I love how so many people on Reddit are acting like this is a complete shock. That site has been a cesspool of bots and targeted ads for years now, people still believed they were having real conversations with humans? I’d be surprised if legit content was higher than 50%.
Game marketing company takes down blog post bragging about how good it is at astroturfing Reddit after Reddit finds the post
Submitted 8 hours ago by Agent_Karyo@piefed.world to games@lemmy.world
Comments
Aielman15@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
Arcane2077@sh.itjust.works 7 hours ago
That’s just the consequence of being popular. Lemmy isn’t impervious or even resistant to this
real_squids@sopuli.xyz 7 hours ago
And of insanely easy account creation. You didn’t even need an email.
piyuv@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
I’d argue it is resistant. Lemmy is federated, which means smaller instances, making it easier to detect this kind of activity. Crime in a city vs crime in a town situation
Aielman15@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
Oh, absolutely. Which is why I avoid popular social media: you just end up drowning in AI/botted content.
turdcollector69@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
It’s so bad, basically every post there is pushed by bots. The entire purpose of reddit is to shape opinion by forced consensus.
It’s a propaganda machine inside the bloated husk of a forum aggregator.
Lemmy isn’t impervious but it’s much better than reddit.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 hour ago
That really depends on the community. When I was there, I would avoid the larger communities and seek out smaller communities. When I first joined Reddit, it was to avoid the attention-seeking posts by humans, and near the end it was to avoid attention-seeking posts by bots and humans alike. The best content IMO is on subreddits with <100k subs and <5 posts per day.
cerebralhawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 hours ago
There’s a way to look at the top Karma users on Reddit. Most of them are either bots, or corporate account. There’s a Marvel one that posts movie stuff, and some Turbo something or other for gaming. They don’t comment, they just post what their corporate overlords want you to see, and they probably have bots that push their content to the top. They just aggregate popular sites, though, driving people into the ads.
When I was on Reddit, going to that leaderboard to block people was my first stop. Though, I do think there are a few that are interesting, even bots — like the haiku one is amusing. It doesn’t always get it right, but it’s fun to see it try. Then there’s a guy — pretty sure it’s a person, at least — who turns posts into poems. Not quite the same. Got a weird name. Regular Redditors know who they are. “Something for your something”, I think. I don’t block the fun ones. Just the corporate trash.
Manjushri@piefed.social 4 hours ago
Oh, Poem for your Sprog. I remember that one. Users like that are one of the few things I miss about Reddit.
jaybone@lemmy.zip 2 hours ago
Poem for your sprog. I had no problem with the novelty accounts, and even the bot accounts there were clearly just some dev with a quirky sense of humor. Though those got hate from the anti bot purists, for whatever stupid reason.
It’s the corporate, vote manipulating, spam, Russian propaganda etc bots that piss me off. And those are much more subtle and harder to detect.
hootmcgoot@midwest.social 4 hours ago
Poem_for_your_sprog
There are some things i miss about that site.
brsrklf@jlai.lu 4 hours ago
Poem for your sprog, right? Not been on reddit for a while, but encountering a post from that guy was generally a fun moment.
ryathal@sh.itjust.works 2 hours ago
The big subs were full of bots, but for some it didn’t really matter. It a post was a bit but it was still funny on memes or funny then it’s fine. I don’t care if karma farming bots were the majority of posts so long as it’s still good content. The content does seem to be significantly worse now though.
HeyJoe@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
As someone who never saw Instagram before yesterday, I was a little shocked at just how much crap was AI generated and just useless fake content. I kept hearing how bad AI was, but until I saw just how bad I really had no idea. I imagine reddit is getting closer to this exact model soon enough.
Lembot_0005@lemy.lol 6 hours ago
Most people are unable to tell the difference between human and bot and, to be honest, a significant percentage of humans are dumber than modern LLMs.
psx_crab@lemmy.zip 6 hours ago
Reddit be like
User A: i made this
Reddit: fuck off with the self marketing!
User B: my friend(definitely not me) quit their job and made this
Reddit: ohh my god this is brilliant!
DoucheBagMcSwag@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 hours ago
Oh no WHICH marketing company so I can’t avoid them?
bytesonbike@discuss.online 1 hour ago
Assume all of the big ones.
Theres been a lot of positive GTA6 posts across a bunch of the internet, like how they’re “releasing it when theyre ready”.
Which is funny because a few days ago, they fired 30+ people who tried to unionize.
tal@lemmy.today 3 hours ago
An outright confession of what sure sounds like blatant astroturfing—a deceptive marketing campaign that’s meant to look like natural, spontaneous conversation—is probably not the sharpest move for any company that wants to attract or keep new clients.
The clients are just fine with it. This guy was off talking about it to market his company; publishers that he attracted did so because of what he was doing.
The users being astroturfed are the ones who aren’t going to like it.
What the client is going to be pissed about is that the guy mentioned their actual game while trying to promote their astroturfing company:
Still, Beresnev did what he could to put space between War Robots developer My.Games and Trap Plan, telling Kotaku the intent “was to experiment with a more organic way of promoting games on Reddit—without using bots or fake accounts—and to build a new case study we could use in the future,” and that mentioning the game and studio by name was a mistake.
“This was entirely our initiative and not commissioned or endorsed by My.Games in any way,” Beresnev said. “We understand this was a mistake and have since removed the case study. We sincerely apologize to My.Games and the War Robots: Frontiers team for the misunderstanding and any confusion it may have caused.”
