A warning about subreddit manipulation. Three prominent accounts and frequent commenters have been suspended from Reddit, all were accounts I frequently suspected of manipulating conversation and/or personally attacking people.
A warning about subreddit manipulation. Three prominent accounts and frequent commenters have been suspended from Reddit, all were accounts I frequently suspected of manipulating conversation and/or personally attacking people.
I noticed a number of people who I had always been seeing commenting on threads and I had long suspected were rotating through accounts disappeared in the recent month or so.
I discovered they have all been [suspended](https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/360045734591) from Reddit.
Thank you Reddit for helping out, and I hope we can all push for transparent, fact-based, professional discussions in here.
The bootcamp industry is hard to navigate, the market is bad right now for entry level, and having either manipulated or personally attacks in discussions doesn't help anyone.
u/dowcet wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Which accounts/posts?
u/michaelnovatireplied·
I don't want to share publicly but since your a mod I'll DM privately
u/JayawardenepuraKotte wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
If only bootcamp founders and staff had user flairs... Students could set them up too but again you never know if they're recommending genuinely or there's monetary incentive behind (recently found out someone that recommended me to a well known bootcamp had referrals 😂).
u/michaelnovatireplied·
There's another bootcamp sub that I moderate where I setup all kinds of flairs yeah, but it's not a popular sub haha.
u/daaaaaaaaamndaniel wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Given they've been suspended, what's the harm in sharing?
u/michaelnovatireplied·
Reddit has strict doxing rules and I don't want to call anyone specific out.
u/dowcet wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
> they get downvoted by accounts that are barely active on Reddit
How can you know who is doing the downvoting?
> When something gets said positive by a clear user who has reasons to post positive, it gets upvoted to oblivion in record time as well.
Which users? If you have cl
u/michaelnovatireplied·
Yeah downvoting and upvoting is impossible to deal with without asking Reddit to intervene and checkout who is doing what from which computers and where.
If an entire comment thread has comments with -1 to +2 votes in 24 hours and then someone makes a comment and it gets +10 votes in 20 minutes, there's not much a mod can do, but Reddit can investigate and ban people.
u/Tanker70 wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Yikes. A few things:
1. That’s predictable - it’s the internet and you can say whatever (hyperbole) you want with very few repercussions. Sad to see it happening here, where a number of people turn to for advice that could impact their futures.
2. I know we don’t dox, which is
u/michaelnovatireplied·
For 2. I don't know if this was one person or multiple people, but all three had distinct patterns in their posts and there is at least one currently active member with similar message structure and tone.
I don't know the reasons for being removed and I don't want to speculate beyond what the link I pasted from Reddit says.
But I can give the patterns:
\- personal attacked in comments, i.e. name calling, turning disagreements into personal attacks about intelligence
\- all three stated provable false information
\- I believe all 3 claimed to be bootcamp grads
\- I didn't perceive any of the users as blatantly or obviously pushing any specific bootcamp or program
\------
Outside of Reddit I was sent some information about someone at a bootcamp asking people to comment on a thread, seemed innocent enough, but when those people ask other people it could appear to be manipulation too.
I worked at Facebook for 8 years, I worked on tools to monitor and deal with bad actors. Reddit has tremendous amounts of forensic information on who is doing what and if you have multiple accounts or are using fake accounts to manipulate conversations - they know. The problem is that this sub is too small for small-scale manipulation to trigger any of that... unless those accounts get reported.
u/workright wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
VPN, throwaway account, you could easily give everyone else the info.
u/michaelnovatireplied·
Even with VPN they can tell you are making fake accounts. There's something called "fingerprinting" and engineers spend a lot of time finding obscure ways to identify your computer specifically to prevent fraud, bots, etc...
After working at FB for so long, I learned the only thing you can really do is have integrity and don't play games.
u/CodedCoder wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
The thing is, I get what you are saying, maybe I was just wishful thinking lol. but it is the same accounts that do it, one post posts something on a specific topic about a specific named school, and in 5 minutes has 20 to 30 upvotes, a lot of the replies are negative about the s
u/michaelnovatireplied·
Ironically this post had a 97% upvote rate last night and then suddently dropped to 70% when I woke up and the number of shares went from 2 to 9. So that looks like people shared it and asked to downvote it... amazing how a post calling out manipulation is being manipulated.