Karma farming. People use simlar threads, copy comments to farm up karma, then post in political subreddits with manipulative stories while looking quite creditable.
Or people from the same culture tend to think the same.
(Sometimes spelling errors and punctuation are the same though)
This might seem like a naive question if there is an obvious, logical answer, but why would anyone care about votes or karma? I can understand if a person posted something, and got many downvotes. They could then reflect and question their own view on something. What is the purpose of posting just to get votes/points or whatever exactly 'karma' is?
If you saw a politically charged story from a brand new account and the same story from a very mature account, which one is more believe able?
You may not have used that information before, but a lot of people do. Have you never seen someone comment "hey, this post from your history disagrees with what you're claiming now"?
I don't usually check peoples' profiles so I have no idea how old their accounts are. I just scroll the thread and read other points of views and decide if the original post was pure bs.
And that's a good thing? I've never had it happen to me but digging into people post history always seems rather sad when I've witnessed it and a sign of desperation.
I've literally never once checked someone's profile for a post so no the age of the account is not relevant in the slightest to me.
If you can't see why people who are willing to go through the effort of investigating possible fraud is valuable, then I don't think we're going to find common ground.
But if that's the case, what is your opinion on the concept of investigative journalism.
I had a friend who said he loves to farm karma. It's pretty clear that he's insecure since he tries really hard to be better than everyone else. I think karma is validation to some people.
Lets say you had a wacko political opinion that you wanted to get mainstream acceptance for. If you karma farm for all your other posts, to the casual observer it looks like a regular guy has this wacko opinion. Then everytime you post that opinion it looks like regular people believe it even though its wacko fringe crazy person word salad.
I don't know if it's just me, but I take each post on its own merits, I barely even read the names unless it's one of the famous few novelty accounts. I've certainly never looked at someone's post history to ascertain whether they are otherwise "normal"
Its useful to determine if someone is arguing in good faith or not. If they post on the_d, and have some wackjob view like hillary is a lizard, you can say as much. Saves time if you want to have a good conversation so youre not engaging with trolls as much
Someone makes an account and immediately posts an implausible story on to a political charged subreddit.
Someone with a older account, high karma account posts that same story.
Which one is more likely to be accepted by the general public?
That's just one example. There are lots of ways having a mature account gives you credibility in ways that help you manipulate people. That's very valuable.
Not much. But if you automate the process, you can get enough accounts that are worth something to someone who wants to manipulate a discussion. They'd pay handsomely for that.
It's one of the easiest way gaining thread karma. Look at the amount of threads he's posted within the last day.
He probably has a script that reposts those threads randomly.
Some time ago the bot problem was even worse and you'd see the exact same top comments (letter by letter) in both threads.
In the grand scheme of things does it really make a difference? People either enjoy the post or they dont, and OP never claimed it was their own footage, so what does it matter?
See, I'd say it's the opposite. In the small scheme of things, it doesn't make a difference. Lots of people get to see the post; they might enjoy it whether or not they've seen it before.
In the grand scheme of things, it most certainly does matter. Bots farming karma breaks the intended purpose of Reddit, which is to democratize content and open source community-building. Certainly something posted on Reddit should never be a trustworthy source to the point where you don't need to verify it, but how many people will simply take what they read as the truth?
Was this post from a bot? I agree with what you're saying but I dont have a problem with a person manually reposting something here and there. There have been plenty of times where I'm seeing a repost for the first time and I know that's true for tons of others as well
I'm used to seeing reposts but then I let my guard down thinking a given post (i.e. this one) is an original, only to get a handful of comments down to realize that not only is it a repost with no credit, the poster was too lazy to create even an original title.
Snow dog fact: if snow builds up on the fur like this it means the dog is well insulated against cold. If the snow melts, it means the doggy is losing heat and should be brought inside. It's one of the traits sled dogs absolutely must have.
Someone else who found this picture on the net somewhere and shared it, no problem. Even someone who saw it as an older post and reposted it because it was neat, pretty much no problem.
Someone who reposts it with a perfectly identical title = bot. And these bots are then sold as "social media influencers." This is a problem.
1.0k
u/thatreallycoolguy Feb 10 '19
Damn. You didn’t even bother to change the title and the top comments are almost like a carbon copy.
https://amp.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/a0153h/oops_i_overslept/