I love how so many people on Reddit are acting like this is a complete shock. That site has been a cesspool of bots and targeted ads for years now, people still believed they were having real conversations with humans? I'd be surprised if legit content was higher than 50%.
this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2025
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That’s just the consequence of being popular. Lemmy isn’t impervious or even resistant to this
And of insanely easy account creation. You didn't even need an email.
Reddit doesn't require email either.
I was talking about reddit. Lemmy, at least the instances i was on, needs manual approval
They can literally setup an instance themselves. By the time it is identified as such, the damage is basically done. Just make a new one. Or use one of the many instances not requiring approval. Or fill out the form with ai. They don't actually need an insane number of accounts for their subterfuge. Having just "some" and keeping them tied to conversational themes/topics seems sufficient?
I’d argue it is resistant. Lemmy is federated, which means smaller instances, making it easier to detect this kind of activity. Crime in a city vs crime in a town situation
Nah, it works for now because no one really tries to spam lemmy. If it gets popular enough companies will pay bot farms to post here and admins want be able to keep up with moderation. Bots will simply join the biggest instances. The only solution would be to defederate the main instances and have everyone pretty much host their own server.
I think to an extent yes, but not quite as bad as Reddit. Reddit admins will completely ignore reports about these. I think most Fediverse admins won't ignore them.
look at Mastodon and it’s practically what’s happening there. bot farms don’t even bother setting up their own servers, they just go to mastodon.social (by far the largest instance) and bot from there. and because .social refuses to have manual approval for each account, and many instances don’t want to defenerate from where almost everyone is, the problem keeps happening…
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And if everybody hosts their own server, than so will the advertisers and everybody will have to defederate then individually making the problem of moderation even worse.
When it gets bad enough the default will switch from blacklists to whitelists and the user base will consolidate to fewer and fewer popular instances that are able to address the spam.
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It's so bad, basically every post there is pushed by bots. The entire purpose of reddit is to shape opinion by forced consensus.
It's a propaganda machine inside the bloated husk of a forum aggregator.
Lemmy isn't impervious but it's much better than reddit.
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There's a way to look at the top Karma users on Reddit. Most of them are either bots, or corporate account. There's a Marvel one that posts movie stuff, and some Turbo something or other for gaming. They don't comment, they just post what their corporate overlords want you to see, and they probably have bots that push their content to the top. They just aggregate popular sites, though, driving people into the ads.
When I was on Reddit, going to that leaderboard to block people was my first stop. Though, I do think there are a few that are interesting, even bots — like the haiku one is amusing. It doesn't always get it right, but it's fun to see it try. Then there's a guy — pretty sure it's a person, at least — who turns posts into poems. Not quite the same. Got a weird name. Regular Redditors know who they are. "Something for your something", I think. I don't block the fun ones. Just the corporate trash.
Oh, Poem for your Sprog. I remember that one. Users like that are one of the few things I miss about Reddit.
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Poem_for_your_sprog
There are some things i miss about that site.
Poem_for_your_sprog
https://old.reddit.com/user/Poem_for_your_sprog/
That account appears to have been inactive for the past seven months.
Poem for your sprog. I had no problem with the novelty accounts, and even the bot accounts there were clearly just some dev with a quirky sense of humor. Though those got hate from the anti bot purists, for whatever stupid reason.
It’s the corporate, vote manipulating, spam, Russian propaganda etc bots that piss me off. And those are much more subtle and harder to detect.
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Poem for your sprog, right? Not been on reddit for a while, but encountering a post from that guy was generally a fun moment.
As someone who never saw Instagram before yesterday, I was a little shocked at just how much crap was AI generated and just useless fake content. I kept hearing how bad AI was, but until I saw just how bad I really had no idea. I imagine reddit is getting closer to this exact model soon enough.
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Reddit be like
User A: i made this
Reddit: fuck off with the self marketing!
User B: my friend(definitely not me) quit their job and made this
Reddit: ohh my god this is brilliant!
r/gaming is shit. Bunch of sycophants all soft criticizing games like a review magazine afraid of offending the makers while talking about their playthrough. Go figure. Heaven help you if you have an actual opinion outside of the box, or don’t know some bit of terminology or lore about a game that is “common knowledge”.
I was hated on Reddit for not hating the main character of Horizon Forbidden West. God forbid someone enjoys a woman speaking.
I never understood the hate for Aloy. She was at worst bland with a pretty heavy helping of "I'm better at everything because I'm the main character", but she's hardly alone in that, and it doesn't usually attract that much ire.
I really didn't understand the complaints that she was unattractive or even outright ugly.
That fits pretty much every game where you control a main character. MCs rarely have a suitable explanation for why they're so special beyond the rule of cool. Why can Gordon Freeman take out teams of special ops? Because he's the MC. He's a pretty bland character that doesn't say anything, but he's loved by millions.
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Bunch of sycophants all soft criticizing games like a review magazine afraid of offending the makers while talking about their playthrough.
Almost as though its a heavily astroturfed community and many of the accounts are exactly this.
Heaven help you if you have an actual opinion outside of the box
That's just social media in a nutshell. You're either a loyal footsoldier or a radical insurgent. But you need to find your opposing faction and do battle with them. And then, if you get too confrontational, the Mods/Admins need to ban you for doing exactly what the site incentivizes.
Don't forget the lack of accountability among mods in reddit.
