Reddit For Sale: Viral Fake News For $200

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How hard is it to get a completely bogus story to the front page of Reddit? Not hard at all as long as you have $200. If you don't have time to read the full article, at least watch the eight and a half minute video we've embedded below.

Reddit’s upvote system can easily be gamed with some bitcoin and a few useful contacts. I know this because my colleague Phil Harper and I successfully managed to place two made-up stories on to influential subreddits /r/UnitedKingdom and /r/Video, which have a combined total of over 13 million subscribers (12 million at the time of our investigation), both of which reached the number one and number two spots. How? With fake accounts and fake upvotes we bought for under $200.
 
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Lol they're so shit scared of r/the_donald they pretty much shadow banned the whole sub. The level of cuckery on reddit (and other places online) is astounding, both paid bullshit like shown in this article and the level of shills on there. Funny how they're rather misrepresentitive of the actual numbers of the real situation. I guess the people who contribute to life are a little busier ;)
 
Lol they're so shit scared of r/the_donald they pretty much shadow banned the whole sub. The level of cuckery on reddit (and other places online) is astounding, both paid bullshit like shown in this article and the level of shills on there. Funny how they're rather misrepresentitive of the actual numbers of the real situation. I guess the people who contribute to life are a little busier ;)

Love how many pede's I see here!
 
You wonder why we have so many stupid people in the world. Well, look at what their being fed. Fox News and McDonald's! Fake news and fake food.
 
You wonder why we have so many stupid people in the world. Well, look at what their being fed. Fox News and McDonald's! Fake news and fake food.

Fox news fake news LOL Yeah lets Trust every other major "news" organization who had their stories approved by the DNC before running them.

Fox news is unashamedly right leaning, but far closer to the truth than any of the other drivel out here.

Pretty sure this thread is about reddit, and how you can pay to get your stories to the top. Maybe we should try to discuss that rather than turning everything into a political mud pit.
 
The 24 hour news cycle killed news.

Not enough happens in the world to justify 24 hours worth of news 365 days a year.

This drives news organizations to pad each subject to irrelevancy. CNN, for example, brings in a bunch of fake experts to chime in on ... every... fucking... issue...

Fox/BBC/CBC/MSNBC are suffer from the same problem to varying degrees.
 
The 24 hour news cycle killed news.

Not enough happens in the world to justify 24 hours worth of news 365 days a year.

This drives news organizations to pad each subject to irrelevancy. CNN, for example, brings in a bunch of fake experts to chime in on ... every... fucking... issue...

Fox/BBC/CBC/MSNBC are suffer from the same problem to varying degrees.

The worst part on primetime CNN is that when they occasionally get a true expert to give their opinion with knowledge and understanding of the situation the person will wait patiently to speak, get their chance and three words in one of the panel "experts" starts talking over them because it goes against their party line. It's basically unwatchable.
 
Fox news fake news LOL Yeah lets Trust every other major "news" organization who had their stories approved by the DNC before running them.

I read that as a dancer... To much ffxi for me


USA news are at joke. its nothing but political propaganda.
but that what you get when everything is a "either you are with me or against me" two part system. i cringe when i see how the interviewers are clearly pushing an opinion rather then trying to reveal the truth.
 
The system of upvotes and downvotes act as a check and balance against obvious subversion. Bad content gets voted down, good content gets voted up.

How in the world does this make sense to anyone? All this will do is demonstrate the tyranny of the majority. (Well, more like plurality as there probably is a silent majority who doesn't vote).
 
Well shit, looks like my days of gaming reddit for traffic might be coming to an end.

Anyone wanna buy some aged accounts? Have some 10+ year old accounts for sale :p
 
How in the world does this make sense to anyone? All this will do is demonstrate the tyranny of the majority. (Well, more like plurality as there probably is a silent majority who doesn't vote).

I don't know what fantasy world they live in where bias doesn't exist.
 
How in the world does this make sense to anyone? All this will do is demonstrate the tyranny of the majority. (Well, more like plurality as there probably is a silent majority who doesn't vote).

It works because it's primarily a site for sharing cat gifs. There's no "new" news on Reddit, it's just for link sharing.
 
It works because it's primarily a site for sharing cat gifs. There's no "new" news on Reddit, it's just for link sharing.
I find r/sysadmin to be invaluable for up to the minute IT news about outages and the Trojan du jour.
 
It works because it's primarily a site for sharing cat gifs. There's no "new" news on Reddit, it's just for link sharing.
No, it's not just a site for cat gifs. Since anyone can create a sub, the quality and activity vary widely across the thousands of active subs. Some are very useful, some are crap and many are virtually dead.

I agree that news is generally shared by linking, and the abuse in the article linked by Steve is disappointing. I would suggest that people could literally just check the articles for factual accuracy, but I doubt many of the most noisy people here care about facts. They believe what they want to believe, and verification of facts is just another lie. lulz, who would have expected that the internet would be weaponized as an instrument of stupidity and ignorance.
 
