> This article was drafted with AI from my outline
Maybe just post your human outline and the data, where the data processing and viz is AI assisted if you like.
The synthetic prose is not a value-add over your outline. It takes time to read, and reduces the bit-rate over your intentions.
nomel
> Thin accounts: few comments, low scores, no real standing in the subreddit.
> Young accounts, or accounts with histories that are hidden or wiped.
Nope, this is no longer an indicator of a bot account. Many that I've looked into will have active posts to local town/region subreddits (often times multiple!) and different sports subreddits, sometimes getting unusually high amounts of karma in them (which suggests a network).
Turing test is looong dead, so no reason to assume the small fractions of a cent to make comments, to get a reasonable history, isn't being taken advantage of.
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DharmaPolice
There have been a few cases posted to the theoryofreddit subreddit where it's obvious that there were sets of accounts which were blanket recommending specific products a disproportionate amount of time. The user accounts involved were often banned shortly afterwards (or were deleted). These were (upon examination) really obvious though, often promoting extremely niche products using very exact terminology.
This I think leads to a sort of toupee fallacy - where because you can spot the really bad examples you feel confident that you can identify the much better, more subtle examples. If an account which has only made 50 comments (all of which are very generic) makes 20 comments in a single month explicitly recommending ImageGeneratorDeluxeProMax then sure, you can guess they might not be legit. But if an account runs for a longer period of time and makes a lot more general organic contributions then if 1 in 500 of their comments are in favour of a particular product then it's harder to say.
I think ultimately account age is the only thing that will be difficult to replicate at scale. I know people buy older accounts but there is still a fundamental difficulty in obtaining them in sufficient numbers. And yes, obviously that will mean disregarding the many millions of legitimate accounts that are under (say) 2 or 3 years old. There is also no easy way of hiding accounts under a certain age when searching Reddit via Google.
By allowing uses to hide user profiles Reddit has also made detecting potentially bad actors that little bit more difficult. And from experience it feels like a large proportion of accounts now have hidden post histories. (It might also be the default for new accounts, I'm not sure).
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zergrush
This is why Reddit is a low value high effort distribution channel. When your userbase is hostile and suspicious constantly to any commercial introductions, advertising there becomes just an exercise in futility. The demographic also is problematic on Bluesky. Same on hackernews. Astroturfing is certainly a response to this friction and in turn it only creates more of it.
Also specifically with Reddit they have allowed hiding comment history which makes it even harder, I imagine they did this for boosting ad business
There are much better platforms to spend your effort on like X. X requires many users to purchase a subscription account and thus acts as sort of a litmus test (people who can afford low amount of money per month).
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smcleod
"The corpus, and the refresh that changed the answer" ... hello Opus 5.
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asksomeoneelse
Niche topics like linux feel somewhat safe from bots. But the last time I checked the more popular subs.. yikes..
When I see 2-weeks old account "Incendiary-Leg-8592" responding to a post by another weeks old user "Pivotal-Kitchen-0498", I have a hard time believing they are humans behind them.
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rithdmc
I think the items listed under "What astroturfing would look like" were a pretty narrow scope. If I were designing a ~spam system~ astroturfing solution, I'd engineer out these four simple indicators as soon as I could.
* Those accounts naming one brand almost every time they name any.
* Thin accounts: few comments, low scores, no real standing in the subreddit.
* Young accounts, or accounts with histories that are hidden or wiped.
* Links to a store or an affiliate page.
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PyWoody
I gave up on any product related reviews on Reddit a decade ago. It can still be useful for guides that may describe what type of products you should look into, e.g., woodworking tools, skincare, etc.
For product reviews, I've been using GearLab (https://www.techgearlab.com/) for years with pretty reliable results. I have no affiliation with them.
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socializer
My impression is that this doesn't show anything. It essentially implies that brand loyalty is equivalent to paid astroturfing, but if you've been around hobby communities on the internet, you know that a lot of people are just brand blowhards. And in any case, by its own admission, none of the results in this article are statistically significant, so it fails to find the effect it implies to have found.
