spend $200 to get them.

~~~
minimaxir
The onus is on Reddit to detect and punish voting manipulation.

When someone proposed a similar voting manipulation trick on Hacker News
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13676362](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13676362)),
dang explicitly notes that such techniques are a good data point for voting
manipulation detection algorithms.

~~~
threepipeproblm
While Reddit seems less than competent to prevent this kind of manipulation,
it does apparently violate Reddit's terms of service.

"You agree not to interrupt the serving of reddit, introduce malicious code
onto reddit, make it difficult for anyone else to use reddit due to your
actions, attempt to manipulate votes or reddit’s systems, or assist anyone in
misusing reddit in any way. It takes a lot of work to maintain reddit. Be
cool."

~~~
slg
I am not sure it is even a question of competency. I think it is a question of
motivation. It is the same reason why Twitter doesn't crack down on their
bots. Both sites have an inherit interest in appearing popular. Having 50k
upvotes or 50m followers looks more impressive than 25k and 25m. It is
possible that those companies feel the value of those increased numbers is
greater than the potential damage bots do to the community. HN doesn't have
the same motivation since HN is more of a vanity project with a bigger focus
on the good of the community.

~~~
threepipeproblm
Good point. I would insert "short-term" here... because I doubt it's any these
corps long-term interests.

------
Haydos585x2
This was an interesting read. I'm not sure it's the best idea as a blog post
because I'm sure Reddit staff will get onto it then keep a much closer eye on
this firm. I feel like journalists will be the same too. If I received 10
emails about these guys I'd be a bit skeptical that there is any actual
interest.

As an aside, I wonder if they're using the same tactics here.

~~~
patrickk
The amount of spam, manipulation of news and opinion, and fake accounts on
reddit is insane, and reddit's staff (actual paid staff, not moderators) do
almost nothing about it. This story is only the tip of the iceberg.

Look at the recent US presidential election, look at the ongoing, long running
censorship on r/bitcoin, among many other examples. I moderate a small
subreddit related to a niche sport and deal with a massive amount of spam and
fake accounts, and reddit's spam policing tool (Automoderator) is somewhat
difficult to setup, only partially effective and could be a lot easier to use
(e.g. one click bans for accounts and domains) if reddit's staff were serious
about the problem.

------
minimaxir
> This gave the campaign the boost we needed and it was all the direct result
> of one thing: hustle .

Deliberately breaking the rules that exist for a good reason isn't "hustle."
It's just cheating.

~~~
toomanybeersies
Isn't hustling by definition doing things that are ethically and legally
shady?

~~~
inimino
Not at all. Hustle means going out and making things happen by talking to
people and promoting yourself. It does not imply shady behavior at all. All
entrepreneurs hustle.

~~~
toomuchtodo
One of the Original definitions is illegal or unethical activities.

[http://www.dictionary.com/browse/hustle](http://www.dictionary.com/browse/hustle)

------
imron
> these are the types of things we do several times a day now

And this type of marketing posing as news, pushed to the front page by bots
and fake accounts is precisely why /r/politics is now a shitbed.

Thanks Hack-PR.

~~~
slg
Why would you consider this isolated to /r/politics? This happens on every
subreddit that is big enough to have value in reaching the targeted audience.
That is one of the many reasons why the best subreddits are usually the ones
with the smallest communities.

~~~
imron
> Why would you consider this isolated to /r/politics?

That was the one mentioned in the article and that is a subreddit that has
been particularly awful since basically the entire last US election campaign.

------
scotchio
Speaking of fake Reddit stuff...

Reddit has a SERIOUS political astro-turfing problem.

Some would argue it swayed the US election. Some would argue Reddit is bought
and sold.

The popular or all experience is completely different. Commenting you don't
even know if it's a real person or not.

Does anyone know a forum similar to this or Reddit where it's ALL verified
accounts?

~~~
scrooched_moose
Metafilter maybe.

There's a one time $5 fee at signup and a 1 week waiting period after to
post/comment. Seems to do a good job preventing this type of thing because the
costs quickly get prohibitive if your dummy accounts keep getting deactivated.

It's still an ugly echo chamber on politics though, it is extremely far US-
left on everything.

