• raman_klogius@ani.social
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    6 days ago

    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.

    • OctopusNemeses@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      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.

        • OctopusNemeses@lemmy.world
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          2 days ago

          They used sockpuppet accounts to game r/adviceanimals to push posts from quickmeme.com to the top and bury their competitors. At the time it was the most popular image macro site and subreddit. Once it was exposed, that format of meme basically collapsed.

    • zecg@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      I disagree, I met people from reddit at meets IRL and we played darts and drank beer.

    • Tollana1234567@lemmy.today
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      6 days ago

      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.