People get extremely defensive on Reddit if you insinuate that this is common. But it really doesn't take a whole lot of skepticism to see though the more blatant ones.
Reddit is still a really great site when you unsubscribe from all default subs and any sub that has gone "critical shill" at about 100k or more subs.
> Reddit is still a really great site when you unsubscribe from ... any sub that has gone "critical shill" at about 100k or more subs.
AskHistorians is still a great sub, at 620k subscribers. It's (intentionally) not on the default list, and has very heavy handed, strict moderation, which is probably why the quality is so good.
One regret I have about AskHistorians is that I don't get to see all the hissy fits thrown by people who don't like the strict moderation and believe their speech should be uninpeded.
I am a moderator on a major subreddit of serious nature. It's pretty boring. Here are the typical culprits.
Probably the most common who have something to say to the mod team are those who blame us for pushing an agenda. We welcome and encourage debate. We want people to call bullshit on something bunk, but we stand by that it has to be something that can be substantiated. We just want you to provide some kind of proof, source, etc. other than, "This totally happened to my sister's boyfriend's cousin!"
Some people take those removals very personally, because the comment is about something heavy that has greatly impacted that person's life. They feel like we are snubbing them when they took the time to reveal something personal. A non-real example would be a study that shows that cancer survival rate increases when you drink at least 60 oz of water daily. Someone will inevitably reply with, "My mom died from cancer, and all she dra nk was water with the occasional cup of tea." I mean, we're sorry for your loss, but your single anecdotal point doesn't really refute the claim. The comment gets removed, and then we're called monsters. If you really think it's bullshit, find another study that claims otherwise or poke holes in the study itself.
Another common one reason is low effort comments or comments that don't add to the discussion. "Jeez, why is this a comment graveyard?" is a pretty common removal. There usually aren't hissy fits, but this, jokes, puns, lyric chains, comments like, "Yeah and water is wet," are also common. Two other low effort comments are, "Someone give me TL;DR please," or, "I want to believe this, but some comment is going to blow this claim out of the water."
This one annoys me when I see it somewhere like /r/Science. It's like, the miss make it super clear that they remove low grade /off topic comments etc. It's not that hard to understand.
Yeah, I don't experience a lot of obvious shilling on Reddit, but I've unsubscribed to most of the default subs and mostly just read small subs relevant to my interests.
> Yeah, I don't experience a lot of obvious shilling on Reddit
When the same talking points are repeated over and over again on large subs and dissident opinions are automatically downvoted to hell, it's obvious there are organized efforts to push specific narratives or point of view. r/politics, r/news, r/worldnews are full of these, with sometimes the moderation itself in bed with the political astro-turfers, banning users that don't fall in line.
Regarding the article, the news that was astro-turfed wasn't clashing with r/politics narrative. And since journalists and bloggers themselves now source their news and stories from Reddit, it helped spread that news all over the internet.
Reddit is an extremely efficient viral marketing tool, both brands and politicians understand it now. When journalists start quoting reddit in their news that then get posed on reddit as news, we've come full circle.
A sibling to this comment mentions/r/Bitcoin, which I agree has biased moderators. But I don't see such blatant bias in the large political subreddits.
The main thing about /r/politics that I have only recently noticed (since the 2016 election) is that they have become extremely orthodox democrats. Before that election, a lot of the time they were a mixture of libertarian and farther left leaning (but certainly not orthodox) people. Now they focus all of their time on Trump bashing, which isn't bad per se, but is extremely annoying since it's pretty much the only thing the sub is about these days. Thing is, there are a lot more political things going on than Trump, and outrage culture has resulted in at least two WaPo posts over each and every one of his tweets.
And then in the comments, you'll be crucified by the posters for anything other than the pro corporatist democratic views that the posters espouse. Move on from bashing Trump to say, bashing Hillary because she was an utterly unlikable candidate and arguably the biggest political failure in modern history, and you draw the ire of dozens of toe-the-liners who see the world just as black-and-white as the idiot /r/the_donald posters.
There's also an excessive amount of hyperbole that just gets annoying as time goes on. Clearly Trump will be around for quite a while longer (until and unless Mueller finds a smoking gun or in the event of a massive Democrat success in 2018), but reading /r/politics you would think he'll be impeached by next week. Adding fuel to the flames are websites like WaPo and the Independent who publish articles with these terribly misleading and hyperbolic headlines that make it seem like Trump is going down, and you get a massive echo chamber fueled and funded by shitty media websites.
I would say world_news isn't as bad as politics. Specifically, world_news seems to be full of more the_donald people jumping on any and every thread.
They are still there in politics as well, but they are usually way at the bottom of the thread. It is sad though, even if you assume that it isn't as "controlled" as it is -- pretty much the front page is all anti donald trump / republican stuff these days. While some of that is fair and is news, what is worse is that at least in the old days, there would be nice constructive discussion/counter points, usually as the top voted post in the comments. Now its mostly just circle jerking there.
Yeah, I think to summarize what I most dislike about what reddit has become is that it's too partisan. Places like /r/conspiracy have become very pro-republican/trump, ridiculous considering the purpose of the sub, and there are also now like 25 different anti-trump subreddits that constantly get to the front page (and I believe many of these, especially the ones that spring up seemingly out of nowhere to front-page status in weeks, are the toys of astroturfing marketing campaigns).
