I have heard from someone who is knowledgeable insider on machine learning and bots that places like reddit are like 80-90% bots and i could surely believe that when you look at what gets up-voted and such.
You can usually tell by looking at their accounts but people have been known to sell good accounts to bots so it appears more organic.
One of the things Skycoin was working on with their version of social media was a way to eliminate bots and also having client side filtering so you can filter out the idiots rather than the big tech filtering you out, so you can choose what content you want to see.
I came to this conclusion a few years ago that 90% of the internet was astroturfed. Not just by governments and intelligence agencies either. A lot of it is probably corporations and their PR firms promoting narratives about their products or putting down anyone criticising them.
For example on reddit if you criticised Monsanto or Lockheed Martin at any time of day weird shill accounts would show up and defend them at any hour of the day. Likewise going back to 2016 those weird accounts which would show up and post walls of text defending Hillary Clinton with articles from CNN and MSNBC. A combination of bot and shill accounts likely working for one of the big PR firms.
I also came to the conclusion that a lot of the fandoms do the same these days. Most of its bots and shills who do their PR saying whatever the latest turd the TV or gaming industry has produced is wonderful and the best while a lot of genuine people will complain its a giant turd and get thousands of downvotes and replys calling you racist or a trump supporter or far right. For example when the new star trek series came out I had this experience which is when I first realised something was "off".
I remember after Bernie lost the first time and it was Hillary in the General, the NEXT day, as in the NEXT day, all of reddit changed. You couldn't talk about Bernie, and you could only focus on Hillary, otherwise you'd get spam blasted. All posts everywhere shifted and there was absolutely zero discourse, only pro-hillary and anti-trump news.
Yes and one day you could shit talk Hillary as being shady and get hundreds of upvotes, then the next, literally the next day those same style of posts were flooded with downvotes.
I remember seeing someone show off histograms of accounts that shows extremely suspicious posting activity. Tons of consecutive posts with ~1 minute between posts was a sure sign of a bit. A regular user would have their time between posts very sporadic and random but the bots very consistently had obvious lines on this time of day/delay per post heatmap.
I have heard from someone who is knowledgeable insider on machine learning and bots that places like reddit are like 80-90% bots and i could surely believe that when you look at what gets up-voted and such.
You can usually tell by looking at their accounts but people have been known to sell good accounts to bots so it appears more organic.
One of the things Skycoin was working on with their version of social media was a way to eliminate bots and also having client side filtering so you can filter out the idiots rather than the big tech filtering you out, so you can choose what content you want to see.
I came to this conclusion a few years ago that 90% of the internet was astroturfed. Not just by governments and intelligence agencies either. A lot of it is probably corporations and their PR firms promoting narratives about their products or putting down anyone criticising them.
For example on reddit if you criticised Monsanto or Lockheed Martin at any time of day weird shill accounts would show up and defend them at any hour of the day. Likewise going back to 2016 those weird accounts which would show up and post walls of text defending Hillary Clinton with articles from CNN and MSNBC. A combination of bot and shill accounts likely working for one of the big PR firms.
I also came to the conclusion that a lot of the fandoms do the same these days. Most of its bots and shills who do their PR saying whatever the latest turd the TV or gaming industry has produced is wonderful and the best while a lot of genuine people will complain its a giant turd and get thousands of downvotes and replys calling you racist or a trump supporter or far right. For example when the new star trek series came out I had this experience which is when I first realised something was "off".
I remember after Bernie lost the first time and it was Hillary in the General, the NEXT day, as in the NEXT day, all of reddit changed. You couldn't talk about Bernie, and you could only focus on Hillary, otherwise you'd get spam blasted. All posts everywhere shifted and there was absolutely zero discourse, only pro-hillary and anti-trump news.
Yes and one day you could shit talk Hillary as being shady and get hundreds of upvotes, then the next, literally the next day those same style of posts were flooded with downvotes.
Reddit changed a lot after Trump was elected, as did all the social media sites
I remember seeing someone show off histograms of accounts that shows extremely suspicious posting activity. Tons of consecutive posts with ~1 minute between posts was a sure sign of a bit. A regular user would have their time between posts very sporadic and random but the bots very consistently had obvious lines on this time of day/delay per post heatmap.