Not just to make reddit appear busy; also, among others, push narratives, distract people from real topics, discredit legitimate ideas, and promote the status quo.

And promote ideas. Most if not all of the politically sanitized comments will reach the top.

Yes, they are obvious once you know what to look for

I was just banned from /r/news for nothing.

I have a 8 minute waiting time on most mainstream subs.

Is that not for everyone? I always get a waiting time on certain subs and assumed that was for everyone.

Like literally nothing? Or did you post something the mods didn't like?

Like my last comments in there were in the thread about the Olympic runner not shaking the Israeli's hand. The whole thread was saying what a poor sport he was, my comment was "I'm sure the lack of handshake goes far beyond the olympics."

What's weird is I never even got a message saying I was banned, and the mods won't speak to me about it unless I reply to the original ban message.

It makes most of it unreadable. I haven't been here but a week, but it's just the headlines that seem important, and not the content.

Was this always a disinformation site?

No. It used to be full of many different things and good discussion.

Now everything is a god damn joke.

Seriously, so obvious the swartz 'suicide' and reddit takeover was needed or else our side would win. I think part of my awakening was the fact that reddit was just endless bullshit. When it used to be a place where I could learn different things from different places, just took the click in my brain.

Same. But you know all good things come to an end

Your not alone.

The good old days. I was thrilled when I first met reddit in. 2009. It has been a downhill journey ever since Mr Schwartz left us

hasn't been the same since Emperor Pao

I usted to like it because you could practice your debate skills. Then--holy cow--it turned into this.

(Also, I've noticed if any thread gets above 1000 comments, very easily-detectable bots will start showing up. Some will grab a comment in the text and repost it as their own, and others will take portions of multiple comments and smash them together into a comment that almost makes sense.)

I hope someone researches and compiles evidence of this, seems like a daunting task to gather the screen shots & explain the connections/timing tho.

It's easy if you post the article and receive replies because you notice the doubling, it jumps out. Would be pretty easy to just search for repeated sentences - but people have already been collecting this stuff at /r/thesefuckingaccounts.

Nice. Cheers!

Also, here's a user in action (this one's a comment-paster): https://www.reddit.com/user/giddypos666

I remember it from a thread I posted way back - looks like it went dormant about 5 months ago.

i checked it out earlier today and it was 30% links to nude pic subs - seems to have reverted now

Any comment thread quickly devolves to mindlessness.

And memes. What a powerful weapon.

Seriously! What's the deal with that? Literally every topic from politics to mass shootings, all comments end up with a bunch of puns and weak attempts at situational humor

Fake internet points, for some reason, everybody wants them. People look at the most upvoted comments and commit them to memory. Then it's the game of who can camp the new queue, find a fresh post and be the first to make a funny on it.

There's also this. and it's worthy http://i.imgur.com/nx2o0iV.gifv

If I am being completely honest here, she did not make me cringe at all.

I feel like she'd break my dick off. I'd have to tell her to downshift a couple times

Saved

You referring to something in particular? Correct the Record, a superPAC illegally coordinating directly with the Hillary Clinton campaign, has tons of sockpuppets all over anything even remotely political anywhere on Reddit, but most of the redditors in non-political discussions seem legitimate to me. I don't know if I've ever seen any users posting non-political content that appeared bot-like in nature.

The sockpuppets are mostly posting from US airforce bases

Assuming you'll call me one for asking, but how could you actually know if a sockpuppet account is posting from a US Air Force base? Wouldn't they be complex enough to use VPNs or proxies?

I mean, not that you can see their IP addresses in the first place...

s/The front page of Reddit/Reddit.

FTFY.