Karma Farms

https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/2cbf9l/karma_farms/

created by [deleted] on 01/08/2014 at 07:17 UTC

54 upvotes, 12 top-level comments (showing 12)

Karma Farms?

I'm in no way trying to start conspiracy theories or state that I actually believe this to be a "thing", but the Unidan fiasco got me thinking about an odd idea: What is there about reddit's administration that could keep someone from setting up a private subreddit where a user could pay to be whitelisted, and once allowed to post, could reap several hundred upvotes by the sub's bot accounts? Would this throw any flags to admins? Other users wouldn't see the posts to the private sub, and there are people desperate enough to pay for votes... So why is this a flawed premise?

Enlighten me "theory".

Comments

Comment by [deleted] at 01/08/2014 at 07:27 UTC

38 upvotes, 2 direct replies

admins can see into private subs and track where the votes are coming from.

People could do this, but I doubt it would work for very long.

Comment by jjrs at 01/08/2014 at 09:23 UTC*

16 upvotes, 1 direct replies

I'm assuming they bust spammers by conducting an analysis on who is upvoting whom, and looking for patterns. That's why people who use sockpuppets to upvote their stuff invariably get caught, despite the existence of VPNs that allow people to hide IPs. Another thing they can likely do is spot bots by looking for machine-like behavior, e.g., doing nothing on reddit but upvoting people in an obscure private subreddit, day and night, without so much as clicking on links.

Comment by Shaper_pmp at 01/08/2014 at 13:46 UTC*

15 upvotes, 0 direct replies

What is there about reddit's administration that could keep someone from setting up a private subreddit where a user could pay to be whitelisted, and once allowed to post, could reap several hundred upvotes by the sub's bot accounts?

• Admins can see what goes on in private subreddits. Admins can see and do *anything* on the site, so a private subreddit is no defence against them.
• A few hundred upvotes is worthless in the cosmic scheme of things - some people have karma in the hundreds of thousands, and a few even have *millions*. A karma-farm that gave even a few hundred would be barely worth even noticing... but the larger you make the collection of automated accounts the more noticeable it becomes to the admins.
• Reddit has a sophisticated suite of automated tools to spot things like blocs of accounts that vote in suspiciously-similar ways, and flags them for investigation by the admins (which usually leads to a shadowban in short order). It can easily scan all user-behaviour and spot things like this even when it's only a *handful* of users in a private subreddit, let alone hundreds.
• Once the admins find a karma-farm they can easily track every post in the subreddit and any account that's posted there. Therefore they can instantly ban, remove the illicit karma or simply zero the karma score of anyone who ever used it, no matter how long ago they did it.

In short it's impossible to hide form the admins, it's difficult to do on a scale large enough that it would make any significant, noticeable difference, it's too easy to automatically spot even at truly trivial/negligible levels that aren't worth doing, and once you took part in one the admins could discover you had at any point in the future and retroactively decide to ban you for it.

Edit: Also I'm pretty sure paying for access to a subreddit is against reddit's TOS - if you arranged/advertised it anywhere on reddit the admins could easily spot the PMs in your account history and follow you to the subreddit, and if you did it off reddit then you'd first have the problem of advertising it to redditors and secondly you'd end up getting caught by the existing anti-voting-bloc systems anyway.

Comment by [deleted] at 01/08/2014 at 13:04 UTC

5 upvotes, 1 direct replies

[deleted]

Comment by Rekel at 01/08/2014 at 10:15 UTC

6 upvotes, 1 direct replies

Well, /r/freekarma exists.

Comment by Maeby78 at 01/08/2014 at 15:55 UTC

4 upvotes, 1 direct replies

I missed the "Unidan fiasco".

Comment by Phinaeus at 02/08/2014 at 06:04 UTC

2 upvotes, 0 direct replies

Here's my take on it. Unidan admitted that the sockpuppeting began about a year ago which is a hell of a long time for it to be an automatically scripted thing. I think someone actually reported him to the admins *and then* he got banned. Why did it take so long? I don't think it's automatic.

This makes sense to me for a couple of reasons. Assuming it was an automatic thing, you'd have a bot constantly checking each users votes versus all the other users. This has an O(!n) time complexity (basically, it's really bad because the more users you have, the vastly more possible connections you must look into). I don't see very many other ways around this large time complexity.

It would be much faster to analyze for example, 10 different accounts. All you'd have to do is have a script check their IPs and upvotes and maybe some hardware information if reddit collects that sort of thing.

I think this explains why it took so long for Unidan to be banned. So coming off from this, I think it's definitely possible but once the lid gets blown off, it's a definite shadowban. However since reddit only remembers the last 1000 comments you've made, I think it's possible for such a scheme to work.

Comment by [deleted] at 01/08/2014 at 10:44 UTC

3 upvotes, 0 direct replies

[removed]

Comment by WeAreAllApes at 02/08/2014 at 06:51 UTC

1 upvotes, 0 direct replies

I don't think even most karma whores are actually after karma itself. They are after attention. If no real people are giving them attention, the karma counter really is worthless, even to a karma whore

Comment by [deleted] at 03/08/2014 at 19:16 UTC

1 upvotes, 0 direct replies

When people's posting history gets brought up against them, it's usually because users can amass karma in widely hated subs and then move around with some vague sense of credibility.

Comment by Croscoe at 04/08/2014 at 06:09 UTC

1 upvotes, 0 direct replies

Damn, this website cray cray

Comment by villiger2 at 01/08/2014 at 14:26 UTC

1 upvotes, 0 direct replies

What is the point? If people are wasting their time amassing bits hosted on a server somewhere then they're not doing anything damaging. Big deal?