19h ago

As usual, things are going great over on reddit.

www.reddit.com /r/bicycling/comments/1k6k3s7/rxbiking_has_been_compromised_taken_over_and_its/

Like what the fuck even is this lol

Awesome website you've got over there, running smoothly lmao

14 comments

I can't believe there's a bunch of corpo chud bullshit happening on the corpo chud bullshit app.

stop using reddit
stop posting about reddit on hexbear dot net, a site which exists explicitly as a refuge from reddit
liberate yourself from reddit
stop using reddit
- Redditor Liberation Army

md

    
  
 🔺    This place is a RussianChinese bot farm disinformation campaign 
 69k   filled with CCP shills and Russian trolls. 
 🔻    I doubt there are any real human posters here. 
      
       Edit1: Wow, so many updoots! 
       Edit2: Thanks for the gold, kind stranger!

Look at that subtle use of parody. The tasteful mono spacing of it. Oh my God, it even has Unicode characters...

You know what I don't miss at all? Reddit, Twitter, insta, all that bullshit.
Fediverse FTW yall

Weird stuff definitely happening on Reddit all the time. One thing though, that I realize I have forgotten about, is that the site actively tries to funnel people into places they're not subscribed. It's dog shit at it too. Saw a back and forth in the r/Union sub with a staunchly anti-union commenter, and when pressed as to why he was even on the sub, he snidely explained:
You see, when you click on reddit, they show you posts from the subs that you are subscribed to. They also show you posts from other subs that you may not be subscribed to, in case you might see something that might interest you.
And I know this might sound really kooky to you, but believe it or not, they just let you go on to those other subs and make comments sometimes. Weird, right? I mean, what is this world coming to, amirite?
The whole site is an engagement farm, right? There is no way to discern between a thread with a lot of excited and friendly comments and a thread with a lot of heated and angry comments. Engagement is engagement, and the more comments Reddit generates, the more data there is to sell to people looking to train AI language models.
I know that Reddit tracks information that tells them whether a sub is "moderated" or not. I think it comes down to level of activity of the people appointed to the mod team. I think you can even petition them to gain control of a subreddit if it goes unmoderated for some time. I don't know what that process is, or how it works. I wouldn't doubt though that people know exactly how to work this process and get access to these subs.

So what happened? Bots somehow took control away from the mods of a bike subreddit?! How even?!
- Organically grown niche communities don't deliver quarterly growth numbers, so Reddit has put no effort into any sort of guardrails against hostile takeovers by astroturfing content farmers. The logic of the attackers doesn't go beyond "this subreddit has a lot of subs and we have methods of dumping the mod team and turning all new posts into content slop that generates revenue for us". Stuff like this is just the choking gurgles of a dying platform.
- Yeah, it's so weird. Like I wouldn't be surprised to see something like this happen to a political sub, but this? Just wild.
  
  Every sub is astroturfed. The few times I've tried browsing reddit and gone to niche subs, there's fucking astroturfing. Horror sub? Astroturfing positive reviews for movies universally panned. Painting sub? People buy bots to boost their content to the top, which of course there's a link for commissions. And coincidentally the people asking for the links for commissions use the exact same message as another poster in another thread for a different artist.
  So much of that site is ads disguised as user comments. Completely unusable.