
What’s going on Reddit these days has media manipulation written all over it - eduardordm
http://betabeat.com/2013/02/hail-corporate-the-increasingly-insufferable-fakery-of-brands-on-reddit/
======
benologist
Is that like the multiple media companies spamming the shit out of HN, with at
least these accounts shilling for BetaBeat?

<https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=met3>

<https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=ssalevan>

<https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=benjaminkabin>

<https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=nitashatiku>

<https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=lovekandinsky>

<https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=gnarls_manson>

<https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=bookish08>

Other big media houses spamming HN include Future (techradar.com and
maximumpc.com), and of course Ziff Davis (extremetech.com, pcmag.com,
geek.com).

~~~
niggler
I'm sure PG is aware of this, but is he going to do anything about it?

~~~
suyash
yeah PG and all HN admins need to fine a way of keeping media manipulation out
of this website.

~~~
batgaijin
Maybe he can start with the techcrunch spam of announced yc companies.

------
hammerzeit
Articles like this are toxic for a community.

First, it's largely unsubstantiated, predicating most of its arguments on
insinuations without much substance if any in the entire article. Without the
usual navel-gazing about Journalism, it's still worth pointing out I wouldn't
associate trustworthiness with any brand willing to publish an article as
poorly-sourced as this.

Second, it ascribes to single-minded malice what is much more likely a vast
and complex series of behaviors, some of which probably involves spammers but
much of which does not. This kind of reductionism is rarely constructive IMO.

Most problematically, it lays the foundation for the delegitimization of
dialogue in a community. This kind of paranoid accusation soon empowers folks
to stifle dissenting voices as part of this outside group trying to bring down
reddit. This kind of paranoia has already infected dialogue on the middle east
in reddit, for example.

~~~
mnicole
Exactly. Subreddits like /r/hailcorporate exist to try to make light of these
practices (and started out credible enough), but now it is overrun with
conspiracy theorists who think that any and all references to a major brand in
a post that hits the front page - especially if it doesn't have very many
comments - is clearly advertising, and you are all sheeple.

They even mass-downvoted someone for saying "something smells fishy and it
isn't the Fish Filet" in a thread about the baby eating the used condom off
the floor because just mentioning a product means they must be a paid
marketer.

------
cup
It's not simply limited to media manipulation. Loby and special interest
groups are also using reddit to sway political discourse.

This is no better seen than when Israel/Palestine articles hit the front page.
You can nearly watch in real time where a critical mass is reached and
suddenly pro israeli comments start flooding in. It's a thing of beauty to
watch.

If you look at the /r/videos subreddit you can see videos uploaded showing
clips from the official ellen page which arn't particularly interested but
have been boosted to the top and are full of comments talking about how great
ellen is.

Even subreddits that have failed to reach the large member volumes other
subreddits have are not immune to this manipulation.

It's unfortunate because it stiffles original dialogue.

Sometimes I wonder what would happen if reddit got rid of the upvote button
and only allowed posts to be down votted. Articles and comments which survived
the war of attrition might be a little more inciteful.

~~~
eurleif
>Sometimes I wonder what would happen if reddit got rid of the upvote button
and only allowed posts to be down votted.

That might actually make things worse. Astroturfers would systematically
downvote everyone else, while legitimate users would usually only downvote a
small handful of things.

~~~
gcr
If that happens, it could make it easier to identify them. Reddit already has
quite sophisticated spam detection algorithms.

------
driverdan
This garbage is what's wrong with blog news sites, a complete lack of
journalistic integrity. While I didn't check them all, every supposed example
I looked at was a legitimate user and not a corporate shill. Ryan Holiday
could have easily confirmed this as well (and may have) but instead chose to
post them and insinuate less than honest intentions by the post authors.

