> "The most popular posts on Reddit have switched from reposted content from “karma farmers,” or engagement hackers, to nearly entirely original content from less popular Reddit users. Original content from smaller communities is now outperforming recycled evergreen content by a tremendous margin across the platform. As of October, none of the top five posts of the month on r/all were original. By March of this year, four out of five of these posts were original. "
In my experience this hasn't been the case at all. I've also noticed that if you click the profile of people that end up on the front page, they are often new (or suddenly active) accounts with a certain pattern:
1) Make 3-4 posts not related to the content they want to promote, to "warm up" the account. I'm guessing there's a soft-ban on new accounts here.
2) Post the actual content/narrative they want to promote.
3) Suddenly, this post gets 10k upvotes and reaches the frontpage.
I haven't seen a massive correlation in LLM popularity and reddit bots. A good old markov chain can simulate the average reddit thread, and the botting issue has been prevalent for quite a long time.
Bots used to just take other popular comments and repost them either in whole copies of threads, as in the example here, or taking a top comment in a new thread and reposting it elsewhere in the same thread. Now they're using LLMs to rephrase comments to try to avoid detection (though they often come across sounding a bit off so they're sometimes easy to spot).
Are LLMs not just fancy Markov chains?
They are next token predictors which have some hidden internal state that output probability distributions which lead to further states.
> In my experience this hasn't been the case at all. I've also noticed that if you click the profile of people that end up on the front page, they are often new (or suddenly active) accounts with a certain pattern:
You make a great point. It's highly unlikely that a newly-created account just so happens to post content that's engaging enough to be featured in Reddit's frontpage. It's far more likely that these "less popular Reddit users" are sock puppet accounts used to post special-purpose content which is then subjected to industrial-grade boosting to force it onto everyone's first page.
Changes of this magnitude are practically impossible without the backing of either Reddit itself or marketing companies intending to control the flow of information.
Exactly - and it's important to make a distinction between the bots that post comments and posts, and the much larger and more influential bot farms that manipulate content (both promoting and demoting).
Personally, I'm fairly certain it's a difficult cat-and-mouse game, but there's no question that some very popular mods also use bot farms to promote the content they want on the subs they mod.
I've noticed something like that. Something I see a lot is a years old account with no account history prior to the past few days, spamming unoriginal content.
Check /r/interestingasfuck, /r/satisfyingasfuck, /r/natureisfuckingcute, hellsomememes, and a lot of other subs.
Qualities of subs particularly susceptible to such spam:
* Subs that don't require OC (not news, not a hobby sub)
* Subs that don't demand proof of identity (/r/selfies, /r/glowups)
So, counter to the quote you cited, I still see a lot of karma farmers on reddit, and like you say, they'll often do what you and I describe and then turn into an Onlyfans account, or something like that.
reddit is just such a goddamned cesspool, and I am so curious as to what nefarious actors are doing on it and why they're doing it.
Different topic, but I'm ranting: The political echo chambers are wild. Places like BadHasbara, Palestine, IsraelExposed, Conservative, Libertarian, antiwork, WorkersStrikeBack, Anticonsumption, all have wild agendas that will instaban anyone who challenges the dreck that gets posted there.
I wish it was that obvious. I think it's like criminals - the obvious ones get caught, and people go "criminals are pretty dumb", but there are plenty of smart ones too.
I posted this example earlier today https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40208741 of a reddit account shilling Sourcegraph. They flat-out deny that this's a bot, but it's clear to Me.
Can't trust anything or anyone any more. Pretty sad.
Hi, head of community at Sourcegraph here. We don't use bots. u/Prolacticus is a Pro user, we do not pay him/her, and they are not sponsored. In fact, I offered them swag a month ago, and they refused.
We do give free/sponsored accounts to our Discord mods, open source maintainers, and folks who write guest blog posts for us. u/Prolacticus is not one of those accounts.
I fully believe that you aren't paying him directly to do this, but I don't believe that any human would shill so hard (and always mentioning the price and the same gist of 'it's fantastic' etc). Any chance it's a replyguy or similar test, either by someone else in your org without your knowledge or just by the creator themselves as I guess they need to do some 'live testing' before charging real 'customers'.
It seems to me that the concept of shill is slowly eating the concept of enthusiast or fanboy in the public perception. They are similar and hard to discern from one another. I'm not sure if one is more trustworthy than the other.
It states:
> "The most popular posts on Reddit have switched from reposted content from “karma farmers,” or engagement hackers, to nearly entirely original content from less popular Reddit users. Original content from smaller communities is now outperforming recycled evergreen content by a tremendous margin across the platform. As of October, none of the top five posts of the month on r/all were original. By March of this year, four out of five of these posts were original. "
In my experience this hasn't been the case at all. I've also noticed that if you click the profile of people that end up on the front page, they are often new (or suddenly active) accounts with a certain pattern:
1) Make 3-4 posts not related to the content they want to promote, to "warm up" the account. I'm guessing there's a soft-ban on new accounts here.
2) Post the actual content/narrative they want to promote.
3) Suddenly, this post gets 10k upvotes and reaches the frontpage.