The entire stunt appeals to people's sense of moral outrage over businesses buying influence in the form of political donations. The reason people find it morally outrageous is because it corrupts the political process: politicians are supposed to represent their constituents, not the whims of the highest corporate bidder. Politicians who engage in this kind of quid pro quo behavior put selfish gain ahead of the good of the community.
Which is why I found it particularly galling that the PR firm relied on people's moral outrage about paying for influence to peddle their message ("tell them you like our initiative and are TIRED of politicians taking legal bribes") -- while doing exactly the same thing: paying for influence, in the form of purchased Reddit upvotes, which corrupts the upvote process and puts selfish gain ahead of the good of the Reddit community.
Normally, when PR firms use "hacking" to describe their techniques, they're talking about novel approaches to getting coverage, sort of like how "life hacks" are novel solutions to life's problems. But in this case, the firm is using "hacking" very literally -- infiltrating and taking control of a system by illicit means. They are black hats, and we should view them not only as morally bankrupt but also very dangerous.
I'm expecting that any day now they'll run a follow-up post, "How we hacked the U.S. media to help an anonymous powerful Russian client sway the presidential election."
Almost every modern campaign takes advantage of our hairpin
tendency to get outraged. Hell, this entire thread is people getting outraged about "cheating" using millenia-old social tendencies.
The solution isn't getting outraged about outrage. It's designing systems that compensate for this tendency. Unfortunately, that often means slowing down sensitive discourse.
You left out the fact that the proposed legislation was fake too. This whole thing was simply to draw attention to a politician that nobody knew. It's scummy to the core, but the dumbest thing they did was write a post about how they did it. That kinda goes against what their client wanted and probably against their own best interest as well.
Sometimes you have to operate in the system that exists. The way reddit is setup allows companies to blast their Coke ads and Bill Gates PR pieces to the frontpage. A campaign trying to limit a money for influence exchange in one context that uses a money for influence exchange in another is just doing the exact same thing their opposition will. This seems more like a case of "Don't hate the player, hate the game."
>Which is why I found it particularly galling that the PR firm relied on people's moral outrage [...] while doing exactly the same thing [...] which corrupts the upvote process and puts selfish gain ahead of the good of the Reddit community.
I (truly) mean no disrespect, but surely you see the irony of succumbing to moral outrage over Reddit upvotes? Surely you also see the absurdity of comparing Reddit upvotes to democratic elections.
This tendency to turn everything into a scandal is partly responsible for the very thing you're decrying.
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.
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.
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.
The PR firm isn't at all ashamed of what they've done, in fact they are publishing this as an example of what a great PR firm they are. After all, it shows their "hustle". It's odd, but not at all surprising, that someone in the PR/marketing world can fail to even see how something might be morally wrong with their scummy methods.
I get it, they need to promote their services, but if this is what they think is the right way to do it, that doesn't fill me with confidence that they have any ability to do PR beyond buying fake upvotes on social media.
On a topic where one would expect citizens chasing for public good, we find marketers and advertisers working for a wealthy businessman paying a convictionless campaign to become famous!
And the advertisers are so proud of it, they give all the details of their Reddit cheating, and worse, all the details of the absence of political conviction of their wanna-be-politician client.
Maybe the story is real, but I cannot believe the advertisers are dummy enough to be the ones writing this article.
I would better think of someone related to Fiverr.com behind... [edit: or an enemy/competitor of the politician]
>I cannot believe the advertisers are dummy enough to be the ones writing this article
If it were any other industry aside from PR/advertising I would give them enough credit not to do something like this, but in this case, I could totally see them doing something this stupid.
Look, I give them credit for coming clean to the public. And a lot of people use Reddit to promote their business, band or other brand (though they do it honestly, not by purchasing a boost). But the more well-known the technique of buying upvotes becomes, the worse the site will be for myself and other users.
Early paid upvotes are the seed for later organic upvotes. You don't even need to spend $200 to get them.
The onus is on Reddit to detect and punish voting manipulation.
When someone proposed a similar voting manipulation trick on Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13676362), dang explicitly notes that such techniques are a good data point for voting manipulation detection algorithms.
I remember researching this back in 2014. You could buy 50 upvotes for about $350. On most mid-sized subs, an initial hit of 50-100 upvotes would get you to the 'hot' section.
Once you get to the 'hot' section, however, your content quality matters. If the content is good and/or has viral potential, it will attract votes naturally.
I was marketing for a travel site at that time. I learned that rather than paying others to push your content, you can get the same effect by posting at the right time and creating content that would naturally appeal to that subreddit.
I do know some people who've bought established Reddit accounts for $50-200 and use that to get upvotes via proxies.