While corporate shilling does happen on Reddit (and other news sites such as
HN) it's not as common as the article implies. If it was he could have at
least found some real examples. Holiday should stick to what he's good at,
marketing, and leave journalism to actual journalists.

~~~
hippobravo
"This garbage is what's wrong with blog news sites, a complete lack of
journalistic integrity."

Newspapers really aren't much better, they're mainly better at appearing to
have integrity. The only real benefit of most newspapers is that the lack of
integrity is somewhat consistent according to a particular slant of the paper.
So you can expect The New Yorker to lack their integrity in a fairly
consistent way, whereas Washington Post lacks integrity in a different but
consistent way.

Reddit's curation is biased toward lowest common denominator dopamine shots
that are provided in as little as time as is possible after clicking the "hit
me" link.

------
dmlorenzetti
There are lots of places where corporate manipulation of the media bother me,
but the front page of Reddit just isn't that high on my list.

What's there now? Among other things, there's a cartoon image of a man saying
"It's locked." A picture of Keira Knightley, with an atheism/theism quote. A
dog catching a piece of cheese. A picture of two shirtless guys jumping around
in a hotel room. The top link points to an article with content that does
actually seem to be corrupted by corporate manipulation (it could be read as
an advert for Lockheed-Martin). However, the article itself is on Reuters, so
Reddit is just acting as a low-quality aggregator site at that point.

In short, it's hard for me to take the front page of Reddit seriously as a
"media" outlet. While I do find some subreddits interesting and informative,
it's not clear how the quality of the front page would somehow get dragged
down by a few professionally-produced marketing messages.

------
TillE
I don't know how much of it is directly corporate-driven, but Reddit _loves_
viral marketing. Can't get enough. Mildly funny Facebook post from a beer
brand? Screenshot it, thousands of upvotes. Repeat over and over and over
again.

I suspect it's mainly down to a total lack of concern or thought for the
effects of what you choose to consume and share.

~~~
Karunamon
In your example, what is the effect? A beer company gets a little bit of free
exposure for a clever pic? Whoop-de-freaking-doo!

The cleverness is probably what's getting upvoted, FYI.

------
purplelobster
Reddit has really gone through a transformation in the past few years. It's
painful to see interesting discussions turn to memes and viral marketing. Just
seems to be inevitable. I had an idea for how to limit the influence of the
masses and bots by giving trust to known high quality "trusted" users. When a
high quality user votes on something, he spreads his trust trust around.
Effectively it means that people who post cat pictures have no trust and
therefore no influence with their votes, and the admins have a simple way of
steering the content by picking and choosing the trusted and non-trusted
users. Trust could be computed similarly to how you calculate pagerank.

~~~
tomkinstinch
I'm not sure why they haven't used karma in a similar way. Why not make up or
down votes cost one karma point? In order to shape the content stream you
would need to spend your social capital.

~~~
purplelobster
I don't think it's possible to build a system without human intervention that
keeps the bad content out and promotes interesting discussions. What I'm
essentially saying is that the Reddit staff should pick a few thousand people
by hand that they think embodies what they want the perfect redditor to be
like. Everybody else starts out with minuscule influence. Now those
ambassadors will go out and up-vote other good users and down-vote bad ones
and will in that way spread their influence to other people. Some users might
even have negative influence. Can you imagine a user who keeps up-voting cat
pictures that is in effect down-voting those submissions without realizing it?
It would be beautiful. Obviously it would be important to keep users'
influence a secret.

In essence, it would give the Reddit staff much needed control of the content
and discourse. If they one day wanted to steer the site towards only cat
pictures, they can easily do that by selecting those users to be the
ambassadors.

Right now it seems that Reddit is suffering from Eternal September x 1000, and
they're at the mercy of the masses. But the geeky, thoughtful content that
brought people to the site to begin with is nowhere to be found anymore. It's
being drowned in memes and cat pictures.

~~~
markkat
_I don't think it's possible to build a system without human intervention that
keeps the bad content out and promotes interesting discussions._

I disagree. IMHO it can be accomplished with the correct structure. The
problem you identify is that subreddits are shared spaces, and the primary
signal that they rely on is the sum of all users. As subreddits grow, the
signal becomes worse. Weighting the votes of users could help, but then you
are implementing a moderator bias, and not being honest with people about
their input would almost certainly lead to blowback.

One of our goals with <http://hubski.com> was to avoid this problem. Our
approach was to avoid shared pages, and instead allow users to build a feed by
following other users or tags. That way we don't have the problem of 'keeping
bad content out' to begin with. Instead of voting a story up a page, users
share the post with those users that follow them. Posts propagate from user to
user. Therefore content cannot be 'buried' by competing with other posts in a
shared space. Of course, we are not anywhere near the size of Reddit, but it
has been working well so far for us. Each user is their own moderator.