It's a pretty toxic environment and by constantly focusing on Trump they're crowding out a lot of content that could actually make users happier.
Just the nature of a growing community. Generally the larger the population gets, the lower the average discourse gets, where reddit in many places is no better then a Facebook comment thread. It is a bi-partisan issue for sure.
Anything remotely right leaning. /r/politics could more accurately be named /r/The_Left. Often the top comments of any thread are just whining about Trump in the same way that /r/T_D is just whining about MSM and Hillary. While there boy still posts that they won't tolerate useless comments I've seen nothing but useless comments there these days.
I don't even care about their political leanings if they were just a tiny bit more diverse. But when the whole first page is filled with exactly the same story just posted from different newsoutlets, you know that the moderators are activley promoting an agenda and don't care about news.
That's just wrong. The moderators on both subs are actively curating the front stories and removing 'duplicates'. I don't care about TheDonald as they are not a pre-set sub nor proclaiming neutrality. But you can't be seriously claiming that the 16 out of 25 front page stories of some variation of 'DT colluded with Russia' on /r/politics are unique newsworthy stories.
> That's just wrong. The moderators on both subs are actively curating the front stories and removing 'duplicates'. I don't care about TheDonald as they are not a pre-set sub nor proclaiming neutrality.
I'm unsure what neutrality means at this point. I don't expect anyone to be "neutral", but I make a distinction between debatable news and troll memes.
> But you can't be seriously claiming that the 16 out of 25 front page stories of some variation of 'DT colluded with Russia' on /r/politics are unique newsworthy stories.
No, I'm certainly not, and while moderators remove some obvious duplicates (query string differences etc), the same story from different outlets are still left and often upvoted. I don't think that's a grand conspiracy but merely user habit.
Whatever you think of this is up to you, and I think there are a lot of issues worth discussing that gets drowned out by the clown in chief-stories, but I've seen no evidence of this being anything other than crowd selection.
And it's news (insignificant, duplicate or big) on one sub, and 80% memes on the other. That's the contrast I was commenting on.
> I don't experience a lot of obvious shilling on Reddit
It was more obvious before the election, when the shilling was so prevalent that different accounts were copy/pasting the exact same phrases into their comments. And you would see a new point brought up, then an hour or two delay, then a response would suddenly show up in multiple places, copy/pasted into many comments, in multiple accounts.
But watch /r/all sometimes... you'll see a topic just suddenly start appearing. As an example, you think Rick & Morty grew popular on reddit organically? No, that started over the course of about an hour one morning, as a clearly orchestrated effort, and it worked.
It doesn't happen all the time... quite a bit of reddit is still honest and organic. But watch it carefully, and enough of it is manipulated that I don't put much trust in what I see there.
The very first serious internet campaign I ever noticed was Britney Freakin' Spears. When her first album came out, she, in her little school girl outfit, were in literally half the banner ads you'd see in an average day. TV, magazines, etc. She was EVERYWHERE. I got the same impression with this Rick and Morty thing. After months of it, I finally watched about 5 minutes of it, and proved to myself that there was no way it was even remotely organic. I mean, come on! It's not even in the same league as Bob's Burgers! ;-)
Some subjects touched anywhere on Reddit are huge instant bot/PR magnet.
On top of my head I can think of: Fracking, Glyphosate (or anything related to Monsanto/Endocrine Disruptor), Turkish Politics.
Definitely fracking and Monsanto. I've also noticed some software and hardware products seem to have a shill presence.
I think we all remember that 6 month period where Microsoft decided to shove VSCode down every ones throat. It was impossible to get away from. New vim released? "Yeah vim is good but now I use VSCode TM". New sublime? New Atom? Same thing. They were aggressive with that one.
> I think we all remember that 6 month period where Microsoft decided to shove VSCode down every ones throat.
Not me. I don't remember hearing about VSCode until a few months back. I had no idea it was first released two years ago.
Maybe I just wasn't reading the right places. But I subscribe to /r/programming, and I think I would expect that to get hit, if they're going to be astroturfing on reddit?
I'm not saying this definitely didn't happen, but I'm skeptical.
I saw loads of accusations of that, but very little evidence to suggest that these were shills, rather than real people who like VS Code. We all get very passionate about our editors, and lots of people use and like VS Code so it's not surprising people comment about it when the discussion is about editors. I like VS Code. I can't remember if I've ever commented to this effect. I'm not a MS shill.
Yes, Fracking! The number of shills that were in many subs was off the charts, a few years ago.
I'll add to the list: Windows 8 shills. I remember right after it came out, I had lots of issues and posted in some sub. Wow, the negative responses to my post were amazing.
Eh, you might as well spin up a few alts over Tor and occasionally use them to build karma, Reddit allows Tor users and registration over Tor.
Not saying this isn't a good thing, if Reddit banned Tor a few of my favorite community members would disappear, and I'd likely drift away from the subreddits I do still follow.
Reddit is still a really great site when you unsubscribe from all default subs and any sub that has gone "critical shill" at about 100k or more subs.