This was an interesting read. I'm not sure it's the best idea as a blog post because I'm sure Reddit staff will get onto it then keep a much closer eye on this firm. I feel like journalists will be the same too. If I received 10 emails about these guys I'd be a bit skeptical that there is any actual interest.
As an aside, I wonder if they're using the same tactics here.
"Hustle", like "passion" and "wanting it", is a popular imaginary virtue to claim when your success was either down to luck, or something obvious and unimpressive (e.g. you paid a bunch of people to astroturf for you).
These guys didn't do anything remotely new or skillful. All that's special about them is that they're brazen enough gloat openly about cheating.
Dear Reddit, Maybe this idea would help slow down this type of abuse:
It seems like it would be easy enough and cheap enough to build a honeypot to identify accounts used for the purchased Reddit upvotes.
For example, Reddit could set up some honeypot posts to track paid upvote accounts.
They then go and pay these upvoters to upvote the honeypot post and identify the accounts used. (It would be helpful if the post was hidden so other people don't find it accidentally. In fact, it is possible to just use a tracking redirect page given only to the paid upvoters and use any post as the upvote "job" so it would be hard to identify by the upvoters.)
Then Reddit could ghost those identified accounts. Simply ignore their votes in the system, but don't tell the account owners, so the owners continue using the accounts without realizing the problem.
This would make it very difficult for the account owners to know which of their accounts were compromised.
Then on any new posts where these upvoter accounts are being used in majority, other accounts can be found. The other accounts that also similarly upvoted on this article could represent other paid upvote accounts.
Track those other accounts and how often they appear beside the ghosted paid accounts, and voila, you have found more paid upvoters.
Keep doing this and it makes the paid upvoters ineffective because although they can work the system, their work is only being used to find other paid upvote accounts and also clients who are paying for paid upvotes.
After a time period, the clients could be sent a warning:
It has been detected that you are using paid upvote services which are against Reddit TOS. Please contact customer service so we can work together to remedy the problem. Failure to do so may cause your account to be banned and all your posts removed from Reddit. Have a good day.
Of course Reddit doesn't have to do this, and really anyone could do the same process to build a list of paid upvoter accounts and a list of articles and clients that use those services...
So what do you think, would this put a dent in the upvoters effectiveness?
The OP is using techniques that used to work on the wild wild web 10-15 years ago. I thought by now everything is being normalized, or at least serious people don't use spamming techniques to launch a business.
If all these bought upvotes come from new accounts, or from the same few IP ranges, or have a lesser ratio of comments to upvotes, or are interacting only between themselves and not with the larger community -> reddit can detect them and turn them into ghost accounts.
Reddit needs to open up a Kaggle challenge for detecting rented upvotes and other abuses, use the data it has already shared with the AI community (the reddit dataset) to detect such attempts as they happen.
The title of the article is "How we hacked reddit...", this submission currently says "How to go viral by using fake reddit likes", and is more accurate. They didn't hack reddit, they bought upvotes.
I don't get the impression that there's any substantial vote monitoring, and so it surprises me that it even cost money to do this kind of astroturfing. How hard would it be to setup and maintain a dozen Reddit accounts and spread them over a VPN service? 10 min initial startup, and not more than a minute a day of doing innocuous activity on those accounts, occasionally. When a campaign rolls out, then have the accounts work in concert.
Sure, it might not be as 100% successful as Fiverr (though I imagine it's fairly easy for Reddit to ad-hoc identify voting blocs if something was known to be bought). But you could employ additional optimization techniques, such as the one used by most high-karma users (e.g. Gallowboob): if a post fails to hit critical upvote mass, then delete and resubmit later in the day.
To give you an idea of how things seem to be relatively unmonitored until users flag it, there's the story of Unidan:
And as a more recent, obscure example, there was the mystery of why the mod of r/evilbuildings had something like 499 of the 500 most upvoted posts in his own subreddit. The math was so laughably in favor of manipulation but a Reddit admin, using whatever shit tools they have to investigate this, acquitted the mod:
The details of how this mod was able to boost his own posts without being called out for vote manipulation is too banal to explain in detail (basically, he would shadowdelete other popular posts so that his would get picked up by the Reddit front page, and then undelete the popular posts before anyone noticed). But the fact that a Reddit admin (I.e. a paid employee) thought that the evilbuildings mod always having the top post in his own forum for 6 months straight was just a coincidence, and/or because that mod was just apparently an amazing content submitter, spoke hugely about how uncreative the Reddit admins might be in detecting fraud.
If this is the kind of effort users put toward imaginary points (though arguably raising karma is part of Gallowboob's professional work), I'm nervous to think about the schemes that PR firms will construct when they realize the easy return on investment offered by Reddit popularity.