I strongly believe that there's a lot of paid product placement and paid political talking points on Reddit, so it's actually remarkable that this (LLM-generated) article fails to find it. I suspect it's just bad design.
If you're already spending money on tokens, there's a very simple experiment you could do instead: just pay one of these companies to position a made-up product and see what they do.
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est
Ask HN: what would you do if you were operating reddit?
What are some good counter measure, besides ban hammer?
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ZiiS
Why are they calling its primary funtion a problem?
neilv
> REDCmts sells one Reddit comment for $9.99 and 100 for $699.99, from what it calls "real, aged accounts", and shows a gallery of brand mentions it says it delivered. Soar says its accounts are "aged and manually warmed" for weeks before a single brand mention. Bazzly advertises automated replies to every post that looks like someone shopping.
Why doesn't Reddit make sure that shilling is disallowed by their ToS, and then sue these companies and all their customers?
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zulux
Yes.
I do it locally to nudge political discourse. Doesn't take much to sway a lot of people.
I'm glad I agree with what I'm doing because its effectiveness is terrifying.
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wxw
IIRC the Reddit founders used bots for initial traffic to skip over the cold start problem. I feel like this bit of lore is actually pretty terrible but is treated as a nice anecdote because it worked.
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d1l
Post is slop but I was on a call this morning with our go-getter sales guy (he’s calling himself a gtm engineer now) where he talked about alternately buying Reddit comments and going and placing flyers on car windshields himself at offices of potential customers. Our CEO was enthusiastic.
janalsncm
This is why you need to write your own content.
> If the tail shows up in buying threads only because it posts a lot, random reassignment says it should write about 7.9% of the brand mentions there, and almost always between 6.3% and 10.1%. It wrote 11.3%.
Is it just me or is this just a block of painfully hard to parse text? This is core to the author’s analysis.
Rather than pasting the analysis from Claude, the author should just explain it themselves. Just the core of their analysis. It doesn’t have to be 2000 words. Put an AI;DR at the top and give us the core of your argument. I would take a paragraph from a human any day over an essay from Claude.
consp
Sounds interesting but I find it kind of annoying the github source either has been nuked or never existed in the first place.
mrtesthah
The AI writing makes this unreadable.
ohm
Reddit added an option to hide your post history, making it harder to figure out if the account is a bot.
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yoggies_bro
Why would I trust an article written in Claudish with a broken link to a github repo?
HarHarVeryFunny
A large portion of the "New LLM release" story comments here on HN also appear to be astroturfing ... would be interesting to see a correlation of comment sentiment to IP-derived geographic location!
someonebaggy
Don't you just have to use Reddit to learn the answer is yes?
tonymet
The sooner you realize the internet is dead (and has been), the less anxiety you'll have.
monksy
From my experience, they have been astroturfed quite a lot, its' been that way for a while.
During the Laquan McDonald innocent and trial there were tons of accounts from the_donald, and not-connected to that were pretending to be experts and live in chicago (despite not having history on the sub). In the threads these accounts weren't positively contributing to the conversation, they were spewing:
1. Direct racial slurs
2. Political proganda criticising leadership they didn't like (not having direct experience and not critiqing direct political actions that lead to the event). I.e. "Chicago is a warzone"/etc.
3. Maliciously bad faith arguements. (Non-regulars steering up arguments to push talking points.. these weren't well intention-ed factual/communicative debates)
Since then: There have been heavy agenda pushing on subs. For example scooters and bikes, after the introduction of rentable ebikes and scooters.. there was heavy votes and arguements over people who criticized the business and users behavior. (When the scooters were added to the city, there were lots of posts about destroying them.. now there are not recognizable accounts arguing and attacking you if you comment on this.. a comment about defending yourself against someone riding aggressively near you gets you site wide banned). Note: the attacks in support for scooters aren't consistent.. sometimes you get breakthroughs talking about the negative impact.
On r/privacy, there are groups of people that grief others about "well you can't do anything about this". I'm not talking about people expressing how they feel, I'm talking about direct denialism and griefing in a sub that is expressly meant to be pro-privacy.