~~~
gfody
Nominal fees don't work because someone will just lay the $5 per account
knowing they can sell them later for more. Even Reddit accounts aren't free
when you factor in the cost/time to set them up and build a bit of karma.

~~~
scrooched_moose
It all depends on how aggressive the site is on cracking down and banning
dummy accounts and the cost of the "upvote packages" (which I can't seem to
find). On Metafilter they seem quite aggressive so the accounts have very
limited value/lifespans.

A dummy account on reddit may be allowed to vote hundreds of times before
being banned so the price per vote becomes minimal.

------
ricksharp
Dear Reddit, Maybe this idea would help slow down this type of abuse:

It seems like it would be easy enough and cheap enough to build a honeypot to
identify accounts used for the purchased Reddit upvotes.

For example, Reddit could set up some honeypot posts to track paid upvote
accounts.

They then go and pay these upvoters to upvote the honeypot post and identify
the accounts used. (It would be helpful if the post was hidden so other people
don't find it accidentally. In fact, it is possible to just use a tracking
redirect page given only to the paid upvoters and use any post as the upvote
"job" so it would be hard to identify by the upvoters.)

Then Reddit could ghost those identified accounts. Simply ignore their votes
in the system, but don't tell the account owners, so the owners continue using
the accounts without realizing the problem.

This would make it very difficult for the account owners to know which of
their accounts were compromised.

Then on any new posts where these upvoter accounts are being used in majority,
other accounts can be found. The other accounts that also similarly upvoted on
this article could represent other paid upvote accounts.

Track those other accounts and how often they appear beside the ghosted paid
accounts, and voila, you have found more paid upvoters.

Keep doing this and it makes the paid upvoters ineffective because although
they can work the system, their work is only being used to find other paid
upvote accounts and also clients who are paying for paid upvotes.

After a time period, the clients could be sent a warning:

It has been detected that you are using paid upvote services which are against
Reddit TOS. Please contact customer service so we can work together to remedy
the problem. Failure to do so may cause your account to be banned and all your
posts removed from Reddit. Have a good day.

Of course Reddit doesn't have to do this, and really anyone could do the same
process to build a list of paid upvoter accounts and a list of articles and
clients that use those services...

So what do you think, would this put a dent in the upvoters effectiveness?

~~~
Klathmon
They have been doing this since the start of Reddit. They are called
shadowbans.

The problem is that many of these accounts are only used once or twice before
being retired or sold off. So if you pay the "upvoters" to honeypot the
accounts, all you'll do is put a very small dent in their accounts and next
week they'll be back up to 100%. And if you pay them every week you'll just
become their main source of income.

And the accounts are much more "crafty" than you think. often copying high-
karma comments in reposts, or posting semi-nonsensical markov-chain style
comments for years before being used as "paid" upvotes.

It's really weird, I follwed one a few months ago. I saw it was posting those
markov-chain style comments, and I watched it until it's karma hit like 500
then it deleted all it's previous comments and only had one comment talking
about how great some app was on /r/android.

~~~
hellbanner
Was it possibly /r/android_* with some other word? I saw a profile that fit
the latte part of that (only talking about 1 app)

~~~
Klathmon
I don't remember, but looking at the thread there were like 30 comments and
like 80% of them were positive. It was a really weird experience.

Like a week after that the account was deleted. I'm not sure if it was done by
the admins or by them, but the comment remained posted by [deleted].

This was all a year or 2 ago, so I don't remember the exact situation any
more.

------
visarga
The OP is using techniques that used to work on the wild wild web 10-15 years
ago. I thought by now everything is being normalized, or at least serious
people don't use spamming techniques to launch a business.

If all these bought upvotes come from new accounts, or from the same few IP
ranges, or have a lesser ratio of comments to upvotes, or are interacting only
between themselves and not with the larger community -> reddit can detect them
and turn them into ghost accounts.

Reddit needs to open up a Kaggle challenge for detecting rented upvotes and
other abuses, use the data it has already shared with the AI community (the
reddit dataset) to detect such attempts as they happen.

------
gehsty
Maybe this is all just another 'viral' advertisement for a guy selling upvotes
on Fiverr?

------
JonDav
[https://www.fiverr.com/gigs/reddit](https://www.fiverr.com/gigs/reddit)

cough cough

~~~
vxNsr
I feel like reddit could spend the $10,000 to just buy all their services and
then ban the accounts/IPs that they see.

~~~
j0rd
Good vote spamming business will be completely automated. They'll have
accounts in reserve pool, with ability to spin up thousands more in a couple
minutes. Most likely they make a couple hundred accounts a day and prime them
with VA's with real content & votes with the intention of burning them with
fake votes once aged appropriately.

If you run a website and you're getting spammed, the worst thing you can do it
also ban the accounts as this give spammers feedback that the account is no
longer valid to use and they'll rotate it out. Best thing you can do is
/dev/null the account. To the user it will look like account is working as
expected, but on the back end anything they do doesn't actually do anything.
Harder for spammer to know when that account is burned. This way they'll
continue to use it, and you can use this data to find related accounts and
/dev/null them as well.

