Reddit is absolutely insane in the way they attempt to handle and mitigate spam. The evolution of reddit's position on blog spam and intolerance of anything original has gotten so blown out of proportion. It used to be that blog spam was defined as the content that bloggers write that basically take an article or video, add a sentence or two of their own bullshit, and link to the original article at the bottom. The value of what the blogger is contributing is minuscule, especially when compared to the amount of page views and ad dollars they could get from a single successful reddit post. The real content was in the original content - sites like wired or nytimes or some guy on youtube. That is where the link on reddit should take you. The misunderstanding and overuse of this term evolved quickly over time. Even though the official reddit policy is the same (10% can be your content or whatever) the way the users and individual mods view original content has changed. Now anything not hosted on a reputable site or blog is almost universally downvoted. About a year or two ago a debate was started about webcomics being rehosted on imgur and sometimes a failure to even credit the original artist. The debate was mostly between people who desired to instaview the image (using RES or hoverzoom) versus supporting the comic artist and actually clicking their link. However, some people were openly against clicking on an artists page because of ad dollars. While this argument varied a bit from the blogspam argument, it still shows the progression of how paranoid and overprotective reddit users had gotten. They go out of their way to avoid being "taken advantage of" which basically means downvoting any content if it is hosted off reddit and not on a "reputable site." Recently both The Atlantic and Business Insider and RT were banned (the first two temporarily site wide, RT only in /r/news). Adage created their own subreddit to post their own content and got banned. Memegenerator was called out for having one of their own moderating /r/adviceanimals and letting those posts get more upvotes than others. It's just a fucked world out there on reddit regarding spam, blogspam, not spam, submitting your own shit. Gaming reddit has become something of a fun challenge that a large amount of people are trying to do. Their success rate is probably far higher than any of us know. There is even a blackhat SEO tactic that involves overly post your competitors site to reddit to get the domain permabanned and then allow you to focus on other SEO tactics and not worry about reddit. It's gone too damn far. The only domains allowed are reputable ones. And even those can lead to a massive conspiracy like memegenerator. I would normally say that users don't need protecting from evil gaming blogspammers, but today, on reddit, they might. The influx of absolutely astoundingly immature people who probably don't know or care to learn what blogspam is and why it matters has changed reddit completely. Plus the knowledge that a frontpage hit on reddit can get your millions of clicks makes the number of people who want to do that much larger and much more determined. Moderators and reddit admins are sinking quickly and I don't think there is any hope in saving them unless they have a massive policy shift. The reward of a gaming reddit is too valuable. I'm just glad hubski has a good group of people who have brains, support each other, and know how to silently ignore the fuck out of spam. ps: KB I have been trying to find a comment from probably 3 years ago and it might have been you who wrote it. It was a really awesome comment on blogspam and what is and isn't blogspam and how it was originally defined and all sorts of wonderful stuff. For some strange reason I think it was on a post about steve martin. I don't know but now it's bothering me.Reddit does not have this ability, and that is why moderating is warfare.
Ok, I can chip in in this comment (finally!) First of all: I'm a moderator in the subreddit that caused the biggest downfall of a website outside reddit for vote rigging (quickmeme). I wasn't a mod back then, but I did was one when the second one fell (memegenerator). I'm going to talk about spam and about memegenerator & its vote rigging. Spam: In my subreddit we used to have LOTS of spam. Our moderating job was probably 75%~ deleting them. Blatant spam. The sub is based on sharing memes (yep, it's AdviceAnimals if you hadn't noticed yet), so when we found a post that didn't linked to a meme, the post was inmediatly taken down and flagged as spam (if we caught it, sometimes, the spam gets past of guards). An example of that "spam that gets past our guards" happened the same week I got promoted: a random user posted something from a random meme maker (I don't remember its name right now) and used bot accounts to upvote it and get it to the front, where everyone who opened reddit at that time would see it. They'd open it (the link wasn't RES-compatible, so they couldn't open it without clicking) check the meme (a rather lame one, btw) and close it. No harm done, right? They didn't knew it got upvoted by bot accounts, so they made no harm? Wrong. Turns out that account was a pretty new one, with just 2 or 3 submissions from imgur (so it would look like a normal account for the mods) and then submitted the submission from that unknown page. We get 600k~ visits on a daily basis, let's say that 500k~ clicked it. That website had 4 or 5 ads IIRC, so BAM! Some random guy on the internet made 10k~ $ by gaming reddit once. And as I see it, sharing something "to the top" in hubski could be as easy as vote-rigging something in reddit (as far as I know, maybe you have a way to prevent that that I don't know). Memegenerator & vote-rigging. | And even those can lead to a massive conspiracy like memegenerator. | Some of my mates in the mod team actually thought that the vote-rigging made by memegenerator was fake (fake in the sense that they didn't promoted it, but instead someone else made it to kick them out of reddit), me included. The vote-rigging was ridiculously obvious (23-4 on a submission made 7 or 8 minutes ago, 3-1/4-0 on everything else). So far we have no proof about that (the only ones who could give us are the admins, and they didn't contacted us, so who knows). Probably this comment looks a tad crazy, but I just want to high-light something: do you have any way to prevent...mmm... "share-rigging"? [I apologize before-hand for any grammar mistake I could have made, I'm not a native english]
"It isn't a problem until it's a problem and when it's a problem you'll be in a much better position to find a solution" Zygar told me that when I was going through endless what ifs the other day. I think it holds true for this situation.