Additionally, the DNC did this on r/wisconsin in 2024. They even used social manipulation tactics with calls to actions that "we must do something." There was documentation about this was coordinated efforts.
This has been documented on accounts that are necro-ing old posts for product recommendations as well.
Theres a lot that is claimed on the Ellen Pao == hitler drama actually being a Spez lead campaign in a business lead fight. (Turns out it was spez that wanted to roll out a lot of the restrictive features and sub removals, and Pao was more of a "let's be less resirictive and socially moderated" )
Ads, scams, rage bait, trolls... The internet is pretty broken for almost all sites that pretends to carry conversations between actual people.
I don't understand why so many people and companies feel the need to just spam reviews, SEO and questionable ads. It's like almost no one has the idea that may we start with a good product, then we'll tell people about it. It's always a question of what you can have produced cheaply in China and how do we then trick people into buying it.
As it stand you can pretty much assume that if it's advertised, or is promoted on social media, it's going to be a shit product.
To some extend I'd exclude certain types of YouTube reviews, because they frequently aren't paid by the manufacturer and making a video with real people and real data is to expensive to waste on scams.
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gwbas1c
> Unfortunately, advertisers are getting smarter and using bots...
I honestly thought this was a nag asking me to turn off my ad blocker!
embedding-shape
> The practical check is the one the data endorses: when a knife recommendation comes from an account you do not recognize, click through and see whether it has ever named a different brand.
This isn't even most of the times possible, since both humans and bot alike on Reddit now hides their comment/submission history, so it just shows a blank page.
No, I think it's best to just default to assuming everyone is a bot, so to say, and read everything critically regardless of what the source may be.
bix6
> Adding "reddit" to a knife search still gets you humans, mostly. For a couple of brands, a quarter to a third of the buying advice comes from accounts that mostly recommend that brand. Whether those are fans or paid, I do not know, and after reading their histories I lean toward fans and hold the lean loosely.
Very long write up to unconfidently say I don’t know.
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add-sub-mul-div
That this was posted by someone who's only here to post his own sites and those sites have never been submitted by another person is like performance art.
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thimabi
Perhaps we can envision a future in which we analyze Reddit data not according to all the positive things people say about a product, but according to the negative things being said.
Shilling can’t prevent dissatisfied customers from voicing their opinions in a properly moderated subreddit, and astroturfing to spread misinformation about a competitor makes companies much more vulnerable to litigation.
johnsmith1840
That's just ad products. I am convinced brands do this one their own subreddits all the time.
Saying postive or neutral statements, say a negative thing, not downvoted but zeroed.
Dead internet is absolutely true
Lerc
Is product astroturfing illegal in any jurisdictions? I can't see a particularly compelling reason for allowing advice from people deliberately concealing a financial incentive.
anyone who ever says no to this hasn't ever posted on reddit.
RickJWagner
Per Reddit itself and Google, astroturfing is especially bad in political subreddits. Attempting to shape public perception is a big business.
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jdw64
Isn't there? Especially when crypto was booming, that kind of opinion manipulation definitely existed to deceive people. I've actually seen it in freelance requests before too, and most of the time they run it through phone farms.
I've also heard it happens in some games as well, but either way, the one I can say for certain is crypto.
nizarmah
All this time I've been oblivious to this. To this day I still write site:reddit.com in my searches to get information from people. SMH.
gwbas1c
Am I the only person who thinks many of the various "I don't touch code anymore" comments here come from bots?
Yes, yes it does. There's astroturfing of every variety: political, brands, image rehab, you name it.
Just look at how often Bill Gates gets glazing articles posted which receive suspicious rankings. None of the comments mention the Epstein-sized elephants in the room.
Politics is even worse, and it's useless as a platform for taking political temperature. Numerous companies openly admit to this activity and Reddit has never commented on this practice.
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asg172
A truly load-bearing article that reassures us that Reddit is not astroturfed.
Of course, AI coding agents, which the author works on, would also never be astroturfed on Reddit!
You know, astroturfing on Reddit also comes from long time accounts with moderator support.