How in the world does this make sense to anyone? All this will do is demonstrate the tyranny of the majority. (Well, more like plurality as there probably is a silent majority who doesn't vote).
It's a system that works rather well for smaller subreddits, and for the site as a whole before it got so large and well known. You are supposed to upvote/downvote based on the value of a post, regardless of whether you agree or not. However, once you get a critical mass you usually just get people upvoting and downvoting based on how they "identify", whether that be based in their politics, beliefs, or brand loyalty. The smaller subreddits still do a good job of having communities that follow the "reddiquette" ideals, but the large ones like r/news, r/politics, are just cesspools of shouty idiots on both sides of an issue.

On top of that, our 24/7/365 retarded news system rewards organizations for being the first to cover a story, which leads to seeking hits/views and not fact checking. This also applies to both sides politically, but each camp seems to believe it only applies to them.
 
I find r/sysadmin to be invaluable for up to the minute IT news about outages and the Trojan du jour.

Well, I'm honestly a fan of plenty of subreddits. There's lots of great groups of people on there, some will spend hours trying to help you with anything from IT issues to the best way to cook ribs in a smoker. Just like real life though, there's groups of toxic people as well, but they're not hard to avoid if you stay out of the bigger subreddits. I can't say I'd count Reddit as a credible SOURCE of news though.
 
No, it's not just a site for cat gifs. Since anyone can create a sub, the quality and activity vary widely across the thousands of active subs. Some are very useful, some are crap and many are virtually dead.

I agree that news is generally shared by linking, and the abuse in the article linked by Steve is disappointing. I would suggest that people could literally just check the articles for factual accuracy, but I doubt many of the most noisy people here care about facts. They believe what they want to believe, and verification of facts is just another lie. lulz, who would have expected that the internet would be weaponized as an instrument of stupidity and ignorance.

My point is Reddit isn't a SOURCE of news, it's a link sharing and discussion site. The fact you can buy your way to the front page isn't surprising. The fact that anyone really considers something "news" just because it's on the front page of Reddit is what I find surprising.
 
The problem mentioned in the article isn't limited to reddit alone. I'm sure similar tactics would work on most forums.
 
It's a system that works rather well for smaller subreddits, and for the site as a whole before it got so large and well known. You are supposed to upvote/downvote based on the value of a post, regardless of whether you agree or not. However, once you get a critical mass you usually just get people upvoting and downvoting based on how they "identify", whether that be based in their politics, beliefs, or brand loyalty. The smaller subreddits still do a good job of having communities that follow the "reddiquette" ideals, but the large ones like r/news, r/politics, are just cesspools of shouty idiots on both sides of an issue.

On top of that, our 24/7/365 retarded news system rewards organizations for being the first to cover a story, which leads to seeking hits/views and not fact checking. This also applies to both sides politically, but each camp seems to believe it only applies to them.

Yes, it's unfortunate, but on a lot of Reddits you do see the down vote for thinking differently, even if it's a clear/concise opposition. Many subs even joke about the obvious groupthink.

I wonder if a system where the down vote required a comment for reason of the downvote, would slow some of that issue. People downvote because it's so easy and so anonymous, if you put it there for people to have to identify themselves, I can imagine a lot of the "you think different than me" flyby's might stop.

Or even a selector .. downvote ---> choose reason from list "low quality, abusive, against rules" etc. and then it'd drop the name + reason in a list. Scramble the reason-selector list order each time and an algorithm could check if one reason has a higher percentage than others. So if "Low Quality" was selected most, then it's likely the post is of LQ value. Most fly-byers would have to think of a reason to downvote and likely select the first one (hence the scrambled list). If it's a Nvidia-heavy subreddit and an AMD-based opinion is posted (of high quality), you'd likely see a more evenly distributed downvote reasoning versus a LQ post of "har har Nvidia sux!"

Hmm, would make for a good social experiment test.
 
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Yes, it's unfortunate, but on a lot of Reddits you do see the down vote for thinking differently, even if it's a clear/concise opposition. Many subs even joke about the obvious groupthink.

I wonder if a system where the down vote required a comment for reason of the downvote, would slow some of that issue. People downvote because it's so easy and so anonymous, if you put it there for people to have to identify themselves, I can imagine a lot of the "you think different than me" flyby's might stop.

Or even a selector .. downvote ---> choose reason from list "low quality, abusive, against rules" etc. and then it'd drop the name + reason in a list. Scramble the reason-selector list order each time and an algorithm could check if one reason has a higher percentage than others. So if "Low Quality" was selected most, then it's likely the post is of LQ value. Most fly-byers would have to think of a reason to downvote and likely select the first one (hence the scrambled list). If it's a Nvidia-heavy subreddit and an AMD-based opinion is posted (of high quality), you'd likely see a more evenly distributed downvote reasoning versus a LQ post of "har har Nvidia sux!"

Hmm, would make for a good social experiment test.
Slashdot had (has?) a system like that. They also had a jury-duty like moderation judging system that you could do for increased voting rights (I think you only got like 3 votes every so often by default)
 
the ultimate in irony... what if this video was a fake story that was propped up to the top by people sharing? hehehehehe
 
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