Reddit Manipulation

acidie

A=A
May 27, 2008
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Don't give two fucks about gamergate or any of that bullshit and being a gay webmaster I don't care about women at all; but I found this interesting.

Basically an ex-mod from Reddit talking about manipulation and shit to some half interested neck beard.

Whats interesting is how easy it seems not only to become a mod but also how easy it is to ingratiate yourself to the establishment.

And the bonus is, once your in "the club" manipulating votes is basically ignored.

Something to think about if you want to get traffic from "the front page of the internet" without being hassled.

https://soundcloud.com/user613982511/recording-xm-2014
 


This was already posted by affiliatearmy in this thread.

Not trying to seal the credit, but it bears repeating.

Lately I've found that the media (here in Australia particularly) has become extremely lazy with sourcing. 90% get their stories from aggregation websites which is what I initially targeted. I knew that if the story blew up on websites such as Reddit & Product Hunt that it would be a success.

Exclusive: How This Man Got the Media to Fall for ShipYourEnemiesGlitter Stunt | | New York Observer
 
AMAs have always been just one big subliminal (or not so subliminal) ad for celebrities to push their latest book/charity/movie/whatever. That's no secret.

I've been manipulating reddit to my advantage for years. It gets billions of page views and you can target people very specifically (by their geo location, sex, interests). Need to push traffic to your new restaurant in Austin ? /r/Austin. Need gaming traffic? Start some drama or ask a question in /r/gaming. Got a an Android app that needs installs? /r/Android. etc. Got a wine related site and the mod of /r/WineTasting account hasnt posted in 3 months? /r/redditrequest and take that fucking shit over.

They key is to blend in and 99% of the time most of them dont even realize they are being marketed to.

Upvotes/Downvotes. Doesnt really matter IMO. Obviously if you can frontpage a large sub you'll get slammed of traffic but I've witnessed threads I post which get 2-3 upvotes, barely a few comments, yet I will have my link in the self.post and will get 100s of hits as long as it remains on the front page of the sub for a few hours.

Cheers my friend.
 
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Upvotes/Downvotes. Doesnt really matter IMO. Obviously if you can frontpage a large sub you'll get slammed of traffic but I've witnessed threads I post which get 2-3 upvotes, barely a few comments, yet I will have my link in the self.post and will get 100s of hits as long as it remains on the front page of the sub for a few hours.

Thanks, useful information.

A couple of questions;

Is there any particular software you use (besides a browser or the Chrome plugin) to manage Reddit?

Also I was wondering what you would think was the best/fastest way to ingrain myself in the culture. I've played with the traffic a little on Reddit but not enough to understand the mindset of the user base.

Basically how do I appear to be one of them, any tips?
 
Is there any particular software you use (besides a browser or the Chrome plugin) to manage Reddit?

Do it all manual brotha. Somethings, in order to get them right, you have to do manually. Sure, you can bot it but you are going to get detected ASAP and your account(s) shadowbanned.


Also I was wondering what you would think was the best/fastest way to ingrain myself in the culture. I've played with the traffic a little on Reddit but not enough to understand the mindset of the user base.

Basically how do I appear to be one of them, any tips?

Simple. Like BoatBurner said, become one. Seriously. Spend a month of your life learning the ins and outs of reddit. The memes, the commons sayings, the culture, and get accustomed to using text post / url posts and gauging what will usually get a decent amount of upvotes.

For example, I just posted using this account I just created. https://www.reddit.com/user/WFExample/ Not every post or submit will be a success but hey, we're marketers, it's all about volume and trial and error. The first two submissions got auto-ghosted because most of the large subreddits have filters that prevent new accounts from posting to cut down on spam (lelz) but as you can see, /r/awesome/ does not. Next, you let this account sit for a few days being idle and then come back and drop your spam subliminal post on it into the subreddit of your choosing.

Also, I highly suggest checking out Karmalytics - Just put in some keywords that are relevant to your websites or industry and you're done. Every morning you will get an email of reddit threads that contain your keyword(s). Just pop into the thread, reply with your url or with relevant information, BLAM, you're done.
 
Don't give two fucks about gamergate or any of that bullshit and being a gay webmaster I don't care about women at all; but I found this interesting.

Basically an ex-mod from Reddit talking about manipulation and shit to some half interested neck beard.

Whats interesting is how easy it seems not only to become a mod but also how easy it is to ingratiate yourself to the establishment.

And the bonus is, once your in "the club" manipulating votes is basically ignored.

Something to think about if you want to get traffic from "the front page of the internet" without being hassled.

https://soundcloud.com/user613982511/recording-xm-2014
reminds me of mr baby man days on digg
 
Produce great content for a sub and schmooze the mods to get a sidebar link, great traffic and extremely steady if there's a decent amount of users subbed :)
 
Also, I highly suggest checking out Karmalytics - Just put in some keywords that are relevant to your websites or industry and you're done. Every morning you will get an email of reddit threads that contain your keyword(s). Just pop into the thread, reply with your url or with relevant information, BLAM, you're done.

Thanks for mentioning karmalytics, going to check them out. I thought I remember the guy posting about it on reddit awhile back but couldn't remember the name. Looks like they monitor HN too, awesome.

You can also use metareddit - all about reddit (free) to do some similar cool stuff too. You can setup keywords to monitor, search reddit better than their traditional site search, "stalk" reddit users to see what subreddits they are most active in etc.

Description of metareddit's "/monitor" tool:

"/monitor
This lets you monitor all new comments, submission titles and descriptions posted to reddit for the mention of a word or phrase. It allows you to find out when people talk about you, a reddit you created, or a topic that interests you.
Monitoring starts when you enter a term, and stops when nobody requested that information for some time.
If you are logged in to metareddit, every term you enter in the form appears as a summary on your (private) userpage; just click your name in the top right corner."
 
Forgot to mention the TheoryOfReddit subreddit has some interesting stuff some people here might like to check out if they want to go deeper down the reddit rabbit hole.

Basically the subreddit is people having discussions about how reddit works, studies on reddit interaction, personal observations about the reddit community and different subreddits and posts, data collection experiments etc... on reddit.

Theory of Reddit is a mildly navel-gazing space for inquiring into what makes Reddit communities work and what we in a community can do to help make it better.
 
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Basically how do I appear to be one of them, any tips?

Bruh...

Each subreddit is different. Different culture, different rules, different "mob mentality."

I have noticed that folks on Reddit tend to be slightly more intelligent than most other "communities" on the internet.

They're real people interested in real information. I actually learn quite a bit on Reddit sometimes...
 
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Fuck me, can't give +rep (fucking wasted it all -neg repping useless cunts). Tomorrow then.


Fucking golden info, thanks.

https://www.reddit.com/r/theoryofreddit

Thanks, this is what I was looking for, gives me an insight of how people think.

Each subreddit is different. Different culture, different rules, different "mob mentality."

This is what I assumed, thanks.

Edit: found this interesting https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfRe...ming_reddit_and_a_few_friendly_reminders_you/
 
Perfect timing for this thread, thanks OP. Been playing around on Reddit last couple days, not all that sure how I was going to even attempt to scale what I want to do. Now I have some ideas. Will report back any interesting learnings.
 
It's easy to do without anything besides a browser and a keyboard + mouse.

I doubt you can front-page a subreddit that has 5mil+ subs with your lil VB6 RedditSpam.exe and list of shared http proxies. :)

I wasn't insinuating that you need 5000 accounts to get something to the front page yourself, you need a fraction of that and only to get the ball rolling. Momentum is important on Reddit and allows you to gain traction much more easily.

Also lol @ VB & HTTP proxies. I only code in LOLCODE