Trap Plan by The Numbers
We sell thousands of copies of games a month, collaborate with thousands of creators, work on all platforms from Reddit to TickTok
2023 Trap Plan Founded
$10M+ Sold Games
20+ Clients in 2024
jaybone@lemmy.zip 2 hours ago
How do you do this without having “fake accounts”? How do they define “fake accounts” here?
tal@lemmy.today 2 hours ago
I mean, I would imagine that they may well do that, but there are businesses that buy and sell social accounts. Like, the point is that a legitimate user accrues reputation. I mean, that’s an important element of how humans interact with each other — provide useful information, and I give your opinion more weight and stuff. Social media tends to try to leverage that too. But when someone doesn’t want their account any more for whatever reason, their reputation has value, and so it can be bought and sold.
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Agent_Karyo@piefed.world 2 hours ago
They are lying. A work account that's not labelled as such is a fake account.
tal@lemmy.today 3 hours ago
The clear blend of cynicism and resignation in replies to the Reddit thread about the deleted Trap Plan post clearly illustrate how widely pervasive these practices are perceived to be.
I mean, back when professional game reviewing was more of a thing, game publishers used to do things like take said reviewers on outings and stuff to influence them, give them free copies, whatever. Marketers trying to subvert information flow isn’t something that suddenly showed up with social media.
Speculater@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
“I’m 39 and a single dad to three girls with special needs, but five years ago I quit my job and started pursuing my lifelong dream of being a game developer. This metroidvania styled RPG with roguelite elements is my dream come true. Here’s a short clip of the gameplay.”
Shitty 8-bit sprites jiggle on the screen
Reddit: OMG! I’m literally crying right now as I buy this. It’s so good!
SoleInvictus@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 hours ago
I see you too are familiar with Heart Forth Alicia.
mrnarwall@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
There are definitely pockets of reddit that don’t have their content flooded with bots, but they are the exception in today’s day and age. I especially enjoy the college football subreddit, as there still isn’t quite something similar on lemmy
krashmo@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
Lemmy has those communities, they’re just small and not very active comparatively
Sciaphobia@sh.itjust.works 8 hours ago
Reddit is like, dude you can’t just come out and SAY it.
DoucheBagMcSwag@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 hours ago
Reddit be like all the play writers from South Park when Randy Marsh found out that subliminal messages were being sent to women
theoneandonlyeggboi@lemmings.world 3 hours ago
I think about that episode a lot.
AMillionMonkeys@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
Boy that screenshot from War Robots: Frontiers sure looks intriguing. I’ll wishlist it.
/s
ICastFist@programming.dev 2 hours ago
Wow, it sure is a unique ~game~ experience! I’m ordering a deluxe account right now!!
theoneandonlyeggboi@lemmings.world 3 hours ago
This is a major reason why I never follow hype.
explodicle@sh.itjust.works 3 hours ago
Patient gamers always win
bytesonbike@discuss.online 1 hour ago
You aren’t kidding. I played Kingdom Come Deliverance last year, when I learned about the second one. Was like wow.
Then read how they originally were courting the anti-woke crowd. Who later turned on them because the sequel has “woke” material.
Its great to not be a part of those GAMERS.
tal@lemmy.today 3 hours ago
If there are enough people who wait until after a game has been out for some time to play it, there will be marketers targeting that group too.
They might promote the thing based on value or something other than what the latest flashy game crowd gets, but put enough wallets together and there’s an incentive for someone to go after them. The astroturfing guy’s shtick was that he was targeting individual communities with crafted material to try to appeal to them. PatientGamers is another community.
tal@lemmy.today 3 hours ago
The marketer in the article — as with anyone else trying to do surreptitious marketing of this sort — is in the business of making hype that is hard to distinguish from buzz. If it were trivial to identify hype, he wouldn’t be in business.
RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
r/gaming is shit. Bunch of sycophants all soft criticizing games like a review magazine afraid of offending the makers while talking about their playthrough. Go figure. Heaven help you if you have an actual opinion outside of the box, or don’t know some bit of terminology or lore about a game that is “common knowledge”.
SippyCup@lemmy.ml 31 minutes ago
I was banned from r/gaming for daring to go against that grain, and as I understand that is typical. It was about a game I liked too , just wished they had taken a few risks. I think it was Breakpoint. I had some very harsh things to say about the Ubisoft formula and how much better that game could have been if they had embraced the sneaky techie gameplay instead of the looter shooter bullshit they’d done instead. What’s funny to me is that shortly after release they updated the game to get rid of the looter shooter bullshit. So I clearly wasn’t alone.
RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 11 minutes ago
That sucks.
I left myself after being shouted down over criticizing a game for restricting player kits. The game was more fun without the restrictions, but fuck me for wanting more freedom in player classes.
87Six@lemmy.zip 2 hours ago
I was hated on Reddit for not hating the main character of Horizon Zero Dawn. God forbid someone enjoys a woman speaking.
vithigar@lemmy.ca 1 hour ago
I never understood the hate for Aloy. She was at worst bland with a pretty heavy helping of “I’m better at everything because I’m the main character”, but she’s hardly alone in that, and it doesn’t usually attract that much ire.
I really didn’t understand the complaints that she was unattractive or even outright ugly.
Tattorack@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
Pretty sure Horizon Forbidden Dawn was well liked, despite having a woman speaking, but Horizon Forbidden West was hated on for changing the design of her.
theoneandonlyeggboi@lemmings.world 3 hours ago
Don’t forget the lack of accountability among mods in reddit.
They can remove whatever they want, and we wouldn’t even know it was there. This alone causes people to self-censor.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
That’s basically all large fandom/hobby subs now, in my experience.
Pauce@lemmy.ca 2 hours ago
Yeah if they hit critical mass the quality drops significantly. I’ve bookmark a handful of my niche subs that haven’t hit that point yet but I saw it all the time over the years on there. Even something as straight forward as a liminal space, not as a term but there is a lot of writings on the topic, subreddit just turns into everybody posting pictures of there closets and and any old building.