[+] [-] jawns|8 years ago|reply
Which is why I found it particularly galling that the PR firm relied on people's moral outrage about paying for influence to peddle their message ("tell them you like our initiative and are TIRED of politicians taking legal bribes") -- while doing exactly the same thing: paying for influence, in the form of purchased Reddit upvotes, which corrupts the upvote process and puts selfish gain ahead of the good of the Reddit community.
Normally, when PR firms use "hacking" to describe their techniques, they're talking about novel approaches to getting coverage, sort of like how "life hacks" are novel solutions to life's problems. But in this case, the firm is using "hacking" very literally -- infiltrating and taking control of a system by illicit means. They are black hats, and we should view them not only as morally bankrupt but also very dangerous.
I'm expecting that any day now they'll run a follow-up post, "How we hacked the U.S. media to help an anonymous powerful Russian client sway the presidential election."
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|8 years ago|reply
The solution isn't getting outraged about outrage. It's designing systems that compensate for this tendency. Unfortunately, that often means slowing down sensitive discourse.
[+] [-] phkahler|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frgtpsswrdlame|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] omginternets|8 years ago|reply
I (truly) mean no disrespect, but surely you see the irony of succumbing to moral outrage over Reddit upvotes? Surely you also see the absurdity of comparing Reddit upvotes to democratic elections.
This tendency to turn everything into a scandal is partly responsible for the very thing you're decrying.
[+] [-] cercatrova|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atemerev|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] someonewhocar3s|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] saltycraig|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] 0x00000000|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rmc|8 years ago|reply
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.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/
[+] [-] nateberkopec|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Algent|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] avaer|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LutfuRadu|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jerrylives|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] metilda|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] paultopia|8 years ago|reply
- his big political stunt wasn't even his own idea, and
- he paid people a ton of money to fraudulently promote it.
What a way to burn your clients...
[+] [-] hn_throwaway_99|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wand3r|8 years ago|reply
You now know about him. It worked and still is working.
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|8 years ago|reply
The former now goes straight into my "never do business with" blacklist.
[+] [-] deedubaya|8 years ago|reply
What if this is just a ploy to make this, a possibly fabricated, story go viral to undermine the candidate?
So meta.
[+] [-] Lazare|8 years ago|reply
I get it, they need to promote their services, but if this is what they think is the right way to do it, that doesn't fill me with confidence that they have any ability to do PR beyond buying fake upvotes on social media.
[+] [-] ternaryoperator|8 years ago|reply
Second, they're proud of what they did and are implicitly telling potential clients, "We can do the same for you."
[+] [-] rdtsc|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rmc|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akhilcacharya|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] illys|8 years ago|reply
On a topic where one would expect citizens chasing for public good, we find marketers and advertisers working for a wealthy businessman paying a convictionless campaign to become famous!
And the advertisers are so proud of it, they give all the details of their Reddit cheating, and worse, all the details of the absence of political conviction of their wanna-be-politician client.
Maybe the story is real, but I cannot believe the advertisers are dummy enough to be the ones writing this article.
I would better think of someone related to Fiverr.com behind... [edit: or an enemy/competitor of the politician]
[+] [-] gfody|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] microwavecamera|8 years ago|reply
If it were any other industry aside from PR/advertising I would give them enough credit not to do something like this, but in this case, I could totally see them doing something this stupid.
[+] [-] flashman|8 years ago|reply
Early paid upvotes are the seed for later organic upvotes. You don't even need to spend $200 to get them.
[+] [-] minimaxir|8 years ago|reply
When someone proposed a similar voting manipulation trick on Hacker News (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13676362), dang explicitly notes that such techniques are a good data point for voting manipulation detection algorithms.
[+] [-] puranjay|8 years ago|reply
Once you get to the 'hot' section, however, your content quality matters. If the content is good and/or has viral potential, it will attract votes naturally.
I was marketing for a travel site at that time. I learned that rather than paying others to push your content, you can get the same effect by posting at the right time and creating content that would naturally appeal to that subreddit.
I do know some people who've bought established Reddit accounts for $50-200 and use that to get upvotes via proxies.
[+] [-] Haydos585x2|8 years ago|reply
As an aside, I wonder if they're using the same tactics here.
[+] [-] minimaxir|8 years ago|reply
Deliberately breaking the rules that exist for a good reason isn't "hustle." It's just cheating.
[+] [-] PhasmaFelis|8 years ago|reply
These guys didn't do anything remotely new or skillful. All that's special about them is that they're brazen enough gloat openly about cheating.