> This article was drafted with AI from my outline
Maybe just post your human outline and the data, where the data processing and viz is AI assisted if you like.
The synthetic prose is not a value-add over your outline. It takes time to read, and reduces the bit-rate over your intentions.
> Thin accounts: few comments, low scores, no real standing in the subreddit.
> Young accounts, or accounts with histories that are hidden or wiped.
Nope, this is no longer an indicator of a bot account. Many that I've looked into will have active posts to local town/region subreddits (often times multiple!) and different sports subreddits, sometimes getting unusually high amounts of karma in them (which suggests a network).
Turing test is looong dead, so no reason to assume the small fractions of a cent to make comments, to get a reasonable history, isn't being taken advantage of.
There have been a few cases posted to the theoryofreddit subreddit where it's obvious that there were sets of accounts which were blanket recommending specific products a disproportionate amount of time. The user accounts involved were often banned shortly afterwards (or were deleted). These were (upon examination) really obvious though, often promoting extremely niche products using very exact terminology.
This I think leads to a sort of toupee fallacy - where because you can spot the really bad examples you feel confident that you can identify the much better, more subtle examples. If an account which has only made 50 comments (all of which are very generic) makes 20 comments in a single month explicitly recommending ImageGeneratorDeluxeProMax then sure, you can guess they might not be legit. But if an account runs for a longer period of time and makes a lot more general organic contributions then if 1 in 500 of their comments are in favour of a particular product then it's harder to say.
I think ultimately account age is the only thing that will be difficult to replicate at scale. I know people buy older accounts but there is still a fundamental difficulty in obtaining them in sufficient numbers. And yes, obviously that will mean disregarding the many millions of legitimate accounts that are under (say) 2 or 3 years old. There is also no easy way of hiding accounts under a certain age when searching Reddit via Google.
By allowing uses to hide user profiles Reddit has also made detecting potentially bad actors that little bit more difficult. And from experience it feels like a large proportion of accounts now have hidden post histories. (It might also be the default for new accounts, I'm not sure).
This is why Reddit is a low value high effort distribution channel. When your userbase is hostile and suspicious constantly to any commercial introductions, advertising there becomes just an exercise in futility. The demographic also is problematic on Bluesky. Same on hackernews. Astroturfing is certainly a response to this friction and in turn it only creates more of it.
Also specifically with Reddit they have allowed hiding comment history which makes it even harder, I imagine they did this for boosting ad business
There are much better platforms to spend your effort on like X. X requires many users to purchase a subscription account and thus acts as sort of a litmus test (people who can afford low amount of money per month).
"The corpus, and the refresh that changed the answer" ... hello Opus 5.
Niche topics like linux feel somewhat safe from bots. But the last time I checked the more popular subs.. yikes..
When I see 2-weeks old account "Incendiary-Leg-8592" responding to a post by another weeks old user "Pivotal-Kitchen-0498", I have a hard time believing they are humans behind them.
I think the items listed under "What astroturfing would look like" were a pretty narrow scope. If I were designing a ~spam system~ astroturfing solution, I'd engineer out these four simple indicators as soon as I could.
* Those accounts naming one brand almost every time they name any. * Thin accounts: few comments, low scores, no real standing in the subreddit. * Young accounts, or accounts with histories that are hidden or wiped. * Links to a store or an affiliate page.
I gave up on any product related reviews on Reddit a decade ago. It can still be useful for guides that may describe what type of products you should look into, e.g., woodworking tools, skincare, etc.
For product reviews, I've been using GearLab (https://www.techgearlab.com/) for years with pretty reliable results. I have no affiliation with them.
My impression is that this doesn't show anything. It essentially implies that brand loyalty is equivalent to paid astroturfing, but if you've been around hobby communities on the internet, you know that a lot of people are just brand blowhards. And in any case, by its own admission, none of the results in this article are statistically significant, so it fails to find the effect it implies to have found.
I strongly believe that there's a lot of paid product placement and paid political talking points on Reddit, so it's actually remarkable that this (LLM-generated) article fails to find it. I suspect it's just bad design.
