MerryNexus

If it were bought and paid for, it wouldn't have four points.

Do you have 500 down votes ready? Because the vote trolls have 500 upvotes.

Downvoting spam is certainly helpful, but the idea that we should stick to the smaller subs (I think) sells the website short.

I hear that a lot when I talk with people about it 'The defaults aren't where it's at any more.' By conceding the default subs we are basically giving up on the website, and is that what we want? Do we want the reddit outsiders see to be dysfunctional? Spreading half truths etc? Are we happy to just retreat and make the reddit experience a very personal one in which small niche communities work?

Reddit used to have a very vocal 'central' sub called reddit.com which unified all the other defaults together, but it's gone now. It would be great to bring something like /r/reddit.com back specifically to talk about issues like this. There's /r/theoryofreddit but it's not a default, and subs like that always end up being fragmented and small.

I'm not sure how it can be done. To be fair to reddit, I think they've made it very difficult to spam the website. Our investigation showed that hackers/spammers really struggled to get it to work. However, because it's so difficult to hijack, the trust the users have in the website is very high. That trust is the honey in the jar to special interests.

Ultimately, with enough money and planning it seems it's possible to get passed the spam filters and hijack yours and my trust in the links.

This is a big issue.

I think more data provided to redditors might help. So we could see in real time where and when votes are coming in. It's very important to get this right, so we all need to figure out a way to fix it.

The video we did this on is here. It was using an account we purchased from a contact we found in our investigation.

We then used a vote system to provide 1000 upvotes to the link, and that was enough to start a kind of chain reaction / feedback loop. People started to upvote the link massively because (we assume) the link was already on the front page.

The perceived popularity of the link made it super popular. For the record I think we got it pretty close to the #1 spot just with the paid for votes. It wasn't 'one or two' it was a thousand.

/u/tweninger could give you great information on redditor behaviour, what's influential and what's not.

UPDATE:

We deliberated for quite a few weeks about what kind of video to use fake votes with. We wanted something that wasn't going to be obviously terrible and arouse suspicion, but something that wouldn't have gone viral on its own. In the end we chose Narcos. The trailer had already been out for a month or so, and not done particularly well. We gave it a headline to appear like an Ad, and then gave it the up vote boost. It worked way more effectively than we could ever have believed.

As for getting some content that would NEVER get upvoted, our pro-Brexit story on /r/UnitedKingdom proves that quite well. It was removed by the mods in the end, but that's because we inadvertently tipped off the commenters that the character was Norwegian. This sent a few curious people on a quick google search to find the professor didn't exist at all, neither did the University, so we shot ourselves in the foot and the post was removed. Hats off to the /r/unitedkingdom mods, but had we not tipped them off, the story would likely have remained.

The system was incredible effective. Could you get to #1 everywhere? Probably not, but you could have a very sizeable impact for not much money at all.