~~~
purplelobster
I like it. Have been looking for an alternative to Reddit for general
discussions, so far HN has been my inadequate replacement.

~~~
markkat
Thanks. Feel free to send feedback along after you kick the tires. It's always
useful to get a fresh perspective. We always consider Hubski to be a work in
progress.

------
frou_dh
The American military astroturfing on reddit is off the charts. Desert-puppy-
holding and worship-baiting-poignant-reunion photos are pumped out like
clockwork.

~~~
plaguuuuuu
You're not the only one noticing that. Every time I mention it (in a non-
confrontational way) I get spammed with downvotes.

I honestly don't care about Reddit any more.

------
michaelwww
People like their favorite brands and will post and upvote them. Costco for
example. People love Costco as the anti-Walmart. That's not to say
manipulation doesn't happen, but the author should at least mention this.

------
jiggy2011
This is something that is difficult to prove either way, especially with the
amount of group think that gets posted to the top of popular subreddits.

Reddit is basically the perfect breeding ground for this sort of thing. In
fact if I was an internet marketing type I can't think of why I wouldn't
target reddit.

We have a lot of younger unemployed people out there today who are probably
thinking "damn, if only somebody would pay me to browse reddit all day".

Facebook etc are doing similar things with "sponsored likes", the main
difference being that this is at least less surreptitious but it certainly
shows that astroturfing is very very big business.

Hell for all I know, I'm the only "real" person on HN and all of the rest of
you are hired by various interest groups to try and persuade me of various
things..

------
incongruity
_"So whether Redditors know it or not, there is a now a big 'deceive me' sign
on their back. And marketers are going to try to take advantage of it."_

And what's new about this? As a consumer, I've had this sign on me since
birth, haven't I?

------
GHFigs
I find myself in the surreal position of wanting to endorse the author's book
while bound by the awareness that any such endorsement by definition ought to
be viewed with extreme skepticism.

------
corin_
Some of his examples are just... awful. Apparently the genius minds at
Domino's Pizza's marketing department came up with "in a one-off test our
Pizza arrived one minute faster than one of our competitors", Costo came up
with "look at the financial record our company set" (something shoppers always
think about when deciding where to shop), and Mountain Dew wanted potential
customers to know their drink was created to hide the taste of Moonshine.

------
orangethirty
It's been like that for a while on the bigger subs. But it's the same thing
that happens on TV, radio, etc. You can't avoid it.

------
tkahn6
So it's impossible for people to find that little factoid about Mountain Dew
genuinely interesting and therefore it must be a corporate conspiracy that it
reached the front page of /r/TIL?

Absolute pure insanity. And why then is reddit's obsession with Neil DeGrasse
Tyson not an orchestrated conspiracy by NDT's publicist or book publisher to
sell more books? Oh, because _you_ like NDT and therefore support for him is
organic and genuine?

Supreme narcissism.

------
nwzpaperman
Reddit has minimal barriers to churning accounts to sybil attack the
community. It's all too common to hear founders trying to maximize users and
accelerate growth before the long-term externalities have been considered or
the stack is ready.

Some times taking your time is the best decision for the long-game.

Crawl->Stand->Walk->Run->Jump

~~~
nwzpaperman
Let's not forget Conde Nast--Advanced Publications--owns Reddit...

~~~
sabat
Not anymore. [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/03/business/media/reddit-
thri...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/03/business/media/reddit-thrives-
after-advance-publications-let-it-sink-or-swim.html?_r=0)

~~~
nwzpaperman
Can't even call it a Chinese wall...