------
oDot
Comments here are missing one crucial thing -- it's a shame that success in
Reddit depends so much on initial upvotes.

~~~
ignawin
I thought the success depends mainly on luck.

------
rmc
The title of the article is "How we hacked reddit...", this submission
currently says "How to go viral by using fake reddit likes", and is more
accurate. They didn't hack reddit, they bought upvotes.

------
soared
Post was deleted, heres a cached link. mirror

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:rGmQFEr...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:rGmQFErEWB8J:www.hack-
pr.com/library/how-we-hacked-reddit-to-generate-5-million-media-impressions-
in-3-days+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

------
joelthelion
Fake likes only explain part of this initiative's success. This would never
have worked with an idea that doesn't appeal to redditors.

------
known
VERIFY and TRUST;

"Media does not spread free opinion; It generates opinion" \--Oswald,1918
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_the_West](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_the_West)

------
lsmarigo
Everyone does this, including the reddit founders themselves in the early days
of the site ([https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/z4444w/how-
reddit...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/z4444w/how-reddit-got-
huge-tons-of-fake-accounts--2)).

~~~
TeMPOraL
Doesn't make it right though.

------
danso
I don't get the impression that there's _any_ substantial vote monitoring, and
so it surprises me that it even cost money to do this kind of astroturfing.
How hard would it be to setup and maintain a dozen Reddit accounts and spread
them over a VPN service? 10 min initial startup, and not more than a minute a
day of doing innocuous activity on those accounts, occasionally. When a
campaign rolls out, then have the accounts work in concert.

Sure, it might not be as 100% successful as Fiverr (though I imagine it's
fairly easy for Reddit to ad-hoc identify voting blocs if something was known
to be bought). But you could employ additional optimization techniques, such
as the one used by most high-karma users (e.g. Gallowboob): if a post fails to
hit critical upvote mass, then delete and resubmit later in the day.

To give you an idea of how things seem to be relatively unmonitored until
users flag it, there's the story of Unidan:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/MuseumOfReddit/comments/2m5q11/a_fe...](https://www.reddit.com/r/MuseumOfReddit/comments/2m5q11/a_feast_for_crows_the_fall_of_uunidan/)

And as a more recent, obscure example, there was the mystery of why the mod of
r/evilbuildings had something like 499 of the 500 most upvoted posts in his
own subreddit. The math was so laughably in favor of manipulation but a Reddit
admin, using whatever shit tools they have to investigate this, acquitted the
mod:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/67r1ht/the_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/67r1ht/the_ceo_of_revilbuildings_gets_inconsistently/)

Follow up:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/6ao8cv/dram...](https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/6ao8cv/drama_in_revilbuildings_escalates_as_the_mod_gets/)

The details of how this mod was able to boost his own posts without being
called out for vote manipulation is too banal to explain in detail (basically,
he would shadowdelete other popular posts so that his would get picked up by
the Reddit front page, and then undelete the popular posts before anyone
noticed). But the fact that a Reddit admin (I.e. a paid employee) thought that
the evilbuildings mod always having the top post in his own forum for 6 months
straight was just a coincidence, and/or because that mod was just apparently
an amazing content submitter, spoke hugely about how uncreative the Reddit
admins might be in detecting fraud.

Edit: if you are interested in subreddit drama details, here's a thread that
combines the evilbuildings drama and Gallowboob:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/6d3syc/evil...](https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/6d3syc/evilbuildings_mod_malgoya_calls_out_gallowboob/)

If this is the kind of effort users put toward imaginary points (though
arguably raising karma is part of Gallowboob's professional work), I'm nervous
to think about the schemes that PR firms will construct when they realize the
easy return on investment offered by Reddit popularity.

------
rnprince
If you're into this kind of thing, I enjoyed reading "Trust Me I'm Lying" by
Ryan Holiday.

~~~
raleighm
Also, if you're into this kind of thing, don't be. It degrades the environment
where you do it.

~~~
rnprince
You can be into understanding the media around you without actually wanting to
produce it yourself. However, if you are interested in adopting some of the
takeaways, the strategies can be used tastefully and ethically.

