Yes vote manipulation is common on reddit.
this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2023
122 points (96.2% liked)
21193 readers
8 users here now
News and Discussions about Reddit
Welcome to !reddit. This is a community for all news and discussions about Reddit.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules
Rule 1- No brigading.
**You may not encourage brigading any communities or subreddits in any way. **
YSKs are about self-improvement on how to do things.
Rule 2- No illegal or NSFW or gore content.
**No illegal or NSFW or gore content. **
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-Reddit posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.
If you vocally harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
It's not just common, it's the entire basis of the platform.
Every dumb fucking talking point they want their users to regurgitate in the real world goes to the moon. Speak the truth and be silenced.
It's a nightmare platform.
Which is funny if you have a home computer and two people upvote the same thing from different accounts on it. Mods will absolutely drop a ban hammer.
🌏🧑🚀🔫🧑🚀
Reddit has quite literally been using them since they were first founded. To get the site off the ground, links, votes & engagement was artificially populated for years as the userbase grew. Reddit has never been organic. And anyone who believes reddit ever stopped manipulating those numbers after their "seed phase" to make the site look better is no more than a sweet summer child.
Can you source me on this? I don't know what to Google to find information on this topic.
I don't fault them for seeding content to get a totally blank site off the ground. But spez definitely never stopped manipulating everything that's followed.
What are you talking about? I did not do anything, it is the fault of {TEAM_NAME}. {TEAM_NAME} is the reason why {SITE_NAME} is entirely fake. Do not blame me, BLAME THEM!
I only go back occasionally for a fap, and even my old favourite subreddits are just reposts of old content, it's dead to me.
That's all they really are, a porn aggregator.
a spez one, at that
Or people are boring.
Until recently, Reddit has been seeing an increase in active users. That has made upvotes more available, causing karma inflation.
Also, Reddit has been taking a lot of effort to kill the default sub list, so it is distributing people to subs they wouldn't normally go to.
But upvotes on discussions there are literally 100 times what they used to be just half a year ago. No way that happens naturally.
Yeah, but that wouldn't be Reddit doing that.
deleted by creator
B[o]ts use API calls, and Reddit has API calls locked down now.
That is if bots used the API directly, which may or may not be the case. It wouldn't be that hard to automate using Reddit's UI. You also had botmakers who relied on the API given months to transfer to webpage scraping.
And while Reddit did create and upvote posts in the beginning, the site seems to be large enough that I don't see Reddit being able to scale upvotes based on content alone without a massive AI army.
deleted by creator
I say it as knowing that Reddit can change how upvotes work. They've done it in the past and it is a lot easier to change a formula over creating bots to upvote and downvote.
Reddit has also shown its ability to frame and curate both the default steam and r/all by removing porn and limiting political posts.
I don't know why Reddit would deal in bots when it has more powerful tools at hand.
deleted by creator
Or just change how upvotes are counted and displayed; no bot is needed. Reddit doesn't publish exact upvote and downvote numbers and hasn't for a while.
It also gives Reddit more control at a higher level to tweak certain numbers in certain subs.
deleted by creator
Since votes are private by default, reddit wouldn't need bots to manipulate voting. They can just show or report on the API whatever number they want.
I'm seeing a huge ratio of upvotes to comments lately on reddit.
Like 30k upvotes, 200 comments.
Happens here too but not as extreme.
I've also seen weird upvote/comment ratios on Lemmy, but I think there are still bugs in the system.
I have seen a post with a sus upvote count and no comments from a different instance. When I view it on the post's home instance, I see plenty of comments from users who's instances that are federated with mine, but my instance's version of the post has few or no comments. It's happened more than once, but I bet it's just temporary strangeness at play when it happens.
I've said this and I'll say it again. Anyone that's on Reddit still, doesn't make quality content or have comments that are worth a shit. All those people went to mastodon, lemmy or somewhere else. Same applies with facebook, xitter, or any other corpo social media.
Yeah, reposts have become a lot more common over the past year.