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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Reddit should be like OnlyFans and tell you.
My account would definitely either ben in the top 50% or the lower 50%.
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Yep.