First, it's largely unsubstantiated, predicating most of its arguments on insinuations without much substance if any in the entire article. Without the usual navel-gazing about Journalism, it's still worth pointing out I wouldn't associate trustworthiness with any brand willing to publish an article as poorly-sourced as this.
Second, it ascribes to single-minded malice what is much more likely a vast and complex series of behaviors, some of which probably involves spammers but much of which does not. This kind of reductionism is rarely constructive IMO.
Most problematically, it lays the foundation for the delegitimization of dialogue in a community. This kind of paranoid accusation soon empowers folks to stifle dissenting voices as part of this outside group trying to bring down reddit. This kind of paranoia has already infected dialogue on the middle east in reddit, for example.
Exactly. Subreddits like /r/hailcorporate exist to try to make light of these practices (and started out credible enough), but now it is overrun with conspiracy theorists who think that any and all references to a major brand in a post that hits the front page - especially if it doesn't have very many comments - is clearly advertising, and you are all sheeple.
They even mass-downvoted someone for saying "something smells fishy and it isn't the Fish Filet" in a thread about the baby eating the used condom off the floor because just mentioning a product means they must be a paid marketer.
It's not simply limited to media manipulation. Loby and special interest groups are also using reddit to sway political discourse.
This is no better seen than when Israel/Palestine articles hit the front page. You can nearly watch in real time where a critical mass is reached and suddenly pro israeli comments start flooding in. It's a thing of beauty to watch.
If you look at the /r/videos subreddit you can see videos uploaded showing clips from the official ellen page which arn't particularly interested but have been boosted to the top and are full of comments talking about how great ellen is.
Even subreddits that have failed to reach the large member volumes other subreddits have are not immune to this manipulation.
It's unfortunate because it stiffles original dialogue.
Sometimes I wonder what would happen if reddit got rid of the upvote button and only allowed posts to be down votted. Articles and comments which survived the war of attrition might be a little more inciteful.
>Sometimes I wonder what would happen if reddit got rid of the upvote button and only allowed posts to be down votted.
That might actually make things worse. Astroturfers would systematically downvote everyone else, while legitimate users would usually only downvote a small handful of things.
Wouldn't a downvote-only mechanism make it easier to hide dissenting opinions without giving chance to show support for a position/comment? Besides that, I wonder how would the top-rated comment system work, given that posts start with 0 downvotes.
Basically, I don't think that a non-exploitable method exists, however pessimistic that sounds.
Welcome to Slashdot circa, I dunno, ancient times. I still wonder why no one has bothered cloning their moderation system - in my mind it's the best one I've ever seen on a major website.
An extra perk is that upvotes can be categorized (and downvotes) that add context. On Reddit all too often the top comment in a thread is a quick and easy joke, and the real insight gets buried. On Slashdot these two types of posts would coexist and be flagged as such.
Indeed. It's surprising to me that no-one has yet been successful combining Slashdot's idea of meaningful moderations with the almost universal practice on newer forums of promoting highly moderated material to earlier in the discussion but having the advantage decay over time if that material doesn't continue to receive strong endorsements. If demoting material had to come with a stated reason, like giving incorrect information or being off-topic, it might also mean fewer people use the down arrow as a substitute for "I disagree", which IMHO would be no bad thing on sites like Reddit and HN.
Reddit has traditionally been left in its political thinking and the left traditionally disagree with the current political direction in Israel.
Just like you attempt to denegrate my comment by suggesting Im a conspiracy theorist, so too do many people on reddit find their comments subjected to a barrage of downvotes or whimsical retorts for posting something that may be construed as pro-palestinian or anti-israel.
I mean look at your comment as an example. I wrote about the obvious nature of comment and post manipulation on reddit and you instead try to shift the attention towards Palestine and Israel, selectively quoting my post to construe.. something unnecessary.
Maybe you think you and others are a target of 'whimsical retorts' not because you are the target of 'whimsical retorts' but because you have a poor grasp of what legitimate rhetoric is.
Your claim is that there is manipulation of reddit. Manipulation implies that there is a 'non organic' illegitimate entity or group of entities working to exert their influence - a conspiracy to influence reddit. You are asserting that there are conspiracies to influence reddit and therefore you have a conspiracy theory and therefore you are a conspiracy theorist.