[+] [-] imron|8 years ago|reply
And this type of marketing posing as news, pushed to the front page by bots and fake accounts is precisely why /r/politics is now a shitbed.
Thanks Hack-PR.
[+] [-] scotchio|8 years ago|reply
Reddit has a SERIOUS political astro-turfing problem.
Some would argue it swayed the US election. Some would argue Reddit is bought and sold.
The popular or all experience is completely different. Commenting you don't even know if it's a real person or not.
Does anyone know a forum similar to this or Reddit where it's ALL verified accounts?
[+] [-] ricksharp|8 years ago|reply
It seems like it would be easy enough and cheap enough to build a honeypot to identify accounts used for the purchased Reddit upvotes.
For example, Reddit could set up some honeypot posts to track paid upvote accounts.
They then go and pay these upvoters to upvote the honeypot post and identify the accounts used. (It would be helpful if the post was hidden so other people don't find it accidentally. In fact, it is possible to just use a tracking redirect page given only to the paid upvoters and use any post as the upvote "job" so it would be hard to identify by the upvoters.)
Then Reddit could ghost those identified accounts. Simply ignore their votes in the system, but don't tell the account owners, so the owners continue using the accounts without realizing the problem.
This would make it very difficult for the account owners to know which of their accounts were compromised.
Then on any new posts where these upvoter accounts are being used in majority, other accounts can be found. The other accounts that also similarly upvoted on this article could represent other paid upvote accounts.
Track those other accounts and how often they appear beside the ghosted paid accounts, and voila, you have found more paid upvoters.
Keep doing this and it makes the paid upvoters ineffective because although they can work the system, their work is only being used to find other paid upvote accounts and also clients who are paying for paid upvotes.
After a time period, the clients could be sent a warning:
It has been detected that you are using paid upvote services which are against Reddit TOS. Please contact customer service so we can work together to remedy the problem. Failure to do so may cause your account to be banned and all your posts removed from Reddit. Have a good day.
Of course Reddit doesn't have to do this, and really anyone could do the same process to build a list of paid upvoter accounts and a list of articles and clients that use those services...
So what do you think, would this put a dent in the upvoters effectiveness?
[+] [-] visarga|8 years ago|reply
If all these bought upvotes come from new accounts, or from the same few IP ranges, or have a lesser ratio of comments to upvotes, or are interacting only between themselves and not with the larger community -> reddit can detect them and turn them into ghost accounts.
Reddit needs to open up a Kaggle challenge for detecting rented upvotes and other abuses, use the data it has already shared with the AI community (the reddit dataset) to detect such attempts as they happen.
[+] [-] gehsty|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JonDav|8 years ago|reply
cough cough
[+] [-] oDot|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rmc|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soared|8 years ago|reply
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:rGmQFEr...
[+] [-] joelthelion|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] known|8 years ago|reply
"Media does not spread free opinion; It generates opinion" --Oswald,1918 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_the_West
[+] [-] lsmarigo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danso|8 years ago|reply
Sure, it might not be as 100% successful as Fiverr (though I imagine it's fairly easy for Reddit to ad-hoc identify voting blocs if something was known to be bought). But you could employ additional optimization techniques, such as the one used by most high-karma users (e.g. Gallowboob): if a post fails to hit critical upvote mass, then delete and resubmit later in the day.
To give you an idea of how things seem to be relatively unmonitored until users flag it, there's the story of Unidan:
https://www.reddit.com/r/MuseumOfReddit/comments/2m5q11/a_fe...
And as a more recent, obscure example, there was the mystery of why the mod of r/evilbuildings had something like 499 of the 500 most upvoted posts in his own subreddit. The math was so laughably in favor of manipulation but a Reddit admin, using whatever shit tools they have to investigate this, acquitted the mod:
https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/67r1ht/the_...
Follow up:
https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/6ao8cv/dram...
The details of how this mod was able to boost his own posts without being called out for vote manipulation is too banal to explain in detail (basically, he would shadowdelete other popular posts so that his would get picked up by the Reddit front page, and then undelete the popular posts before anyone noticed). But the fact that a Reddit admin (I.e. a paid employee) thought that the evilbuildings mod always having the top post in his own forum for 6 months straight was just a coincidence, and/or because that mod was just apparently an amazing content submitter, spoke hugely about how uncreative the Reddit admins might be in detecting fraud.
Edit: if you are interested in subreddit drama details, here's a thread that combines the evilbuildings drama and Gallowboob: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/6d3syc/evil...
If this is the kind of effort users put toward imaginary points (though arguably raising karma is part of Gallowboob's professional work), I'm nervous to think about the schemes that PR firms will construct when they realize the easy return on investment offered by Reddit popularity.