They can remove whatever they want, and we wouldn't even know it was there. This alone causes people to self-censor.
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Oh no WHICH marketing company so I can't avoid them?
Edit: marketing firm is TRAP PLAN and the game that used is services was War Robots: Frontiers
Assume all of the big ones.
Theres been a lot of positive GTA6 posts across a bunch of the internet, like how they're "releasing it when theyre ready".
Which is funny because a few days ago, they fired 30+ people who tried to unionize.
Funniest was a comment I saw on reddit after the PR statement, saying looks like reddit overreacted and they are glad Rockstar set the record straight that the workers were fired for leaking information and not for anything related to unions. Typical redditors believing anything to get angry about.
It was over course downvoted, but the audacity of taking the position fully believing the PR release was hilarious that I wondered if it was a plant.
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Cool, so- everyone should boycott those games and send a message to any developer hiring shitfucks like this clown and his company.
This confirms what I expected. I thought I was going crazy the first time I saw an ask reddit repost and I recognized all the top answers. Eventually they bots will outnumber the users and dead Internet theory will prevail
There are definitely pockets of reddit that don't have their content flooded with bots, but they are the exception in today's day and age. I especially enjoy the college football subreddit, as there still isn't quite something similar on lemmy
Lemmy has those communities, they're just small and not very active comparatively
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The clear blend of cynicism and resignation in replies to the Reddit thread about the deleted Trap Plan post clearly illustrate how widely pervasive these practices are perceived to be.
I mean, back when professional game reviewing was more of a thing, game publishers used to do things like take said reviewers on outings and stuff to influence them, give them free copies, whatever. Marketers trying to subvert information flow isn't something that suddenly showed up with social media.
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"I'm 39 and a single dad to three girls with special needs, but five years ago I quit my job and started pursuing my lifelong dream of being a game developer. This metroidvania styled RPG with roguelite elements is my dream come true. Here's a short clip of the gameplay."
Shitty 8-bit sprites jiggle on the screen
Reddit: OMG! I'm literally crying right now as I buy this. It's so good!
I see you too are familiar with Heart Forth Alicia.
Just so nobody forgets, North Face planted ads on Wikipedia, and then threw one of their regional managers under the bus when they got caught, as if to claim that it wasn’t really the real company doing it.
https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2019/05/29/lets-talk-about-the-north-face-defacing-wikipedia/
An outright confession of what sure sounds like blatant astroturfing—a deceptive marketing campaign that's meant to look like natural, spontaneous conversation—is probably not the sharpest move for any company that wants to attract or keep new clients.
The clients are just fine with it. This guy was off talking about it to market his company; publishers that he attracted did so because of what he was doing.
The users being astroturfed are the ones who aren't going to like it.
What the client is going to be pissed about is that the guy mentioned their actual game while trying to promote their astroturfing company:
Still, Beresnev did what he could to put space between War Robots developer My.Games and Trap Plan, telling Kotaku the intent "was to experiment with a more organic way of promoting games on Reddit—without using bots or fake accounts—and to build a new case study we could use in the future," and that mentioning the game and studio by name was a mistake.
"This was entirely our initiative and not commissioned or endorsed by My.Games in any way," Beresnev said. "We understand this was a mistake and have since removed the case study. We sincerely apologize to My.Games and the War Robots: Frontiers team for the misunderstanding and any confusion it may have caused."
https://www.trapplan.com/about-us
Trap Plan by The Numbers
We sell thousands of copies of games a month, collaborate with thousands of creators, work on all platforms from Reddit to TickTok
2023 Trap Plan Founded
$10M+ Sold Games
20+ Clients in 2024
How do you do this without having “fake accounts”? How do they define “fake accounts” here?
I mean, I would imagine that they may well do that, but there are businesses that buy and sell social accounts. Like, the point is that a legitimate user accrues reputation. I mean, that's an important element of how humans interact with each other
provide useful information, and I give your opinion more weight and stuff. Social media tends to try to leverage that too. But when someone doesn't want their account any more for whatever reason, their reputation has value, and so it can be bought and sold.
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So they could develop their own "fake" accounts. Or they could just buy accounts from real, actual users, step into their skin and acquire their reputation. Or they could buy accounts from people who intentionally try to karma-farm
I imagine that that's probably its own industry.
EDIT: Oh, sorry, maybe I misunderstood
you were quoting the astroturfing guy, using whatever his meaning was. I have no idea what he calls a "fake account", and I don't think that I'd consider him to be incredibly trustworthy in the first place. But he might mean that he doesn't rely on an army of sockpuppet accounts to upvote his astroturfing, I suppose.
They are lying. A work account that's not labelled as such is a fake account.
This is a major reason why I never follow hype.
Patient gamers always win
If there are enough people who wait until after a game has been out for some time to play it, there will be marketers targeting that group too.
They might promote the thing based on value or something other than what the latest flashy game crowd gets, but put enough wallets together and there's an incentive for someone to go after them. The astroturfing guy's shtick was that he was targeting individual communities with crafted material to try to appeal to them. PatientGamers is another community.
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You aren't kidding. I played Kingdom Come Deliverance last year, when I learned about the second one. Was like wow.
Then read how they originally were courting the anti-woke crowd. Who later turned on them because the sequel has "woke" material.
Its great to not be a part of those GAMERS.
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