this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2026
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Reddit defining its platform as a place for consumers to discuss brands speaks volumes about its motives.
Compounded by it being mostly bots doing that.
"I bought a brand today!"
"Woah! So did I!"
"I'm so happy this brand has made my life!"
"Yeah! So it has mine!"
Fucking riveting stuff there.
Reddit is astroturfed from day 1. By that I mean they literally faked it until they made it as in the early days Reddit was 100% consisted of sock puppets, whose activity convinced outside people to join.
It's long forgotten how reddit was open source. Not only that but people hosted their own instances of reddit as test beds for botting and who knows what else.
The quickmeme incident got memoryholed real fast. That era of image macro memes was basically entirely fabricated.
What quickmeme incident? I must have missed that one.
I disagree, I met people from reddit at meets IRL and we played darts and drank beer.
I met my best friends on a reddit d&d lfg post
Crisis actors. Spez is going for the long con.
Nothing to disagree with. It’s a fact about how they got Reddit going.
astroturfing dint take off til trump came into the picture the 1st term, thats when people start flooding the politics and news subs(the gop at the time were threatening to hold social media platforms like reddit , if they dont ban these "illicit subs"). reddit was more diverse before his 1st term.
but to be fair, the first post ever on Reddit was the Downing Street Memo.
remember the silence brand crab? pepperidge farms remembers...
remember they had a reddit layout for mobile but they killed it for the app. i think it was called ireddit.
I mean, you're talking about Reddit, which is a brand, in this comment.
Like, people talk about things, and a lot of things have brands.
It's just a bit two-faced and dishonest for Reddit to be marketing itself to users as a platform for genuine discussion while in actuality being a marketing platform for brands.
If more Redditors realized what Reddit has become, they might be more willing to join a platform without the centralized control that enables manipulation.
With enough users on the Fediverse, the astroturfing will come. It's not really inherently resistant to brand placements etc. It's just not big enough to get corporate attention.
Astroturfing will come, but the platform itself can't as easily be designed to enable it with preferential algorithms and tracking. If an instance injects ads into its frontend, users can easily switch instances or use an alternative frontend or app; if a specific instance is known to host promotional posts, it can be easily defederated or otherwise blocked.
The same cannot be said for blocking ads or tracking on Reddit, particularly for mobile users.
I mean, it kinda is.
Lemmy is setup in a way that it totally crumbles at around 100-200k active users. The "every instance replicates almost everything while being legally liable if it doesn't correctly moderate everything" means that it's close to impossible to run a Lemmy instance if there's too many people on the platform.
Reddit has more than one billion accounts and hundreds of millions of active users.
Lemmy physically cannot sustain anything near those numbers. Thus it's kinda hard-coded to prevent it from getting serious astroturfing, for better and for worse.
For comparison: Both the LTT forum and the crackberry forum have more total and more active users than all of Lemmy combined.
If it ever grew that much instances could go private for signups, require referrals, only federate to select communities (it would be necessary at that point to avoid bad actors) Like a whitelist instead of or in addition to the blocklist.
fucking s&p 500 stock. What are they expecting
he means people making content by arguing/responds with BOTS who argue/responds with users and other bots.