If you don't like the harmful ways that media manipulation is used, you might
actually like that the book explicitly warns the industry how vulnerable it is
to this practice, which can be used by anybody for any purpose. This warning
came four years before the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

------
RileyJames
It seems that everyone is aware that likes, follows, upvotes, etc can all be
bought, and therefore these numbers are manipulated regularly. But does anyone
care to see the problem solved?

~~~
omarchowdhury
You would have to solve the human being's innate attachment to number or as
René Guénon terms the current state of affairs "The Reign of Quantity."

------
blackice
Reddit should really try to proxy / VPN / Bot detection because I'm willing to
bet the people on fiverr are using large proxy networks to achieve this.

------
Doubletough
Looks like they've been shamed into submission and have pulled the article. It
was getting hammered with comments earlier. Well deserved ones.

------
meant2be
What would be the proper way of gaining traction on reddit? Is that even
possible anymore? I mean if the game is already rigged what chance do honest
businesses stand in this environment? I dont have an account on reddit (been
there for what? 7 years now?) and I always wondered how somebody go viral and
get traction now this stuff makes me think everything is basically done and
paid for.

------
Simulacra
I don't know if this is a hack, per se. I work in media and PR, and this is
just one of those things you do. Pump up the issue, get eyeballs on the
campaign, find a way to jazz the reporters, and off to the races. What may
have made this fly is that the idea was already in the minds of the public,
and the media. It's a LOT easier when that happens.

------
dchuk
So I'm working on a side project that basically has an HN/Reddit interface.
One monetization idea I had for down the road is basically a legitimate means
to boost certain posts for certain periods of time, giving them prominence on
the site in a clearly labeled area for such purposes.

Is this something people would be interested in?

~~~
mi100hael
...you mean like Reddit's "Promoted Posts" that appear at the top of the page?

------
seoseokho
Anybody have a copy of this? link is 404 now

~~~
mgcross
Looks like it's archived:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20170710232311/http://www.hack-p...](https://web.archive.org/web/20170710232311/http://www.hack-
pr.com/library/how-we-hacked-reddit-to-generate-5-million-media-impressions-
in-3-days)

~~~
seoseokho
Thanks! wonder why they took it down though

------
ameister14
While I understand people finding this distasteful, it's exactly the kind of
rule-breaking that they should be doing. Cheating? Airbnb broke Craigslist's
rules to good effect, among others.

It's naughty without being outright evil. When did that become a bad thing on
HN?

------
logicallee
A lot of people don't seem to realize that being the top link on r/politics is
a public good that's available to _everyone_. Just because someone pays $200
to make some politician's publicity stunt that nobody cares about be the top
link there (I mean really, nobody cared - the idea of a law forcing
politicians to walk around wearing the logos of their top ten donors is beyond
silly), doesn't mean that everyone else can't also be the top link there at
the same time, with other publicity stunts nobody cares about!

The great thing about being a top link is everyone can do it at the same time.
It doesn't corrupt the process at all or waste anyone's time. Everyone can
benefit from it and it doesn't make things worse for anyone.

For example imagine if all the top links on hacker news were just corporate
advertisements disguised as stories. Would it be a worse place or cause any of
us harm? Of course not.

~~~
scribu
> imagine if all the top links on hacker news were just corporate
> advertisements disguised as stories. Would it be a worse place or cause any
> of us harm? Of course not.

Did you leave out the </sarcasm> tag by accident?

How can the front page being topped with "publicity stunts nobody cares about"
not make it a worse place?

~~~
logicallee
of course, here: /s. Yes it was sarcastic.

(I must say I'm a bit blown away that you think I require a sarcasm tag,
though - I wrote that "everyone can be the top link", an obvious absurdity
since how can everyone be the top link, and that hacker news wouldn't be any
worse if every single link were a paid story. I didn't think I came even close
to having to mark my comment as sarcastic, which I sometimes do.)

~~~
croon
You underestimate the levels of straight-faced absurdity of the last 6 months.

------
visarga
What I'm worrying about is that the reddit database is used by AI for learning
dialogue and this kind of spamming actions just pollute the dataset.

~~~
Bakary
Even without the spam the learning set would be cancerous.

------
silimike
This story brought to you by Fiverr.com

~~~
geetfun
Seriously, right? Can totally see another article like this one with the
title, "How I created a viral thread on hackernews and made X dollars on
Fiverr."

------
HearMeRoar
>How we hacked Reddit

Really? Hacked?

~~~
xyzxyz998
To be fair, this is probably the only time I've seen the term hacked used
correctly. I no longer know whether I should use it in this sense or the
"incorrect but used by almost everyone" sense.

~~~
mkl
I don't think it's used correctly here. They didn't hack together any code,
they didn't hack on some multipart kludge. All they did was break rules by
buying votes.

~~~
TheRealDunkirk
"Gamed" should be the word.

------
paulpauper
How about all the times this failed

------
notananthem
That is the least hacky and also least efficient way to do that, and also make
yourself look like a total goober.

