YHK - yet another hacker news clone

If you see a single sheep on an island, it is safe to assume there is more than one sheep living on the island.

No serious person would ever suggest using it to take the "political temperature" of society at large. It's about as useful as Nextdoor for that.

I've seen cases where the admins delete comments that talk about the issue

Also, shill accounts prove to advertisers that the platform works to make money. That’s the whole reason Reddit exists.

reddit wants engagement numbers to grow either way, so that disincentivizes it further

Like, Reddit may know that Bazzly is selling fake comments, which violates Reddit's ToS. How many comments can they prove are tied to Bazzly? How much does an astro-turfed comment financially harm Reddit, and can they convince a jury of that?

Instead, most companies will aggressively shut down the bot networks, if they can identify them, and hope that the astro-turfers focus on other platforms, and/or make it more financially challenging to do it successfully on theirs.

Why would you assume any website is immune to this problem of bots and fake or paid reviews? Bots are so cheap now and smart enough to pass as realistic humans.

Even with good intentions, money runs out eventually (they say no ads and no sponsored content) and someone with deep pockets will exploit this.

Eventually everyone will just have to implement the foolproof solution of putting in the rules that saying that their website has a problem is "a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills" and be done with it.

I pay for Consumer Reports, since you actually need a paid subscription to access the data, which makes sense structurally. I don't really know if the reviews are any good, though I've been relatively happy with it. I also paid a subscription for an independent supplement testing lab, but I forget what it's called at the moment.

Amazon nowadays is such a crapshoot. A link to a product isn’t reliable. The price could be different than what the review stated, and the link might be for an listing that shows as out of stock. I think GearLab tries to fix this by giving you a link to search results on Amazon instead, but in some ways that’s worse. In the couple of links I tried the reviewed product wasn’t the top result so now it’s up to you to decide which of the links is the real one.

That loses some of the value prop for me because part of what I want from a service like this is to give me a link to a legit product listing. That’s not GearLab’s fault, Amazon makes that very difficult, but it still reduces the utility for me. That said it’s better than nothing which just points to the sad state of affairs in e-commerce today.

Edit: it looks like at least some of their links take you directly to the product page. Not sure why some of them take you to a search results page instead, but my guess is it’s an issue with expiring links.

Even the first time I saw the advice I was skeptical, reddit is rife with bots, and fake comments/posts. It's been well-known for almost a decade at this point that there are multiple individuals moderating many communities there, and that kinda power is rife for abuse.

I've been a sporadic reddit reader/poster for a few years, but this past month I've had enough and deleted my account. The main draw was niche-topics, but they've been overrun with AI slop, and even the local communities have become echo-chambers rather than posts of new bands, events, etc. The local newspaper can tell me about those already.

Also the software / programming subs are just spam hell now.

Word-Word-#### have become the norm ever since they've been pushing mobile users to use reddit. They also are a good source of questionable users.

Assuming you do indeed still use "old" reddit, the next time you see such a comment, open their account page in a private window (or any browser that isn't logged in). They might look different to themselves and most others.

One thing I found out is that normies really don't care about their usernames. They fundamentally don't understand the need for pseudonymity on the internet, so they are okay with whatever the website assigns to them.

It's just a little bit of extra friction to them to start sharing their opinions on the site.

Only for arbitrary people. Gate kept or low member count communities that exist to facilitate a discussion between appliance repair men, literature enthusiasts, fly tying hobbyists or owners of a particular model of vehicle are largely alive and well (unfortunately a lot of them moved from forums to facebook, but still.

at this point astroturfing is a given... corporations do it, governments do it, individuals do it... anonymous content in aggregate can not be relied on

An id-with-options-for-anonymity solution would go a long way but no one is remotely interested in that because it would just crater all these companies valuations if you figured out 60k subscribers were actually 45k bots, and 80% comments were automated agentic replies.

I had launched almost 10 years ago a campaign in indiegogo and immediately got spammed with people selling marketing campaigns, I launched a few days ago one in gamefound and the same happened. Without it, or you investing on your own marketing campaigns it's just impossible to get any traction of sorts, unless you have a network of contacts that themselves can reach organically other people, and the same for other things, like bootstrapping an online social platform. It's almost as if it's a "cost of doing business".

Most of these marketers themselves have automated funnels, now all using agents, there's a lot of tell-tales on the messages you receive and then on the follow ups too - sometimes to the point that the messages just miss completely things you made clear just on the previous message and just follow a funnel to get you through the door. At a certain threshold or when told explicitly sometimes a human goes into the loop, but 2 messages in it's like they reset back to factory defaults...

