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

12 upvotes, 0 direct replies (showing 0)

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.

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