To elaborate— You have the most information about how to solve a problem once it's become a problem. If you're running into scaling issues—you very, very quickly find out where the chief bottleneck lies and can work out a solution. And when spammers slowly try to take over, you'll be able to observe the ways in which they game the system and respond appropriately. Often, the biggest problems are the ones which you can't predict.
They have no other choice. I'll hazard the guess that you know hella more about SEO than I do, so feel free to check my ass when I overstate: - Reddit was designed, from the very beginning, to be an outwardly-facing site. It's a link aggregator. Its whole raison d'être is to index, basically, for its community. - Reddit has no design features that allow it to parse "good content" from "bad content" the way, say, Google does. It's more of a "Yahoo-type" engine - Reddit's content is built by hand. Want good content, put it in. Want bad content, keep it out. Considering Alexis and Steve basically sockpuppeted their way to having a community, "gaming" Reddit is in its very DNA. - The implosion of slashdot and the implosion of Digg gave lots of people nowhere to go but Reddit. Meanwhile, the advent of F7U12 cartoons siphoned off a large percentage of angsty teens (and pre-teens) from /b/ to Reddit. Finally, the open graph of Facebook led to cross-pollination all across the Internet with Reddit as its initial vector. - Add in Obama's AMA. All of a sudden, PR firms are required to pay attention to Reddit. Where Reddit goes, so goes the Internet - and let's be honest, CNN has basically been mining Reddit for its human interest stories for about six years now. So whereas all those geeks used to share Reddit shit on their Facebook to be hip, now everybody grabs shit directly off of Reddit. ... and it's still, at its most basic level, an architecture of sockpuppetry. SEO and Reddit are like blood and vampires. I don't care how sparkly you are, I don't care how many rabbits you eat, I don't care how much you fight your nature - at a basic, carnal level, Reddit is a fucking spam magnet. Its early community existed despite this, not because of it, and the content it has now exists despite the attempts of the majority of its users, not because of it. Reddit really has become a madrassa for baby SEO jihadis. Each individual little 'tard on there is SEO-ing his way to karma. No wonder that anyone with a modicum of skill at it ends up dominating traffic. this comment sent this spatula to the top of Alexa's product search. Worldwide. For three days. By accident. You'd game the system too. * * * RE: Steve Martin - was it this link? 'cuz that's not me. otherwiseyep is a clever chap who is unsung entirely too much.Reddit is absolutely insane in the way they attempt to handle and mitigate spam. The evolution of reddit's position on blog spam and intolerance of anything original has gotten so blown out of proportion.
You're absolutely right and no, you didn't overstep your claims about SEO at all. I only know a bit because I've been doing the things the SEO company we hired tells me to. There is a lot of basic stuff like backlinks that reddit helps. In a nutshell if your site is linked from another reputable site (there are different levels of reputation) then Google sees you as being better and your listing goes up. So one backlink on a site like reddit will help your ranking on Google. That's why /r/all/new is so terribly filled with obvious spam links. This is a whole separate issue from the clickbaiting, adsense, pageviews thing that blogs also do (#1 offenders are HuffPo & BuzzFeed). This is another excellent point that I hadn't thought about. CNN has deteriorated as well. They have been pulling quotes and photos from twitter rather than getting reporters on scene for years now. In high school I remember CNN as being the reputable, objective spot. Of course reddit is going to be another great, minimal-effort source for fluffy content. I also remember the transition from posting the links to the stuff you found on reddit to facebook/twitter/blogs rather than linking to the reddit thread itself. That was a huge shift, occurring about the time of the digg exodus. When it went from being a secret cool kids club to a publicly cool club. I remember being guilty of posting content I found on reddit and having a couple friends who would post the same shit. We felt like we were part of some little inside club. We knew we were posting content that we found on reddit, but didn't call each other out on it. And holy shit I can't believe you found that link AND I was right about the Steve Martin thing. Bizarre. Thanks so much; that was bothering the shit out of me! Even 3 years ago some reddit users understood that fact and but were already fighting a losing battle. Blah. See how far reddit has shifted. Now the best way to accumulate posts is to repost shit that was posted a month, 2 months, a year ago. This. This. This. Blah.CNN has basically been mining Reddit for its human interest stories for about six years now.
