New Study: At Least 15% of All Reddit Content is Corporate Trolls Trying to Manipulate Public Opinion

medium.com New Study: At Least 15% of All Reddit Content is Corporate Trolls Trying to Manipulate Public…

The Impact of Corporate Trolls on Reddit: A Growing Problem

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One thing I've noticed over the years is that in terms of marketing, reddit has a disproportionately high level of return in interaction relative to its size, while Twitter has traditionally had a low level of return relative to its size.
For some reason, comments on reddit has always been viewed as more trustworthy relative to other social media platform, despite reddit or's general reputation for being confidently incorrect on many subjects.
There are certain people whose entire career was made by their reddit posts, yet, it was always odd to me that reddit never managed to effectively capitalize on this other than making their platform worse with every update.
Testing out this theory has been interesting.
- Reddit's strategy is genuinely brain dead. Just think of the shit they've been up to:
  Jacking up API prices to unreasonable levels and killing off third party apps that brought millions of users on to your platform
  Continuously make the UI shittier and shittier to the point where it's unusable
  Do the same with the app
  Kill off old Reddit which is the sole reason millions of users still use the site
  Add awards and expand the feature to basically become paid reaction emojis
  Remove awards even though they were one of the biggest revenue streams
  Announce it was a mistake and add the awards again
  Add avatars that nobody asked for and make some of them paid
  Add a premium subscription that does nothing and do absolutely nothing to improve it
  Add a bunch of useless features that nobody uses like Reddit live
  Truly the works of geniuses.
  
  Old Reddit still works.
  
  For now, but they've been chipping away at it slowly but surely.
- I worked at startups and I'm not going to deny that I was absolutely horking my company as a solution for years on Reddit. Especially with niche products.
  This was from 2014-2018, and then I left startups and worked in corps.
  When Google has plans to slurp reddit comments, I bet I could gamify reddit even more.

247 comments