Ask HR: Can you create / control 100k Reddit accounts easily?
I was discussing this with my friend the other day. While Reddit strongly discourages self-promotion, it certainly can be done through creative methods. I'm curious how easy it would be for a company to buy control over 100k "real" Reddit accounts and use their upvotes to cause their products to hit the front page in order to increase sales. What are your thoughts? No even 5-years ago it was really hard. Few challenges I ran into as I had a customer pay for this: User agents have to be the newest browsers, if you use an old one, they start not counting your votes prior to banning. You will need an IPV4 space as they treat IPV6 as spam right now. 100K bots means at least 80,000 ip addresses. They track login times across accounts which vote on a similar item, or it may not be login, but, it may be action time, so your cron jobs have to stagger. The best way to do it, is pay people in third world countries to legitimately post. It was about $1 per person, per day to post 2 times. We would pay them once a month and it was insanely cheap. The issue is then Reddit started banning on geo location so now you need people in poor countries who have a VPN. If you can find 100-200K with a VPN at $1 per post, $100-$200K is nothing, as you are paying developers a lot more to do this. Sounds like a good use case for Amazon Mechanical Turk. You might find this useful to read. Reddit's hip to this sort of stuff, and is working hard to prevent it. https://www.reddit.com/r/redditsecurity/comments/d6l41l/an_u... You don't need 100k accounts, you just need enough upvotes to get to the front of an individual subreddit, and content good enough for real people to take it from there. I've been looking for examples of a self hosted service to do exactly this, albeit at a smaller scale. Challenge 1). create a ton of emails Challenge 2). create a ton of reddit accounts Challenge 3). generate enough, random activity on accounts to give them enough karma to do anything Challenge 4). create a system to dispatch and carry out actions with said accounts what is reddit and who uses it ? It's a social media platform where people can post photos, text, or links in smaller communities. Is a very high-traffic site and app