If you're already spending money on tokens, there's a very simple experiment you could do instead: just pay one of these companies to position a made-up product and see what they do.
Ask HN: what would you do if you were operating reddit?
What are some good counter measure, besides ban hammer?
Why are they calling its primary funtion a problem?
> REDCmts sells one Reddit comment for $9.99 and 100 for $699.99, from what it calls "real, aged accounts", and shows a gallery of brand mentions it says it delivered. Soar says its accounts are "aged and manually warmed" for weeks before a single brand mention. Bazzly advertises automated replies to every post that looks like someone shopping.
Why doesn't Reddit make sure that shilling is disallowed by their ToS, and then sue these companies and all their customers?
Yes.
I do it locally to nudge political discourse. Doesn't take much to sway a lot of people.
I'm glad I agree with what I'm doing because its effectiveness is terrifying.
IIRC the Reddit founders used bots for initial traffic to skip over the cold start problem. I feel like this bit of lore is actually pretty terrible but is treated as a nice anecdote because it worked.
Post is slop but I was on a call this morning with our go-getter sales guy (he’s calling himself a gtm engineer now) where he talked about alternately buying Reddit comments and going and placing flyers on car windshields himself at offices of potential customers. Our CEO was enthusiastic.
This is why you need to write your own content.
> If the tail shows up in buying threads only because it posts a lot, random reassignment says it should write about 7.9% of the brand mentions there, and almost always between 6.3% and 10.1%. It wrote 11.3%.
Is it just me or is this just a block of painfully hard to parse text? This is core to the author’s analysis.
Rather than pasting the analysis from Claude, the author should just explain it themselves. Just the core of their analysis. It doesn’t have to be 2000 words. Put an AI;DR at the top and give us the core of your argument. I would take a paragraph from a human any day over an essay from Claude.
Sounds interesting but I find it kind of annoying the github source either has been nuked or never existed in the first place.
The AI writing makes this unreadable.
Reddit added an option to hide your post history, making it harder to figure out if the account is a bot.
Why would I trust an article written in Claudish with a broken link to a github repo?
A large portion of the "New LLM release" story comments here on HN also appear to be astroturfing ... would be interesting to see a correlation of comment sentiment to IP-derived geographic location!
Don't you just have to use Reddit to learn the answer is yes?
The sooner you realize the internet is dead (and has been), the less anxiety you'll have.
From my experience, they have been astroturfed quite a lot, its' been that way for a while.
During the Laquan McDonald innocent and trial there were tons of accounts from the_donald, and not-connected to that were pretending to be experts and live in chicago (despite not having history on the sub). In the threads these accounts weren't positively contributing to the conversation, they were spewing:
1. Direct racial slurs 2. Political proganda criticising leadership they didn't like (not having direct experience and not critiqing direct political actions that lead to the event). I.e. "Chicago is a warzone"/etc. 3. Maliciously bad faith arguements. (Non-regulars steering up arguments to push talking points.. these weren't well intention-ed factual/communicative debates)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Laquan_McDonald
Since then: There have been heavy agenda pushing on subs. For example scooters and bikes, after the introduction of rentable ebikes and scooters.. there was heavy votes and arguements over people who criticized the business and users behavior. (When the scooters were added to the city, there were lots of posts about destroying them.. now there are not recognizable accounts arguing and attacking you if you comment on this.. a comment about defending yourself against someone riding aggressively near you gets you site wide banned). Note: the attacks in support for scooters aren't consistent.. sometimes you get breakthroughs talking about the negative impact.
On r/privacy, there are groups of people that grief others about "well you can't do anything about this". I'm not talking about people expressing how they feel, I'm talking about direct denialism and griefing in a sub that is expressly meant to be pro-privacy.
Additionally, the DNC did this on r/wisconsin in 2024. They even used social manipulation tactics with calls to actions that "we must do something." There was documentation about this was coordinated efforts.
This has been documented on accounts that are necro-ing old posts for product recommendations as well.