I could go on from here and tear down the other ridiculous accusation that I am maliciously 'shifting' the discussion, but this should be sufficient enough to encourage you to reconsider your position.
And yes, reddit is left of center and the left tends to be anti-Israel. What of it? Does that imply that there are no members of reddit that are not left of center? Does that imply that there are no people who are left of center that also are not anti-Israel? Does that imply that all rhetoric that does not strictly echo traditional left of center views is illegitimate?
I turn your attention to such organisations as the Jewish Internet Defence Force which has a [twitter feed](https://twitter.com/JIDF) listing reddit posts. This is lifted straight from their about page.
>r ACTION ALERTS are now well known throughout the Jewish and Israel advocacy world, and by our many enemies, as they have led to the removal of thousands of antisemitic and jihadist pages online. Whether it's an antisemitic Facebook page with millions of members, or a YouTube video promoting global jihad, our team is on it, monitoring it, and urging companies to adhere to their own rules.
If that isn't a non organic entity working to exert influence on reddit I don't know what is!
The existence of the JIDF and other similar organizations that have the explicitly stated goal of flooding Internet conversations with pro-Israel comments, would make the argument self evident.
This garbage is what's wrong with blog news sites, a complete lack of journalistic integrity. While I didn't check them all, every supposed example I looked at was a legitimate user and not a corporate shill. Ryan Holiday could have easily confirmed this as well (and may have) but instead chose to post them and insinuate less than honest intentions by the post authors.
While corporate shilling does happen on Reddit (and other news sites such as HN) it's not as common as the article implies. If it was he could have at least found some real examples. Holiday should stick to what he's good at, marketing, and leave journalism to actual journalists.
"This garbage is what's wrong with blog news sites, a complete lack of journalistic integrity."
Newspapers really aren't much better, they're mainly better at appearing to have integrity. The only real benefit of most newspapers is that the lack of integrity is somewhat consistent according to a particular slant of the paper. So you can expect The New Yorker to lack their integrity in a fairly consistent way, whereas Washington Post lacks integrity in a different but consistent way.
Reddit's curation is biased toward lowest common denominator dopamine shots that are provided in as little as time as is possible after clicking the "hit me" link.
There are lots of places where corporate manipulation of the media bother me, but the front page of Reddit just isn't that high on my list.
What's there now? Among other things, there's a cartoon image of a man saying "It's locked." A picture of Keira Knightley, with an atheism/theism quote. A dog catching a piece of cheese. A picture of two shirtless guys jumping around in a hotel room. The top link points to an article with content that does actually seem to be corrupted by corporate manipulation (it could be read as an advert for Lockheed-Martin). However, the article itself is on Reuters, so Reddit is just acting as a low-quality aggregator site at that point.
In short, it's hard for me to take the front page of Reddit seriously as a "media" outlet. While I do find some subreddits interesting and informative, it's not clear how the quality of the front page would somehow get dragged down by a few professionally-produced marketing messages.
I don't know how much of it is directly corporate-driven, but Reddit loves viral marketing. Can't get enough. Mildly funny Facebook post from a beer brand? Screenshot it, thousands of upvotes. Repeat over and over and over again.
I suspect it's mainly down to a total lack of concern or thought for the effects of what you choose to consume and share.
Reddit has really gone through a transformation in the past few years. It's painful to see interesting discussions turn to memes and viral marketing. Just seems to be inevitable. I had an idea for how to limit the influence of the masses and bots by giving trust to known high quality "trusted" users. When a high quality user votes on something, he spreads his trust trust around. Effectively it means that people who post cat pictures have no trust and therefore no influence with their votes, and the admins have a simple way of steering the content by picking and choosing the trusted and non-trusted users. Trust could be computed similarly to how you calculate pagerank.
I'm not sure why they haven't used karma in a similar way. Why not make up or down votes cost one karma point? In order to shape the content stream you would need to spend your social capital.
I don't think it's possible to build a system without human intervention that keeps the bad content out and promotes interesting discussions. What I'm essentially saying is that the Reddit staff should pick a few thousand people by hand that they think embodies what they want the perfect redditor to be like. Everybody else starts out with minuscule influence. Now those ambassadors will go out and up-vote other good users and down-vote bad ones and will in that way spread their influence to other people. Some users might even have negative influence. Can you imagine a user who keeps up-voting cat pictures that is in effect down-voting those submissions without realizing it? It would be beautiful. Obviously it would be important to keep users' influence a secret.
