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Spammers are flooding Reddit with fake posts designed to show up in AI search results
(www.techspot.com)
this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2026
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To then sell those accounts to people trying to manipulate the real users on the site.
Yeah, I'm sure that was going on a LOT, I never really had it in the forefront of my mind though, mostly because thinking of ways to make money seems to be an alien concept to my mind. I wonder how much mine was worth before I got banned... probably not much anyways it was mostly comment karma from answering questions. Oh well lol.
I checked my first one (that was banned later) once out of curiosity. 8ish years over 100k karma and it was like $20? You'd have to really grind to make any money like having a bot farm or something. Granted I never actually checked my account specifically, just similar accounts with similar age and karma.
This was years ago that I looked. I wouldn't be surprised if the number has gone down since then.
Oh gosh well mine was like $5 then lol. Yeah it really doesn't seem worth it to me but then I live in a totally different economy I suppose.
Yeah agreed. But if you're in a 3rd world country or some broke teenager that money goes farther. Bot farms buy "legit" accounts then influencers pay them for likes and interactions on social media platforms fooling The algorithm into thinking the content is popular then putting the bought content into real human's social media feeds. I have watched YT videos on how the stuff operates in the past. It just goes to prove that the internet is fake af. Going viral can be bought. Algorithms can be manipulated. It's all bullshit.
Lemmy seems pretty legit so far though! I'm pretty new here but it seems like a small corner of the internet that's not yet taken over by 90% bots!
......yet.....
Yes I enjoy it here so far, there's a few hotheads but I guess that can't be avoided anywhere. People seem genuinely interesting and interested in cool stuff, so it's really my jam. All that stuff is just so beyond my, interest I guess. I love doing things with computers, making art, editing photos, games, I can make some simple web pages and put them on a host, etc. Fun stuff. Now it's all.... I dunno lol. I never got into phone apps to begin with so I think I was lost from the start. I like computing on a full computer. Honestly any algorithm besides chronological sort is junk to me, like you said it can all be gamed so it's just all so dumb.
It probably wouldn't get that much either, most of those karma farmers are in low income countries with lots of english speakers, eastern europe, india, places like that.
I suppose, I just heard about the vastness of the old WoW gold farming economy semi recently, the amount of money going through that kind of stuff is just mind boggling.
I read about some online game that had gold, and these hackers learned to fabricate it after compromising the system, and were selling it to players, is that what you are referring to? That was a long time ago, not sure exactly, over 10 years though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_farming
Huh, interesting. I tried to find the article about the hackers, could not get it on enshittified search, pretty sure it was in Harper's Magazine. I think the hackers were in se asia or something but forget.