My DD on shills was removed and at first I thought it was Reddit admins who did it, with the recent events with the mods at R/gme, I now know what happened. Here's my deleted DD on shills.
Read this fucking article by Forbes.
Another one: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2016/12/14/how-we-bought-reddit-for-200/?sh=3aed2bdc44a8
Here are some questionable jobs, look at the date of when the job poster created their account on some of these jobs.
Edit: I want to emphasize that proof of these job listings exists, allows for the CAPABILITY of manipulation within Reddit.
AND THIS IS JUST ON ONE WEBSITE.
Edit: Original post regarding this was removed. See edit 6.
Edit 2: Posted this in WSB. Got removed. I'm 💯 certain one of the mods is removing posts like these. I wasn't even notified of the removal nor received a message from any mods.
Edit 3: This is straight from the article.
"This is part of the problem, despite the efforts of myself, and the Point team, we couldn’t find obvious fake comments, despite it clearly being widespread. These are, after all, professional services and all boast about their ability to blend in. If we’re specifically looking for fake comments and find none, how can the average user?"
Edit 4: "It’s not uncommon, too, for moderators to be targeted by companies that want to manipulate influential subreddits."
Probably what happened to WSB when u/zjz got removed in the beginning.
Edit 5: "Clearly, Reddit is being manipulated and gamed on a wide scale by companies who want to promote a specific cause, product or politician. This isn’t just a fake news problem, it’s a fake conversations problem. If fake news can be solved with fact-checking, how can fake conversations be stopped when the commenter isn’t interested in anything other than debating you into submission?"
Shills do NOT care about YOUR opinion. They only want you to care about THEIRS.
Edit 6: On my other post, I added a link to where people can BUY Reddit accounts. I've obtained the information from the second Forbes article and the post was removed by Reddit. Let me just say, it is POSSIBLE to buy existing Reddit accounts with high karma.
Edit 7: "Looking elsewhere, we set out to find other entrepreneurs working in the business, and a browse around Facebook proved to be very fruitful. A few messages later and we’d bagged a conversation with a man called Mike (name changed). He quickly became our fixer for high quality ‘seasoned’ Reddit accounts, costing between $10 and $150 each depending on their age and karma. After paying a small deposit via bitcoin, Mike sent us a list of accounts we could buy. Within a day we had access to hundreds of accounts."
Seems like Facebook and other social media platforms can be used to purchase Reddit accounts also. You just have to know WHO to reach out to.
Edit 8: "Our first port of call was to go back to Mike and without hesitation he offered upvotes in two flavours; automated or organic. Automated votes use a bot along with purchased accounts, but their effectiveness “can’t be guaranteed”.
Organic votes would be manually logged by human labour somewhere inside Pakistan. The cost? $40 would get you more than 200 organic upvotes. Given how many upvotes are needed to reach the number one spot on big subreddits – easily in the thousands – 200 would not be enough."
Upvotes can be bought and there are TWO types of upvotes. AUTOMATIC and ORGANIC.
Edit 9: "We had to find another source for mass upvotes and downvotes. A tip off from a friend pointed us in the direction of someone in New Zealand. A bit of research uncovered that he was a teenager who had built a programme that delivered thousands of upvotes or downvotes on request.
Talking to us on Skype he revealed that the programme he built uses thousands of proxies all controlled via his server. The system automatically logs in and out of thousands of bought accounts, ‘rolling through’ thousands of IP addresses facilitated by his system.
As soon as Reddit identifies a spam account, it’s removed from the pool and replaced with a new one. This way, the upvotes look entirely natural to Reddit’s spam filter. And the most impressive thing? It’s entirely automated. You simply top up your account, submit a link, and watch the votes roll in. You can even control the frequency of their arrival, and it works the same on comments as it does on links."
HOLY SHIT! This guy made a program where as soon as Reddit identify a spam account, the upvote is removed and replaced with a new one from another account so it looks "Natural" to Reddit's Spam Filter
Edit 10: "I presented Reddit with my findings and asked it if it’s doing enough to combat fake comments, threads and upvotes. But in a bizarre response, the company’s representative – Anna Soellner – didn’t bother to address any of these questions, instead providing a statement that seemed to be a response to my previous story.
“In order to write your story, you and your co-author engaged in multiple levels of impersonation, violating the terms of service of Reddit. Our users recognized the stories you posted as fake and community moderators removed the links in a very short time frame. We are continuously working with our users and moderators to ensure the integrity of our site to promote genuine conversation.” Soellner said."
Seems like the Reddit Representative didn't even acknowledge Reddit's flaws but instead said he was a bad boy for being an insider and exposing the flaw. Lol wut? Shit like this makes people think twice before becoming a whistleblower, you can't GUARANTEE their protection.
Final Edit and Conclusion: Shills, bots, and paper hands are here and they are real. Be careful what you read and do not blindly upvote a post because of a catchy title. Shit like this has been around for so long that I'm surprised people are barely starting to find out about them.
Regarding Reddit's CEO testimony in the first GameStop congressional hearing about them not finding any "bots" in WSB. This is because it's true. They did NOT find any bots because the accounts used to push false narratives were natural actual accounts being controlled via an automation software. In my opinion, Reddit is not ready or capable to handle "Modern Bots" and unless they upgrade their spam filters or give mods more tools to combat these issues, problems like this will be available for ANYONE to exploit.
*Mic drop
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