Theres a lot that is claimed on the Ellen Pao == hitler drama actually being a Spez lead campaign in a business lead fight. (Turns out it was spez that wanted to roll out a lot of the restrictive features and sub removals, and Pao was more of a "let's be less resirictive and socially moderated" )
https://reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/2zcbyq/what_is_go...
Ads, scams, rage bait, trolls... The internet is pretty broken for almost all sites that pretends to carry conversations between actual people.
I don't understand why so many people and companies feel the need to just spam reviews, SEO and questionable ads. It's like almost no one has the idea that may we start with a good product, then we'll tell people about it. It's always a question of what you can have produced cheaply in China and how do we then trick people into buying it.
As it stand you can pretty much assume that if it's advertised, or is promoted on social media, it's going to be a shit product.
To some extend I'd exclude certain types of YouTube reviews, because they frequently aren't paid by the manufacturer and making a video with real people and real data is to expensive to waste on scams.
> Unfortunately, advertisers are getting smarter and using bots...
I honestly thought this was a nag asking me to turn off my ad blocker!
> The practical check is the one the data endorses: when a knife recommendation comes from an account you do not recognize, click through and see whether it has ever named a different brand.
This isn't even most of the times possible, since both humans and bot alike on Reddit now hides their comment/submission history, so it just shows a blank page.
No, I think it's best to just default to assuming everyone is a bot, so to say, and read everything critically regardless of what the source may be.
> Adding "reddit" to a knife search still gets you humans, mostly. For a couple of brands, a quarter to a third of the buying advice comes from accounts that mostly recommend that brand. Whether those are fans or paid, I do not know, and after reading their histories I lean toward fans and hold the lean loosely.
Very long write up to unconfidently say I don’t know.
That this was posted by someone who's only here to post his own sites and those sites have never been submitted by another person is like performance art.
Perhaps we can envision a future in which we analyze Reddit data not according to all the positive things people say about a product, but according to the negative things being said.
Shilling can’t prevent dissatisfied customers from voicing their opinions in a properly moderated subreddit, and astroturfing to spread misinformation about a competitor makes companies much more vulnerable to litigation.
That's just ad products. I am convinced brands do this one their own subreddits all the time.
Saying postive or neutral statements, say a negative thing, not downvoted but zeroed.
Dead internet is absolutely true
Is product astroturfing illegal in any jurisdictions? I can't see a particularly compelling reason for allowing advice from people deliberately concealing a financial incentive.
https://www.theverge.com/tech/975398/reddit-ai-rules-hub-mod...
I was banned by their new AI moderation system. Then I appealed it and got a message saying "Our slop banned you by mistake." (paraphrased)
Then I was banned again by their new AI moderation system.
Then I deleted my post history using Power Delete Suite and stopped using reddit.
https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite
Let their bots moderate bots.
anyone who ever says no to this hasn't ever posted on reddit.
Per Reddit itself and Google, astroturfing is especially bad in political subreddits. Attempting to shape public perception is a big business.
Isn't there? Especially when crypto was booming, that kind of opinion manipulation definitely existed to deceive people. I've actually seen it in freelance requests before too, and most of the time they run it through phone farms.
I've also heard it happens in some games as well, but either way, the one I can say for certain is crypto.
All this time I've been oblivious to this. To this day I still write site:reddit.com in my searches to get information from people. SMH.
Am I the only person who thinks many of the various "I don't touch code anymore" comments here come from bots?
Absolutely. For example, the blatant ads for Stake https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/1s3yscz/how_reddit_us...
Yes, yes it does. There's astroturfing of every variety: political, brands, image rehab, you name it.
Just look at how often Bill Gates gets glazing articles posted which receive suspicious rankings. None of the comments mention the Epstein-sized elephants in the room.
Politics is even worse, and it's useless as a platform for taking political temperature. Numerous companies openly admit to this activity and Reddit has never commented on this practice.
A truly load-bearing article that reassures us that Reddit is not astroturfed.
Of course, AI coding agents, which the author works on, would also never be astroturfed on Reddit!
You know, astroturfing on Reddit also comes from long time accounts with moderator support.