It's okay to submit a link to a secondary source of commentary or analysis, provided that the secondary analysis is the substance of the submission. E.g., a detailed critique of a film review that raises interesting points about the reviewing process or biases of the reviewer is not blogspam.
The BEST internet is one where every single blog, website, forum, image gallery, e-commerce site, news aggregator, etc is trying to post dense, high-quality, original content. The WORST internet is one where every site is instead trying to hijack page views by re-posting content that is already available elsewhere. The PURPOSE of sites like reddit is to drill down to the interesting, original, dense content. The HOPE is that this kind of approach will spur more and better content creation and a less-cluttered internet.
Do you have the link for the history of chan boards? It was a reddit post from years ago, and it was a history of where all the smart kids would hang out on the internet. The japanese chan boards, then moot learning some japanese and wanting to host his own chan site, then some history of somethingawful and then eventually, with the air of an aged coal miner with granite eyes, he proclaims that the smart kids come to reddit now. Just cause we're doing it, here are two posts you made under my favorite bookmark folder, that would be in my primer for someone just starting to internet.
It is incredibly easy to game reddit, and the temptation to do so gets stronger as the site gets increasingly iron-fisted about the 'not mine' policy toward original content. I don't, though, because I feel dirty doing it. Think about content on a spectrum from 1 (awful) to 10 ("best of"). Most of the content on the front page is about a 5, 6, or 7. But most of the content not on the front page is a 5, 6, or 7 also. What's determining whether something reaches the front page isn't necessarily the qualify of the content, but how many upvotes it got to start with. If you had, say, 30-40 IPs you could use to give a link or comment 30-40 upvotes within a short time-frame after that link was submitted (say, two hours) then that link's chances of rising to the top of the front page would be something like 1-in-10. If it's any good, your chances are even higher than that. In '07 or so, I tried to submit some links and they'd sit in /new only to be downvoted by the three people and never seen again. So I decided to conduct an experiment: I had a router that gave me a new IP every time I reset it, so I just used this to get ~30 different IPs and gave that many unique upvotes to a link. At that point I didn't need to do anything else: the link skyrocketed to the front page. This works for comments, too, by the way. And as I'm sure you've noticed, this is what 'brigading' is in essence, just with multiple people. I've called this Upvote Padding. Most of the people who are "gaming" reddit aren't actually forcing something to the front page with thousands of upvotes; rather, they're giving their links a tremendous head-start and letting a herd of redditors stampede it to the top because their view of "good" and "bad" is too influenced by the pre-established views of others. So I'm almost certain that major companies are doing this for the front page. If I was able to do this in 2007 with a single router, I can't imagine what corporations who may have access to thousands of available IPs are doing.Gaming reddit has become something of a fun challenge that a large amount of people are trying to do. Their success rate is probably far higher than any of us know
That is a key to realizing how easy it is to game reddit. You don't need 1000 accounts - you just need 20-30 upvotes in the first couple hours. If done at the correct time (I've heard 6am western time is smart) it will easily be #10 on the front page because of the algorithm. All yesterdays 2000 upvote posts have been falling over night they are easily replaced by fresh content. The content only has to be semi-good to keep propelling it upwards by "real" votes.If you had, say, 30-40 IPs you could use to give a link or comment 30-40 upvotes within a short time-frame after that link was submitted (say, two hours) then that link's chances of rising to the top of the front page would be something like 1-in-10. If it's any good, your chances are even higher than that.
Vote manipulation is a stupid rule and has been enforced in the dumbest way possible on reddit. Yes, we've seen some very legitimate culprits go down to this rule like Quickmeme which actively gamed the /r/AdviceAnimals and /r/Funny subreddits by using accounts to downvote any non-Quickmeme and upvote any Quickmeme submissions. However, reddit as a site has shut down several subreddits for 'vote manipulation' in the past including /r/niggers when they already have rules against harassment, witch hunting and internet vigilantism clarified within the Personal Information Rule explanation in their FAQ. As some of you know, /r/Niggers was a racist subreddit that basically fostered discriminatory discussion and would occasionally brigade threads, downvoting comments they collectively disagree with and post offensive comments on said threads. Then we have subreddits like /r/MensRights, /r/Cringe, /r/CringePics, /r/ShitRedditSays, /r/SubredditDrama which are already guilty as sin for vote manipulation, stirring witch hunts and overall damaging the community in horrible ways and the admins just don't bat an eyelid. The funniest thing I ever saw was the admins banning the /r/TightShorts subreddit because there were only two mods filtering content on there. After over six requests made in /r/RedditRequest and several more directly made towards the admins from people willing to form a larger mod team, the admins still refused to even respond. This led to the community of that particular subreddit being fragmented across several other subreddits.