12mo ago

Has Reddit’s traffic really quadrupled in 6 months?

www.bandt.com.au ‘Quality Of Google Search Crashed’ – Concerns As Reddit’s Traffic Nearly Quadruples In Six Months

Looking to get to the top of search rankings? Get your teenagers ranting about your brand on Reddit.

If they were just talking about Reddit, I’d assume something dodgy was going on connected with the IPO. But Quora is supposedly back from the dead too… Am I missing something glaringly obvious here?

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Election is coming up, all Russian bots
- It's all kinds of bots; Russian, Chinese, Liberal, Conservative, but most of all its Reddits own bots meant to inflate traffic stats ahead of the IPO.
  
  So what you're saying is we should short the stock to make it big
  Could even open a lawsuit and force reddit to investigate how much of their traffic is bots, immediately after the IPO
  
  This is not financial advice… typically these things balloon fast, and maybe stay up a week or two before anyone buying is done buying and the price collapses to the point informed investors want in. You can also have people doing price support early (“a squid on the bid”) to avoid a depressing price collapse in the opening phase, but that’s something you have to feel from experience.
- Judging by the trending posts, its mostly us liberal bots :).
- And Israeli bots (probably IDF and Pro-Israelis too)
  Seriously I just discovered this. Go search any random Gaza/Palestine/Israel post you will see -50 for someone saying "Israel has killed children and should stop killing children" and like +300 for "this article is so biased it's taking about Israeli attacks but no mention of how Hamas is the real cause of this death".
  I'm not even going to bother to link because I want people to see for themselves rather than it looking like I'm selecting the worst if it.
  
  yeah but that's sadly how a lot of real people think on Reddit anyway.
- It probably has a lot to do with their IPO as well. They want to look like they are doing well ahead of that.
- That tired but always working deflection. Let me get a little creative. I'm pretty sure it's underground blind mole rats this time.
  theys r comin 4r us, I'm telling ya, mark my wurds. ya'll bein minefukd while yous wer sleepin
  How's my russian? did I do it right?
- Mfers still believe in Russiagate despite everything... It's time to accept they're not Russian trolls, your country is just full of fascists.
  
  Did something come out that disproves the existence of russian bots in social media?
  
  Washington Post: Russian trolls on Twitter had little influence on 2016 voters
  Jacobin: It Turns Out Hillary Clinton, Not Russian Bots, Lost the 2016 Election
  Matt Taibbi: Move Over, Jayson Blair: Meet Hamilton 68, the New King of Media Fraud The Twitter Files reveal that one of the most common news sources of the Trump era was a scam, making ordinary American political conversations look like Russian spywork
  Jacobin: Why the Twitter Files Are in Fact a Big Deal
  MSNBC Repeats Hamilton 68 Lies 279 Times in 11 Minutes
  Chris Hedges: Why Russiagate Won’t Go Away
  
  From the Washington Post piece:
  But the study doesn’t go so far as to say that Russia had no influence on people who voted for President Donald Trump.
  It doesn’t examine other social media, like the much-larger Facebook.
  Nor does it address Russian hack-and-leak operations. Another major study in 2018 by University of Pennsylvania communications professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson suggested those probably played a significant role in the 2016 race’s outcome.
  Lastly, it doesn’t suggest that foreign influence operations aren’t a threat at all.
  And
  “Despite these consistent findings, it would be a mistake to conclude that simply because the Russian foreign influence campaign on Twitter was not meaningfully related to individual-level attitudes that other aspects of the campaign did not have any impact on the election, or on faith in American electoral integrity,” the report states.
  
  The overwhelmingly more significant threat is that US corporate social media are integrated with the propaganda machinery of the US government and the capitalist class. The purpose of things like Alliance for Securing Democracy’s Hamilton 68 and the Disinformation Governance Board is not to protect us from foreign influence but for the “intelligence community” to inject its own influence.
  Facebook Partners With Hawkish Atlantic Council, a NATO Lobby Group, to “Protect Democracy”
  Jessica Ashooh: The taming of Reddit and the National Security State Plant tabbed to do it
  A Reddit AMA Claiming To Be A Uyghur Quickly Exposes A CIA Asset Slandering China
  r/neoliberal was created by a neoliberal think tank » BPR Interviews: The Neoliberal Project
  .
  They have their eye on the fediverse now as well: Atlantic Council » Collective Security in a Federated World
  This is all an extension of how traditional corporate media works, which has been understood for decades:
  Michael Parenti, 1986: Inventing Reality: The Politics Of The Mass Media
  Edward Herman & Noam Chomsky, 1988: Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media.
  A five minute primer: Noam Chomsky - The 5 Filters of the Mass Media Machine
  
  Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  MSNBC Repeats Hamilton 68 Lies 279 Times in 11 Minutes
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
  
  Liberals will cry for impossibly indisputable evidence then go silent when you actually manage to provide it.
  
  This. Everything wrong in US is some bot army peddling propaganda at labor camps. Might even add the Atlantians to the list of foreign influencers before claiming US has more than a significant amount of fascists, racists, xenophobic assholes that already elected criminal as a president, and others war criminals without a shred of repercussions.
  but whatever makes you sleep better at night.
  
  Uh, actually yeah it did. Turns out they were just normal pro-russia conservatives. I thought the Cucker interview would have made that connection pretty obvious. They weren't paid to post that kind of propaganda, they were doing it willingly.
  
  These things are not mutually exclusive. The fact that Russian propaganda bots swayed a large percentage of American republican fascists in no way debunks the bots. It just means that it was an effective propaganda campaign.
  
  I’m sorry I was hoping what I was asking would be more clear:
  Did something specific, that you can link to disprove the existence of Russian bots in social media?
  
  Sure but first you have to get me a link to an instance of evidence ever swaying someone's opinion on the internet and not just turning into a debate about the validity of the evidence. EDIT: And the admin literally did that and you went quiet, you're so full of shit.
  
  If I remember correctly the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence quietly released a bipartisan report some years back conforming the existence of Russian trolls in the 2016 election. I haven't seen any evidence or reports released that they have ceased their attempts at manipulating social media since then.
  I do agree though, a lot of the posts are just real people who know that hate gets more engagement and crazy people.
  
  They did, but they determined the huge russian disinformation campaign was the work of like 5 accounts and 200k in ad-spend on facebook. In other words a wet fart.
  
  Why can't it be both? Russian social media engineers wouldnt have to try that hard. America's full of a bunch of fascist capitalist warmongers with a majority of liberal sheep for citizens, ready to believe whatever truth they want to be more true than reality.
  Perhaps Russia isn't as involved as of late though? Perhaps Putin killed off all his social media engineers sending them to fight in Ukraine? I'm waiting for the reports to come in from field reporters finding Russian boy scout corpses on the battle field. That's when you know he doesn't have the resources to spend trying to influence American elections. He's got bigger problems, like mandating Russian breeding schedules.

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