I used to be a lot on r/travel. Back then there were posts with pictures that had upvote ls in the triple to quadruple digit range. There were also user questions, usually in the double digits.
Now the majority is just discussions that mysteriously have thousands of upvotes. And some of them quite boring. That must be bots or fakes directly by reddit. No way this happens naturally.
Is this common practice now or is that something r/travel did specifically?
Yikes. I imagine that happens a lot.
Everyone always talks about their alt accounts, and every time I hear about alr accounts, I’m like “you guys have more than one account”?
But of course they do. And the craziest people like you say will use them to market or take advantage of the system.
This guy has accounts with bios that align with identity groups he wants to speak on behalf of, and they’re like all co-mods, all talk in the same idiosyncratic way. Their comments always include links to not very reputable news sources identically formatted. They comment on each other’s posts with the same canned responses, and are basically the only approved submitters to his subs when he starts out.
And when I talk about different identity groups, this guy has/had profiles with bios like: “I’m a trans woman!” “I’m an anti-fascist satanic atheist!” “I’m a larger woman who isn’t shy about her beauty!” “I’m a Jew!” Then he’d jump in to debates and be like “as a…” and quote himself. “u/princessdragonslayer” used to post nsfw pics of “herself” and quote this guy in the post titles.
It’s also funny cause he self-publishes books that are conflicting in their politics and tries to make sure redditors don’t know. He has a pro-cop book that’s basically fascist, he has a rape-pill book about “Why Men and Women Can’t be Friends,” but on reddit he plays a liberal guy who posts anti-Trump stuff 24/7/365.
Whaaaat wow that’s amazing and uncomfortable.
How do you even follow all of that? Did you just fall down a rabbit hole?
If he tries to make sure redditors don’t know his accounts are connected, how did you find out?
I was on a random sub called badchoicesgoodstories and there was an odd essay/conspiracy post about Hitler that seemed off, because it quoted statements Hitler had made in campaign speeches and purported them as factual accounts of the Nazi party policy. I commented that this was a bad way to approach what amounted to campaign propaganda, and that I had family history that diverged from the claims this post had made. I had also quoted from an encyclopedia which is considered first line reference material for the Third Reich. I found myself immediately banned from 20+ subreddits all at once for “spreading disinformation,” and on questioning it, the person revealed themselves to be a psychotic narcissist, they also deleted my one comment then inserted a false quote of me in response to make me look like a Nazi.
Then I looked at other comments they removed and realized they basically do this all the time, found similar posts containing accounts of how shitty they were, then I started adding people who they were shitty to to a private sub where we could discuss this person (they basically would search their name on reddit and if anyone complained about them they’d go call them Nazis and harass them in whatever sub it happened to be.) So we basically created a list of all their current and previous alt accounts and subreddits, following their own gratuitous self-promotion to their Amazon pages, Goodreads reviews, their publisher company LLCs that published books between all their pseudonyms, one of which was a real-estate holdings company. They tried to get us banned for “stalking” them but since they promoted all of this on reddit themselves and operated as a public figure, their books, comics, memes, were all merchandised and sold through online marketplaces and vendors, there wasn’t much they could do.
They had all their primary accounts suspended recently and lost all their main subreddits, presumably for harassing former co-mods, according to one of them. I currently mod a lemmy community that contains a snippet of their behavior and the full list of their alts and subs, although they’ve left their official name mostly behind and I think trying to keep a lower profile now.