I've made recommendations a lot more often than that back when I used reddit just through being active in a specific niche-ish subreddit and regularly answering questions with answers that end up saying 'buy [well-known good product that solves this exact problem you want solved]'. Then again, my account was several years old by that point, and I was recommending probably 4-5~ different products depending on the question, all from different sellers, not to mention that I'd answer all kinds of different questions, building goodwill and recognition, so accusing me of being a bot (or just a human who has a financial interest in promoting certain products) probably wouldn't do much, but if you want assume ill-will, it'd be really hard to truly disprove that kind of accusation.

Everyone understands that pretty girl on instagram who has 300,000 followers is getting paid to show that make up in her stories, why on earth would you think the guy with 300,000 karma posting his fits on /r/malefashionadvice isn't getting the same?

Many long-tenured blog authors claim they don't touch code anymore as well. I think that lends credibility to the veracity of the claim, as shocking as it is to you as an individual.

> Why do this? Well, it's likely this is done as a means of circumnavigating some subreddits filters to ban mentioning of gambling. The word Stake has likely been filtered out of some subs or mentions of gambling outright banned, and this is a way around it. I noticed too when you utilize Ctrl + F, you cannot find the word "Stake" when searching for it on these posts, due to how these figures are considered different.

I saw the comment you linked a while ago and looked for some of the phrases on Google and turned up five or six hits before getting bored; there were a lot more in the search results that I never checked. This was also around the time that Kick was showing up everywhere because they had been paying for their clips to appear on other sites.

https://arctic-shift.photon-reddit.com/search

I'm sure reddit will kill it at some point like they did Reveddit and Unddit, but it works for now.

Can't post honest questions anymore without posting obviously phony pandering banter first to increase your karma. What's worse, it promotes the bad behaviors the bots are actually good it.

Bring back forums.

I have a 15+ year old account that has a hidden history because far too many times someone dug through my comments, took something out of context, and pivoted to that instead of the actual conversation.

My take is that people should respond to the comment not the commenter.

> Young accounts, or accounts with histories that are hidden or wiped.

DDG search "buy pre-aged reddit accounts" and you will find all of these. You can even search reddit for this.

The author of the article has no fucking idea what they are talking about. Buying "comments" is for chumps.

> I score it this way because an account that keeps bringing up the same brand is the product the vendors above are selling.

Or man, I just like my knife: It's older than my kid, and I've never had to do anything but hone it, and it'll still cut a piece of paper or a tomato no sweat. The next comment will be someone asking what brand of knife it is.

at least Eternal September was a human invasion.

it is trivial now to create synthetic multi-platform personas that generate real looking post histories at unlimited scale. the baseline assumption should be that everything on the internet is fake until proven otherwise.

That's in part why the enforcement of the "no reposts" rules and their conditional counterparts is so selective, having the ability to allow/deny these on increasingly large subreddits effectively amounts to running a money printer as you can then pick and choose who is allowed to karma farm, or direct userbases to their hustle culture bullshit reselling pokemon cards, watches, shoes, or bots to do this, etc.

This is also why there is often so much frankly insane drama over moderators getting catfished, outed as pervs/creeps, etc especially after a genuine subreddit with solid original content gets "too popular".

There are also weird second order effects, especially in places like popular subreddits for games, where selectively allowing what complaints actually make it to the top of the sub are utilized by those who make disgusting amounts of money from botting/farming the game to sell in game items or currency for real money, to create what looks like a genuine public outcry for balance changes or features that seem fun/good on paper but at the end of the day only exist to make it easier for them to get more items to sell. This practice has roots predating reddit, back when everything was still forums and the RMT markets for titles like Diablo 2 were in their infancy. Earlier this year an RMT account for Path of Exile was finally banned, you can find videos where people go through archives of what they had on hand when it happened and tally up prices, no bullshit millions of dollars in total value.

I learned a lot of this firsthand by getting involved in a city subreddit when I first moved out on my own, some people found out I could code well enough and tried to pay me a lot of money to assist them in creating these kinds of farms/influence operations. I obviously declined, this is all so fucking stupid! A few of them flew too close to the sun and made millions of dollars through ad programs on places like facebook, used what they could to pay off their college loans, buy a nice car, and then lost their asses in court and declared bankruptcy after giving most of it back.

An article talking about astroturfing but so tone deaf as to not even rewrite its ai generated content to be human readable.

It truly feels like the dead internet.

Then, textual analysis to detect when they’re promoting something specific. This is not hard to detect across the set of all active posters.

That was a good punchline!

Such a terrible change, and it's apparently the default for new users. I have no way to check if the person I'm about to spend 3 minutes typing a reply to is just bleep-bloop.

It's a little unfortunate that when marketers see something that is resistant to commercialization they decide to become even bigger liars instead of letting someone tell them "no".

OP there isn't a word length requirement on blog posts. You put all the information you learned into your instructions for the LLM. Just post that.

    > I wanted to know whether the knife subreddits I read, and scrape for New 
    Knife Day, show any sign of that. Not a hunch about one suspicious comment, 
    but something I could count and someone else could recount.

