Reddit can be easily scammed with minimal work. All it takes to artificially inflate the standing of an article on Reddit (and subsequent website traffic) is for one person with an account which has enough ‘karma’ points to get through Reddit‘s spam filter, and then a group of people upvoting that article once it’s made it through the spam filter.
There are other protocols for ‘best spamming practices’, like how you should upvote and downvote some similar stories to disguise your Reddit activity and make it look organic. You should never upvote a direct link, because that can appear to Reddit’s system as if someone’s sent you the link directly to be upvoted. I know all of this because I knew people in college who were getting paid $$$ to do exactly this, and they told me all about how their weird underworld worked. The clicks sent from Reddit are VALUABLE, with some front page stories sending hundreds of thousands of clicks at a time to websites.
You can see a list of website domains HERE which have been banned on Reddit. This happens most frequently because the scammers are working for multiple clients at once, and think that the more variety of domains they are submitting to Reddit the more organic their activity looks.
What these people don’t realize is how fucking incredibly easy it is to detect when they’re spamming. Just go to the front page of Reddit sometime, scroll until you see a domain that looks out of place, or one you don’t recognize, and take note of the username who submitted that article. Then click on the link to that domain history on Reddit, it will look something like this: https://www.reddit.com/domain/INSERTDOMAINNAMEHERE.com/, and then scroll through that domain history and you’ll likely see that the account who submitted that post and made it to the front page is responsible for the overwhelming majority of that domain’s submission history on Reddit. These people are getting paid to do this. It’s not even up for debate. They maintain hundreds of accounts because they know they’re always just one submission away from losing their favorite username.
This video above, showing how easy it is to get to the top spot on Reddit with just $200 isn’t some big revelation. If you’ve been paying attention to Reddit since DIGG.com crumbled years ago, back when Digg had the same upvote/downvote format as Reddit, then you saw the massive flood of spammers move over to Reddit, continue to submit their spam, and continue to get paid by large corporations. Btw, DIGG has since been reborn as a great blog and it’s something I read every day now, but there was a time when it was all user-submitted content controlled by power users. It’s sad to see that Reddit’s done nothing over the years to stop this from happening because they were gifted the ‘front page of the Internet’ when DIGG failed, you’d think they’d want to protect that.
(video via r/videos)