• rafoix@lemmy.zip
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    18 hours ago

    Bots have been controlling votes on Reddit for years. It costs about $50 to get to the front page of Reddit.

    • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip
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      16 hours ago

      Which is also generally very detectable (if you actually care) and is generally used to push (monetized) social media and not the answer to “what is the difference between normal and merino wool?” and so forth.

      The vast majority of the “user” interaction and memes is not the product (at play. it IS useful for societal manipulation but there are better platforms for that). It is all those useful questions and answers that people get pissy about folk deleting the answers to.

      Because people, generally, weren’t searching for team edward or jacob reddit but instead the fuck is a renesme reddit or LED versus fluourescent bulbs reddit and so forth. And the community labeling of the latter is generally REALLY good.

      Things DO get messy when the question becomes best synthetic boxer briefs reddit but… it is incredibly rare for an astro turfing campaign to be strong enough to get a genuinely bad product “on top”. You tend to just get an overly expensive branded white label in the top slot which may actually be identical to the “real” best one anyway. But considering you are relying on human opinion regardless, that isn’t far off of what you were gonna get without said astroturfing.