In essence, it would give the Reddit staff much needed control of the content and discourse. If they one day wanted to steer the site towards only cat pictures, they can easily do that by selecting those users to be the ambassadors.
Right now it seems that Reddit is suffering from Eternal September x 1000, and they're at the mercy of the masses. But the geeky, thoughtful content that brought people to the site to begin with is nowhere to be found anymore. It's being drowned in memes and cat pictures.
I don't think it's possible to build a system without human intervention that keeps the bad content out and promotes interesting discussions.
I disagree. IMHO it can be accomplished with the correct structure. The problem you identify is that subreddits are shared spaces, and the primary signal that they rely on is the sum of all users. As subreddits grow, the signal becomes worse. Weighting the votes of users could help, but then you are implementing a moderator bias, and not being honest with people about their input would almost certainly lead to blowback.
One of our goals with http://hubski.com was to avoid this problem. Our approach was to avoid shared pages, and instead allow users to build a feed by following other users or tags. That way we don't have the problem of 'keeping bad content out' to begin with. Instead of voting a story up a page, users share the post with those users that follow them. Posts propagate from user to user. Therefore content cannot be 'buried' by competing with other posts in a shared space. Of course, we are not anywhere near the size of Reddit, but it has been working well so far for us. Each user is their own moderator.
Thanks. Feel free to send feedback along after you kick the tires. It's always useful to get a fresh perspective. We always consider Hubski to be a work in progress.
You would still get people gaming the system, find a popular cat picture and repost, gain 2000 karma, profit. It really isn't hard to get easy karma with lowest-common-denominator content.
It's more or less the pagerank algorithm except with karma. I think it'd work. Pagerank is totally game-able and yet big G has managed to keep the upper hand year after year.
The American military astroturfing on reddit is off the charts. Desert-puppy-holding and worship-baiting-poignant-reunion photos are pumped out like clockwork.
People like their favorite brands and will post and upvote them. Costco for example. People love Costco as the anti-Walmart. That's not to say manipulation doesn't happen, but the author should at least mention this.
This is something that is difficult to prove either way, especially with the amount of group think that gets posted to the top of popular subreddits.
Reddit is basically the perfect breeding ground for this sort of thing. In fact if I was an internet marketing type I can't think of why I wouldn't target reddit.
We have a lot of younger unemployed people out there today who are probably thinking "damn, if only somebody would pay me to browse reddit all day".
Facebook etc are doing similar things with "sponsored likes", the main difference being that this is at least less surreptitious but it certainly shows that astroturfing is very very big business.
Hell for all I know, I'm the only "real" person on HN and all of the rest of you are hired by various interest groups to try and persuade me of various things..
I find myself in the surreal position of wanting to endorse the author's book while bound by the awareness that any such endorsement by definition ought to be viewed with extreme skepticism.
Some of his examples are just... awful. Apparently the genius minds at Domino's Pizza's marketing department came up with "in a one-off test our Pizza arrived one minute faster than one of our competitors", Costo came up with "look at the financial record our company set" (something shoppers always think about when deciding where to shop), and Mountain Dew wanted potential customers to know their drink was created to hide the taste of Moonshine.
So it's impossible for people to find that little factoid about Mountain Dew genuinely interesting and therefore it must be a corporate conspiracy that it reached the front page of /r/TIL?
Absolute pure insanity. And why then is reddit's obsession with Neil DeGrasse Tyson not an orchestrated conspiracy by NDT's publicist or book publisher to sell more books? Oh, because you like NDT and therefore support for him is organic and genuine?
Reddit has minimal barriers to churning accounts to sybil attack the community. It's all too common to hear founders trying to maximize users and accelerate growth before the long-term externalities have been considered or the stack is ready.
Some times taking your time is the best decision for the long-game.
https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=met3
https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=ssalevan
https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=benjaminkabin
https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=nitashatiku
https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=lovekandinsky
https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=gnarls_manson
https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=bookish08
Other big media houses spamming HN include Future (techradar.com and maximumpc.com), and of course Ziff Davis (extremetech.com, pcmag.com, geek.com).