this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2025
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chapotraphouse
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So what happened? Bots somehow took control away from the mods of a bike subreddit?! How even?!
Yeah, it's so weird. Like I wouldn't be surprised to see something like this happen to a political sub, but this? Just wild.
Every sub is astroturfed. The few times I've tried browsing reddit and gone to niche subs, there's fucking astroturfing. Horror sub? Astroturfing positive reviews for movies universally panned. Painting sub? People buy bots to boost their content to the top, which of course there's a link for commissions. And coincidentally the people asking for the links for commissions use the exact same message as another poster in another thread for a different artist.
So much of that site is ads disguised as user comments. Completely unusable.
Organically grown niche communities don't deliver quarterly growth numbers, so Reddit has put no effort into any sort of guardrails against hostile takeovers by astroturfing content farmers. The logic of the attackers doesn't go beyond "this subreddit has a lot of subs and we have methods of dumping the mod team and turning all new posts into content slop that generates revenue for us". Stuff like this is just the choking gurgles of a dying platform.