> Young accounts, or accounts with histories that are hidden or wiped.

Nope, this is no longer an indicator of a bot account. Many that I've looked into will have active posts to local town/region subreddits (often times multiple!) and different sports subreddits, sometimes getting unusually high amounts of karma in them (which suggests a network).

Turing test is looong dead, so no reason to assume the small fractions of a cent to make comments, to get a reasonable history, isn't being taken advantage of.

This I think leads to a sort of toupee fallacy - where because you can spot the really bad examples you feel confident that you can identify the much better, more subtle examples. If an account which has only made 50 comments (all of which are very generic) makes 20 comments in a single month explicitly recommending ImageGeneratorDeluxeProMax then sure, you can guess they might not be legit. But if an account runs for a longer period of time and makes a lot more general organic contributions then if 1 in 500 of their comments are in favour of a particular product then it's harder to say.

I think ultimately account age is the only thing that will be difficult to replicate at scale. I know people buy older accounts but there is still a fundamental difficulty in obtaining them in sufficient numbers. And yes, obviously that will mean disregarding the many millions of legitimate accounts that are under (say) 2 or 3 years old. There is also no easy way of hiding accounts under a certain age when searching Reddit via Google.

By allowing uses to hide user profiles Reddit has also made detecting potentially bad actors that little bit more difficult. And from experience it feels like a large proportion of accounts now have hidden post histories. (It might also be the default for new accounts, I'm not sure).

When I see 2-weeks old account "Incendiary-Leg-8592" responding to a post by another weeks old user "Pivotal-Kitchen-0498", I have a hard time believing they are humans behind them.

* Those accounts naming one brand almost every time they name any. * Thin accounts: few comments, low scores, no real standing in the subreddit. * Young accounts, or accounts with histories that are hidden or wiped. * Links to a store or an affiliate page.

For product reviews, I've been using GearLab (https://www.techgearlab.com/) for years with pretty reliable results. I have no affiliation with them.

Why doesn't Reddit make sure that shilling is disallowed by their ToS, and then sue these companies and all their customers?

I strongly believe that there's a lot of paid product placement and paid political talking points on Reddit, so it's actually remarkable that this (LLM-generated) article fails to find it. I suspect it's just bad design.

If you're already spending money on tokens, there's a very simple experiment you could do instead: just pay one of these companies to position a made-up product and see what they do.

During the Laquan McDonald innocent and trial there were tons of accounts from the_donald, and not-connected to that were pretending to be experts and live in chicago (despite not having history on the sub). In the threads these accounts weren't positively contributing to the conversation, they were spewing:

1. Direct racial slurs 2. Political proganda criticising leadership they didn't like (not having direct experience and not critiqing direct political actions that lead to the event). I.e. "Chicago is a warzone"/etc. 3. Maliciously bad faith arguements. (Non-regulars steering up arguments to push talking points.. these weren't well intention-ed factual/communicative debates)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Laquan_McDonald

Since then: There have been heavy agenda pushing on subs. For example scooters and bikes, after the introduction of rentable ebikes and scooters.. there was heavy votes and arguements over people who criticized the business and users behavior. (When the scooters were added to the city, there were lots of posts about destroying them.. now there are not recognizable accounts arguing and attacking you if you comment on this.. a comment about defending yourself against someone riding aggressively near you gets you site wide banned). Note: the attacks in support for scooters aren't consistent.. sometimes you get breakthroughs talking about the negative impact.

On r/privacy, there are groups of people that grief others about "well you can't do anything about this". I'm not talking about people expressing how they feel, I'm talking about direct denialism and griefing in a sub that is expressly meant to be pro-privacy.

Additionally, the DNC did this on r/wisconsin in 2024. They even used social manipulation tactics with calls to actions that "we must do something." There was documentation about this was coordinated efforts.

This has been documented on accounts that are necro-ing old posts for product recommendations as well.

Theres a lot that is claimed on the Ellen Pao == hitler drama actually being a Spez lead campaign in a business lead fight. (Turns out it was spez that wanted to roll out a lot of the restrictive features and sub removals, and Pao was more of a "let's be less resirictive and socially moderated" )

https://reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/2zcbyq/what_is_go...

I do it locally to nudge political discourse. Doesn't take much to sway a lot of people.

I'm glad I agree with what I'm doing because its effectiveness is terrifying.

Saying postive or neutral statements, say a negative thing, not downvoted but zeroed.

Dead internet is absolutely true

I was banned by their new AI moderation system. Then I appealed it and got a message saying "Our slop banned you by mistake." (paraphrased)

Then I was banned again by their new AI moderation system.

Then I deleted my post history using Power Delete Suite and stopped using reddit.

https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite

Let their bots moderate bots.

I don't understand why so many people and companies feel the need to just spam reviews, SEO and questionable ads. It's like almost no one has the idea that may we start with a good product, then we'll tell people about it. It's always a question of what you can have produced cheaply in China and how do we then trick people into buying it.

As it stand you can pretty much assume that if it's advertised, or is promoted on social media, it's going to be a shit product.

To some extend I'd exclude certain types of YouTube reviews, because they frequently aren't paid by the manufacturer and making a video with real people and real data is to expensive to waste on scams.

I honestly thought this was a nag asking me to turn off my ad blocker!

Very long write up to unconfidently say I don’t know.

Shilling can’t prevent dissatisfied customers from voicing their opinions in a properly moderated subreddit, and astroturfing to spread misinformation about a competitor makes companies much more vulnerable to litigation.

Assuming you do indeed still use "old" reddit, the next time you see such a comment, open their account page in a private window (or any browser that isn't logged in). They might look different to themselves and most others.

Also the software / programming subs are just spam hell now.

Word-Word-#### have become the norm ever since they've been pushing mobile users to use reddit. They also are a good source of questionable users.

Amazon nowadays is such a crapshoot. A link to a product isn’t reliable. The price could be different than what the review stated, and the link might be for an listing that shows as out of stock. I think GearLab tries to fix this by giving you a link to search results on Amazon instead, but in some ways that’s worse. In the couple of links I tried the reviewed product wasn’t the top result so now it’s up to you to decide which of the links is the real one.

That loses some of the value prop for me because part of what I want from a service like this is to give me a link to a legit product listing. That’s not GearLab’s fault, Amazon makes that very difficult, but it still reduces the utility for me. That said it’s better than nothing which just points to the sad state of affairs in e-commerce today.

Edit: it looks like at least some of their links take you directly to the product page. Not sure why some of them take you to a search results page instead, but my guess is it’s an issue with expiring links.

I pay for Consumer Reports, since you actually need a paid subscription to access the data, which makes sense structurally. I don't really know if the reviews are any good, though I've been relatively happy with it. I also paid a subscription for an independent supplement testing lab, but I forget what it's called at the moment.

Why would you assume any website is immune to this problem of bots and fake or paid reviews? Bots are so cheap now and smart enough to pass as realistic humans.

Even with good intentions, money runs out eventually (they say no ads and no sponsored content) and someone with deep pockets will exploit this.

Eventually everyone will just have to implement the foolproof solution of putting in the rules that saying that their website has a problem is "a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills" and be done with it.

Also, shill accounts prove to advertisers that the platform works to make money. That’s the whole reason Reddit exists.

I've seen cases where the admins delete comments that talk about the issue

reddit wants engagement numbers to grow either way, so that disincentivizes it further