The language is so obfuscated that the crude draft would really be better than this. I've just realized that one of the telltale signs of LLMs is: inventing a new terminology like here - tail accounts, never giving a direct definition what it really is, and then going with it, like it's obvious.

This is the 7th submission on HN in the last week which has entered my RSS feed, which has AI-tell slop right in the title. It's really discouraging.

Reddit's system rewards these low effort posts for some reason. Over time, the platform becomes less and less trustworthy until it becomes something like Quora.

The worst thing for a forum is to let users punish comments they disagree with, you know, one way by fading out their comments until you cant read them.

r/sanfrancisco is quite negative on the current mayor Daniel Lurie and frequently expresses approval for Zohran Mamdani even though Lurie has an approval rate of 74% in SF [2] while Mamdani has a 69% favorability [3] in NYC largely because of the political skew of the sub.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49556546

[2]: https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/sf-mayor-lurie-...

[3]: https://sri.siena.edu/2026/09/23/siena-poll-of-likely-new-yo...

In some case this is benign, like with advertisers and marketing, and in other cases it is much worse in which case there could be actual foreign enemy governments doing psyop campaigns on reddit.

Reddit isn't controlled by the company. Instead it is controlled by an army of anonymous nobodies who could have all sorts of bad motivations.

They got rid of him just because the owner of the subreddit was someone else who wasn't really using reddit any more but still could kick that mod.

A good example is worldnews. For a long time I thought it was a pretty good source of, well, news. But at some point I started noticing that certain topics (cough Negativity about Israel cough) which got a decent amount of discussion were deleted as duplicates of posts that came in later and had 0 comments and could not be seen on hot/top/whatever.

Back to your topic, I think this is in large part due to the death of multiple forums and personal websites and the aggregation of everyone to like 4 platforms.

In the past, if you were banned or didn't like one forum, you could find another. Or maybe just post your thoughts on your own website/blog. But now nobody will see it unless it's on reddit, discord or YouTube.

I don't think we can get that back, but maybe a bluesky(-ish) forum/reddit alternative where you can chose who you interact/see posts and comments from would work well. It would take another collosal fuckup to get people to move and even then... Lemmy was alive during the API/third party apps thing and nobody really moved.

No. I'm not nasty or disrespectful. I just disagree and give the reasons why.

I try to be helpful but I no longer care. I only glance at the titles in case something new shows up. I don't want to sound like I'm bragging but, as I said, I'm an expert in one area and experienced in the other and reddit users lose that. I know others feel the same way and never go there. I wish I wouldn't.

I recently got banned from subreddit A1 because I commented in subreddit A2 without knowing the ongoing bloodfeud where A1 moderators didn't find the A2 moderators strict enough. I'm a tourist to the topic "A" all together and barely understood the lore of the topic. Let alone the cultural eggshells of following a search result into the wrong subreddit.

Let us see if the pedophiles control this site too. Bookmark this and then check back later to see if it was flagged and removed.

There's no standard of professionalism or repercussion for being a terrible moderator, most of them are anon socially-weird outcasts with a chip on their shoulder.

When you're paying someone real money to be a moderator they tend to do a good job because they want to continue receiving that payment. The reward for a Reddit moderator is instead to feel like you're important and powerful, and that you can punish people you disagree with.

It also means that their power can generally be easily bought, because again, there's no repercussions for manipulating the board. Reddits incentives are entirely broken.

One of the modern issues is that once new competitors enter the market, their funders are publicized to stoke the mob's torches. When Digg was making its comeback last year, I remember seeing one about how it had funding from right wing organizations to incite left wing users to abandon it. This was also why news about George Soros buying Hot Ones made some headlines for a while.

The second a "public forum" starts gaining traction, people immediately start talking about the underlining "psyop" of the content that gets shared. But like... yeah, not everyone agrees on everything. I think that's why you DO sort of need a figurehead to be like "this is what I'm fine with my users talking about". They're immediately chastised as heartless lizard people (Zuck with Facebook), fascist (Musk with Twitter), or whatever "the Reddit mob" thinks of Huffman, but like... that's EVERY platform. Have you seen what WoW players think about Blizzard? Or how Discord's mascot is currently getting treated? 4chan was never good and whatnot.

People want a 'neutral' platform, but what they mean is a neutral platform where everything fits their personal ideologies, with an microcosm of "stupid" users that larp on the site (remember r/DogFort?). The issue, as has always been the case, is that once you have a group, someone realizes there's value in leading it. Then it becomes a textbook case of the Simple Sabotage Field Manual, but for convincing the users to buy products, watch films, and engage in specific activities that align with a demographic to reinforce beliefs.

Anyway, back to remembering to GET OFF THE INTERNET and continue sharing my stupid little fairy tale.