A Reddit user noticed an odd pattern of upvotes for stories related to G4 TechTV and various other game-related companies. After a little investigation, the firms in question came clean (or at least, accounts seeming to belong to them came clean), and admitted that they had a relationship with a pro linkspammer ("social networking specialist") who was running up to 20 Reddit identities at once and using them to game the outcomes. The linkspammer (or at least, an account seeming to belong to the linkspammer) has
admitted it:
I would go into why I do social media but it's personal and I don't like to give out personal information. Btw. As masterofhyrule. I would like to say I didn't spam digg back then, I just added a bunch of friends to share to to get my videos on the front page but when I saw it hit top 10 I was surprised. I didn't do the videos for money, I did it to be popular and the reason I was banned from digg back then wasn't because of spam, it was from the greasemonkey script that 100+ users used. Just wanted to clear that up even thoughts been 3 years about. Feel free to attack me, just please don't hate the sites, they aren't the problem.
The comment threads in question are a fascinating glimpse into the corrosive effect of astroturfing on social relationships -- a kind of social media reenactment of
The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street -- as Redditors rage against the house of mirrors and wonder who among them are simply sock-puppets for the wrongdoers.
Of course, this is the sort of thing that HB Gary was developing for use in the middle east, to destroy the burgeoning public discourse and turn neighbors against each other "own the narrative."
Meanwhile, the spammer's account of his own actions is so far in denial, so wounded and broken, you get a picture of some kind of savant psychopath festering in his begrimed underwear in a basement somewhere, plaintively mourning the loss of his make-believe "friends" who always showed up to agree with everything he said.
GamePro, G4TV and VGChartz GamrFeed have been abusing multiple accounts to spam and manipulate /r/gaming for months
(Thanks, Mikeout, via Submitterator!)
(Image: Brandon sock puppet, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from pepperlime's photostream)
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you forgot to insinuate that the guy was a close relative to hitler and that he was a cannibal during his teens
Given that these people are spammers, I suspect they’re still lying. The “don’t blame the sites, it was all me!” account is a little too convenient.
And the G4 guy who commented yesterday and said “oh we just saw a guy linking to us and decided to give him some games” sounds like convoluted BS to me. I think the spammer is an employee of G4, probably IS the G4 guy who commented, i.e. today’s confession is just another of his sock puppets.
Srsly, why emphasize so much “Don’t blame the companies!” and then remind people “upvote if you like the content, don’t downvote because of what I did!” is just too much exactly what a company representative would say.
This is all just damage control.
“some kind of savant psychopath festering in his begrimed underwear in a basement somewhere”
thank you for that mental image. thank you very much…
(what’s the emoticon for ‘throwing up a little bit in your mouth’?)
unicorn chaser please!
btw?
i change my underwear as soon as they’re begrimed.
i never let them fester.
that would be gross
Cue cleverly constructed comments by meat puppets.
It’s been clear for a long time that spammers (and the like) ARE psychopaths. They don’t stop because they can’t stop. They are so disconnected from any sense of ethics that they simply cannot comprehend that what they’re doing is destructive, abusive, and wrong.
This is why the nonsense about ex-spammers is exactly that: nonsense. There are no extant examples of any ex-spammers (modulo the ones who are dead). None. (Every now and then one of them claims to be an ex-; those claims are soon enough debunked by referring to the evidence in spamtraps and similar.)
This particular guy is a pretty good example of that: he can’t be reasoned with. He will never stop. Even if, by some remote chance, he faces some kind of criminal or civil or administrative sanctions, he’ll just regroup, pick a different methodology and/or a different target, and get right back to work.
Which is why, in one sense, he shouldn’t stop: there’s really no reason for him to. If he can’t make money with one approach, he’ll just find another, and another, and another. There is always someone willing to pay, and nobody willing or able to put a stop to it.
Interesting, rsk.
Your analysis (which I find likely, btw) indicates the only thing we can do with/to these people is find a way to direct them to activities that are socially constructive, to displace their current antisocial activities.
It’s OK for a surgeon to enjoy cutting people up, you know, as long as he does good surgery.
“some kind of savant psychopath festering in his begrimed underwear in a basement somewhere”
lazy cliche detected
I think that emoticon is:
8-@
I’ve caught and had several of these banned from Wikipedia. You will also notice them all the time on Stumbleupon. They have also gotten very good at hiding on in Amazon reviews, actually building personas to hide the paid reviews.
I’ve caught and had several of these banned from Wikipedia. You will also notice them all the time on Stumbleupon. They have also gotten very good at hiding on in Amazon reviews, actually building personas to hide the paid reviews.
