I just found out that those pages to buy votes exist, I knew that bots and stuff existed, but I thought it was something more "hidden", from 4 cents per vote, it doesn't surprise me that the site is completely going down the toilet
In some impoverished regions, vote farming is an important (and sometimes only) source of some people's income. Create account, upvote post, dozens or hundreds of times a day. They get paid slave wages, if at all.
I can’t tell if this is astroturfing or high-level trolling. Encouraging MAGAts to piss away their money and actually give a damn about Reddit sounds like a pretty evil strategy to me.
Russian propaganda mills probably shaking their heads in disbelief that the only grassroots activists are sitting in their basement not doorknocking but trying to figure out how to spend money to influence people over the internet
Are we supposed to act like this is new? The Hillary Clinton campaign was doing this via CTR (Correct The Record) back in 2016 and it was particularly noticeable after the DNC forced Bernie Sanders to exit the race. It continued after the election when CTR transitioned to "ActBlue".
Then there's the 2016 Reddit MAGA craziness but I don't think there's any need to re-hash that. It's CTR that most people don't know / forget about.
I'd die laughing if someone was able to do this on Lemmy and buy something like 3k votes, an unseen number. Or better yet, 30k votes. You'd be on All and see that and know something was up.
Thank goodness we're too small and unimportant for them to interrupt my Linux and Startrek memes with that nonsense.