Reddit’s Cofounder And CEO Steve Huffman Is Now A Billionaire

We can make fun of him all we want but he's still a billionaire off the backs of millions of redditors.

Reddit is easily more bots and astroturfing than any other website on the internet.

The karma system is a black box for a reason. Votes go in, some other number that is not vote count comes out.

This has been true 10 years ago but now I'd actually think Reddit is significantly less trustworthy on average.

The astroturfing is insane. Literally every company I contract with has a #reddit slack channel where they orchestrate some form of astroturfing. Also most of software related subreddits are 100% astroturfed by admins who get kickbacks from promoting some SaaS or burying stories.

Basically any subreddit with external contact (discord, email etc) is open for "cooperation".

This is not even covering major propaganda ops by troll networks, just commercial astroturfing. There's current ongoing story that Ghislane Maxwell - yes that one - was a major mod on r/worldnews. Isn't that just crazy?

For 10 years I’ve been asked to write software to astroturf reddit.

So maybe it’s seen as good, but it isn’t.

And for anyone wondering, I declined. I didn’t want to and if they had they would have been flogged by redditors when they figured it out (which they would have).

Also from that era I built a tool that scraped user histories and built a network of which communities and interests Redditors had. Then you could drop in a user and it would pull their sex, interests, approx age, etc.

And all that was from public Reddit data before companies like Facebook and Google saw every hyperlink you ever clicked.

Ahahaha. That is hilarious! With closed profile history and subs that got occupied by politics/business bots - reliable my ass. How can anyone speak about reliability without any transparency...

For the average user is still true. Even I check using alternative front ends, but I'm less trusty.

It will take years of enshitification before things go down, and by then the rest of the internet will be shit too, so who knows how it will stack

Heh? That hadn't rung true in years now.

Reddit is now full of bots

in the communities that matter to me such that i can make an accurate judgement i find this to be correct

in the more political and news subs it might well be a shit show

Of course!

I knew it was all your fault!

Please, oh please tell me you had the same username on Reddit!

I often wonder how different things would be if spez kicked the bucket and Swartz retained full control. Could have been a shining light in the sea of silicon valley dumbfuckery

think we all know the answer to that one.

AS AN alien he probably consumed aaron and finally achieved human form.

a space alien.

A 5% return on 50 mil is 2.5mil/year. Fuck billionaires, hope they all die sooner than later.

Almost all of the tech side of (early) Reddit was done by Aaron Schwartz. It's despicable that this overcooked noodle of a man becomes a billionaire on the back of his achievements.

Hey do you know how hard it is to huff your own farts all day while pretending to work? Steve Huffman knows all about that.