How do you tell the difference between astroturfing and regular comments? I mean, besides "it's obvious".
this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2025
142 points (98.6% liked)
20939 readers
5 users here now
News and Discussions about Reddit
Welcome to !reddit. This is a community for all news and discussions about Reddit.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules
Rule 1- No brigading.
**You may not encourage brigading any communities or subreddits in any way. **
YSKs are about self-improvement on how to do things.
Rule 2- No illegal or NSFW or gore content.
**No illegal or NSFW or gore content. **
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-Reddit posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.
If you vocally harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
only occasionally look at reddit and yeah the push is super obvious
the "hot" section for my vpn region the other day was just the top 4 pro-regime dumps
Amusingly enough, brazen astroturfing (especially in political subs) was one of the main reasons I was looking for an alternative to Reddit and found Lemmy. Two years ago.
And it's certainly only gotten worse since.
Same story. One year ago. That and stopping drinking are some of the best choices I've made in a long time.
I still use reddit occasionally for its smallest communities where I know I'm still interacting with humans. I assume the top posts are all bot posts with bots flaming bots in the comments. Everyone's time is worth more than that.
load more comments
(2 replies)
load more comments
(9 replies)
I started to understand how screwed up Reddit was when I saw a front page post with like 70k upvotes on a video for a "fishing knot" that requires using both free ends of the line. Either 70k people didn't think about that for more than one second, or it's all bots. Tens of thousands of them.
load more comments
(2 replies)
Yes it takes very little searching to find this shit on reddit.
But - and I'll probably get tons of downvotes, but still: the Fediverse is not safe from this.
edit: considering our APIs are free & open it could even be easier, esp. if you don't want to leave a money trail
edit2: I definitely don't mean to diss the Fediverse in any way! It stands sky high against walled-in platforms. Just stay vigilant and real. This is not paradise.
Its easier to spot here, and since we're split up into small severs, its easier to moderate.
load more comments
(5 replies)
It really isn't, even on my instance used by like... 3 or 4 actual people so far, I have had more than enough spam accounts - and those were relatively harmless. Support the server admins and mods of the servers you are on/communities you are in, if able, they are the ones who are engaged in cleaning up incursions like it. Oh, and report things.
For what it's worth, I do believe the Fediverse has higher resilience, thanks to a different culture, decentralised nature (with helpful platforms like Fediseer) and a lack of the "we just need numbers as big as possible for our investors to be satisfied"-incentive to tolerate anything that looks like engagement.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
I wonder if one of these astroturfers would be interested in purchasing my now unused account that is still in the top 1℅ of highest karma users... 🤔
I'll take no less than $500,000. Don't lowball me. I know what I've got.
What's the 1% threshold?
🤷♂️
But I have a few million and access to the special 1℅ sub all through comment karma alone.
If your shittit account is:
∘ 18 or 19 years old ∘ Has a 3 letter username (example: u/hey) ∘ has a million or more karma (the more the comment karma, the more the better)
Your account would be worth 2000+ USD. I have personally seen one account satisfying the above criteria selling for 2500 USD.
If you have one such account it's the best time to sell now.
load more comments
(3 replies)
Reddit should be like OnlyFans and tell you.
My account would definitely either ben in the top 50% or the lower 50%.
load more comments
(4 replies)
Yep.