[linkage]

The vast majority of "likers" have never been real people in any case. All of the prominent accounts are boosted by bots and Mechanical Turk users in economically underdeveloped countries. This has been shown numerous times by comparing the likes/impressions ratios for different accounts posting similar content.

Anecdotally, I have been 'liking' (as a verb) posts about 3x more after anonymity went into effect. I used to be anonymous on X until I started meeting people at IRL events and then had to be more cautious about what I broadcast to my network. Anonymized likes gave me back a lot of that freedom.

[mikkupikku]

Pretty much all of these social media companies have been built on a foundation of fraud. It's understandable why, the easiest way to break the chicken-and-egg problem of network effects is to simply cheat and use bots to make the platform look popular. It is nonetheless fraud, and the criminal DNA of these companies never goes away.

[neilv]

> the easiest way to break the chicken-and-egg problem of network effects is to simply cheat and use bots to make the platform look popular.

In relatively early days of Reddit, before mainstream awareness, I thought it suspicious how clever or knowledgeable so many of the comments were. Better than any other general-purpose venue I could think of.

So, when telling people about Reddit, I'd sometimes remark that I suspected they'd enlisted a bunch of writer shills, to frontload and elevate their comments traffic.

Maybe it was all genuine and organic, and an artifact of the voting system and network effects, while the bar for quality was set so low by some other venues.

Though, years after Reddit was mainstream, I heard something about the founders originally writing a lot of the comments themselves.

[candiddevmike]

If they started out doing this, why wouldn't they continue to do this in the form of click fraud for advertising? Surely if they could create some minimum % of click fraud for each ad, they make more money and it would fly under the radar of their customers looking into it...

[Ajedi32]

> This has been shown numerous times by comparing the likes/impressions ratios for different accounts posting similar content.

That seems like dubious methodology. Obviously if a celebrity posts something that's going to get more engagement than some rando, even accounting for the difference in impressions.