Not a word of this article is true, and I can find 20 people that agree with me…
There was a sock puppet revelation recently on a small forum I frequent and, when faced with incontrovertible evidence, the puppet master had a big butthurt meltdown in which he admitted the whole thing, just like this guy. It was like one of those on-the-stand confession/eruptions at the end of Perry Mason episodes (“yeah, I did it, but it wasn’t my fault, see?”). Now, I suspect every new account as being another one of his puppets.
I think this sort of thing really must be the mark of a sad, lonely mind and I wonder if/when the DSM will recognize it as an actual mental illness (or at least a symptom thereof).
If someone has multiple personality disorder and an account for every personality, do they count as sock puppets?
If they have an account for each are they really disordered? I can’t even remember my passwords for my one identity.
On the upside, they seem to have found the guy in real life.
Yes! Wait, no! Shut up! No, you shut up!
By definition, Multiple personality *disorder* is when you have many personalities who *don’t* agree.
BTW, I have actually been on fora where people created accounts to argue with themselves, if the competition wasn’t up to it.
Oh, come on, Cory, if you honestly believe HBGary was just developing that service for use in the Middle East, I have an inside line on some New York infrastructure for you.
Video games… interesting…
How about creating fake personas to defend the Church of Scientology, and further demonize protests following Wikileaks’ several commercial excommunications?
Click on “Activity” in the Disqus profile for Disqus user Watcherman, apparently also posting under the handles “Watchergirl” and “Watcher.”
This sort of thing reminds me of some dialog from “The Matrix”
“Smith. Agent Smith.”
“You all look the same to me.”
The downside of Reddit, and why I don’t spend as much time on it lately, is that they don’t exactly discourage spam, sockpuppetry, and other shilling.
Yes, they’ll delete accounts when reported (occasionally, but almost never for accounts that have had a chance to build any karma). And yes, the system does take care of itself to a degree, since you vary rarely – outside of this case, of course – see obvious spam hit the top pages.
However, for those of us that find more interesting stuff in the new items than the top-voted submissions, it’s much tougher to get through all the spam. I would estimate that a good 40% of the new page for all reddits is either folks pimping their blog (and nothing else), paid-per-click articles(squidoo, hubpages, triond, associated content, etc), or SEO link-building submissions. On the larger reddits, there are times when it’s closer to a 6:1 spam to content ratio. But those submissions and page views count the same as a legitimate view when the stats are aggregated. It’s also not a new problem. The Saydrah incident also is relevant here. Unfortunately, it’s caused the quality to drop as there’s so much noise over the signal, and good content often gets missed because it’s buried in a sea of spam.
Good on the admins there for dealing with these particular sockpuppets quickly, but this only seems to happen when users can get these complaints on the front page, and that’s a shame.
and yet when I read the kind of out-of-touch comments you see all over Slashdot, Wired, Reddit, Digg, and yes, BoingBoing, that is EXACTLY what I picture. His parents’ basement, to be exact, and he hasn’t brushed his teeth in days either.
Why does that image immediately come to mind? Because the crap flowing forth is like the rancid body odor of poor hygiene. He either knows it and doesn’t care, maybe even a little proud of his stink, or is completely desensitized and oblivious in his sad little world.
cliches, much like stereotypes, survive because they are reinforced by the majority behavior of the groups they are applied to. Period.
When you get away from news and blogs and into communities where people actually contribute knowledge, the civility and intelligence level of the discussion skyrockets.
Please go back to that place of civility and intelligence and sympathize with prejudices against society’s pariah’s there.
“cliches, much like stereotypes, survive because they are reinforced by the majority behavior of the groups they are applied to. Period.”
I like how you defend a cliche with yet another cliche. Way to distance yourself from those people who are ‘desensitized and oblivious in their sad little worlds.’
One of the nice things about reddit is that if you suspect a particular user of being a shill, you can easily check his/her contributions. So far, sock puppets haven’t been great at diversity of opinion. They tend to talk about the same kinds of things in the same way, over and over again.
I’m sure that will change soon.
Too and late
I fixed that for you.
It is so typically head in the sand of people today. If you don’t think fascist global corporations have not been all over this since day one, you are truly in denial. This guy is just a freak sideshow that got sloppy and got caught. This is one aspect of so called social media that shows why it is totally inferior to real face to face community, it is freakin easy to game.
20 accounts? Big deal.
I found a whore on Newsvine with over 200 accounts. A complete loon who is still rampant on HuffPo, who have been notified about his behaviour and done nothing.