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.
this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2025
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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.
Bring back the enthusiast forums that were supported by calendar and sticker sales, we didn’t know how good we had it.
I'll only search up reddit posts on Google, and it's almost always about a movie/show or a game I'm currently playing or looking to play.
SAME. I had been very sick and off social media during the whole exodus, so had no clue about the lemmyverse, but going back to reddit the astroturfing was sooo bad, I just had to look for alternatives.
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.
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.
Its easier to spot here, and since we're split up into small severs, its easier to moderate.
Its easier to spot here
It's super easy to spot on reddit. Even easier than that?
There clearly aren't that many bots (of all kinds, incl. humanoid) in the Lemmyverse (yet), so I guess they stand out more, but beyond that?
its easier to moderate
Hm. How so?
I learned early that admins (and possibly also mods) have more insight into user behavior, is that what you mean?
Beyond that the mod/admin structure is pretty much the same as on, say, reddit.
Nothing can be prevented entirely online, but empowering users with the tools to choose their own experience and tailor their feed with the communities and users they choose themselves is a giant step in the right direction.
Reddit chose the path of consolidation and central control, and the results were inevitable.
No place is safe from this until we are forced to log into the internet with IDs issued by a global government. And obviously that’s a hideous nightmare of its own. and still not a solution.
Anonymity online is important to preserve.
But it’s also the source of so much unchecked bullshit, cheating, exploitation, manipulation, etc etc etc. And now with stronger AI in the mix, it has also made everyone paranoid, only wanting to trust old accounts, calling everything they disagree with a bot, etc.
In short, the internet was a mistake. A big huge self inflicted, unavoidable, and necessary mistake.
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.
Got my very old one too, lots and lots of posts & interactions, if you find a buyer i'll give you 50% 😁
What's the 1% threshold?
🤷♂️
But I have a few million and access to the special 1℅ sub all through comment karma alone.
Reddit should be like OnlyFans and tell you.
My account would definitely either ben in the top 50% or the lower 50%.
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.
Where would one go if they really wanted to do that? 🤔
I have personally seen one account satisfying the above criteria selling for 2500 USD.
This was on Ebay a couple of years ago before they banned the sale of online of online accounts. Now most of the Reddit account sales happen on playerup and blackhatworld. If you're going to sell your account on either of the sites make a post proving you actually have control over the account like go into your user profile and type a post saying "This is for playerup. This account, [enter username here], is being sold by an individual and not through some agency or marketplace. Please contact me to buy the account. Individual buyers only. Agencies and marketplaces please avoid" and record a video of it and post it on the product description. If you can't directly upload videos use sites like imgur. This will instill confidence on the buyer since most of the posts claiming they have a 18 or 19 year old accounts are straight up scams. Also PLEASE post this in your product description to help the buyer to prevent your account getting banned by shittit's spam filters:
My account was created in [Enter country here]. Always use an anonymous browser ( incogniton, morelogin, octobrowser, adspower, dolphin-anty ) Use a your phone’s 4G/5G connection as a hotspot for your PC. As for VPN, right now only Mullvad VPN seems to be immune to Reddit's spam filters. Use the airplane mode button and check if it assigns a new IP each time. Check if your configuration works on both of these sites (https://iphey.com/ https://proxy.incolumitas.com/ proxy_detect.html). Avoid changing the email or setting the account to NSFW in the first few days. Reddit is placing a lot of importance on Google’s reCAPTCHA v3. Before accessing Reddit, our advice is to visit around 100 websites (including Reddit) and accept cookies. Save those cookies and use them in your browser. This will make the account activity appear more natural. Work Strategy Day 1-2: Visit the communities where I have posted comments, browse posts, and leave a few random votes (twice a day). Day 3: Repeat the warm-up process, find a post, and reply to a comment (do not comment directly on the post, only reply to a comment). Day 4: Enter the subreddit you want to work in, join the subreddit, and for the next two days, browse posts and leave a few votes. Day 7: Start leaving a couple of replies to comments. Day 10: Your account is ready to work. Post-10-Day Strategy From day 10 onward, vary your account’s actions: 1 day rest,1 day comment, 1 day only browsing, 1 day any action you choose.
Another note for you: but bans are always a possibility due to various reasons (bad links, poor-quality or flagged proxies) or flagged VPN's.
@Kolanaki@pawb.social @Valmond@lemmy.world
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.
People don’t think on social media. At least average normal people don’t.
I really think that a large percentage (far from a majority, tho) of what people see as new bot activity on social media is just a rise in “normies” using things like reddit.
Just look at all the people being fooled by ridiculous AI shit.
How do you tell the difference between astroturfing and regular comments? I mean, besides "it's obvious".
When it's posts you agree with, it's honest users. When it's posts you disagree with, it's astroturfing.
I joke, but unfortunately that seems to be the most common metric for a lot of people. If it's a position "no one would really support" (in their view), then support for it must be astroturfed.
Bingpot! So many people live in meme bunkers, where every issue is a binary battle between moral perfection and diabolical evil.
The problem is, unlike most people realize, astroturfing is rarely sourced from shill accounts like it used to be. Nor are high-karma accounts being purchased.
The issue is bots and shill accounts manipulate vote counts of posts/comments with certain positions. So, you don’t tell the difference, unless you find a way to track who is voting on Reddit content.
I remember their being a lot of users saying it's "stealing" to block ads, especially on YouTube and you should definitely just sign up for premium.
No one would suspect anti-AI comments of being astroturf by authors and publishers - which means they could do so invisibly if they wanted to. I'm not saying they are, just that astroturfing seems like it would be easy to get away with if you pick the right forums.
This is a fantastic question.
If you ask it in a UFO subreddit, you’ll be attacked. The dynamics there are totally fucked up. (Because the bots and astroturfing there is only about hiding the truth, you see.)
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
Yep. The astroturfing and hive mind made it easy to leave after the API debacle. Any modestly large sub pretty much made outside opinion not worth sharing. Smaller subs were still mostly ok, but even those were being overrun with reposts or people skirting the purpose of the sub trying to get karma. You couldn’t have discussions anymore, it was people posting for karma and people responding in ways to hop on karma coattails.
Yep.
Accounts like this are usually taken over by right wing bots. Accounts that didnt care about politics, all of a sudden, have a huge agenda. Its just bullshit
Berkshire Partners uses bots to boost their portfolio on Reddit
Who is Berkshire partners?