How Anyone Can Manipulate Reddit and How r/Wallstreetbets May Have Been Manipulated
Are your thoughts truly your own beliefs? I ask this because, as a society, we are affected by marketing daily, forcing us to adopt specific ideas. A great example of this is the De Beers Diamond Company.
How are people manipulated into believing a concept?
De Beers Diamond Company had a monopoly on the diamond supply and drove a resource for industrial application into one of the “most valuable” piece of jewelry out there. Before the 1930s, only 10% of engagement rings had diamonds installed. Then came along De Beers, who ran a campaign stating a diamond embedded engagement ring is a symbol of affection should be worth at least a month worth of salary for the person you love. In 1948, De Beers Diamond started a marketing campaign with the slogan “A Diamond is Forever” and soon, society associated the diamond as a symbol of luxury and a sign of wealth. In 1980, De Beers changed its slogan to “How Can You Make 2 Months Salary Last Forever” convincing men worldwide they have to spend at least 2 months salary on an engagement ring. Through De Beers’ strategic marketing, they convinced multiple generations that diamonds are a symbol of love. You must spend an extraordinary amount of money to show your affection for the person you want to spend the rest of your life with. The De Beers story goes deeper than their slogans as they also betted against men’s desire to compete and women’s emotions to want the best partner. I highly recommend checking out the full story to understand the genius behind their marketing.
Why was that history lesson so important? Because if you convince enough people to believe something, soon everyone will. The whole reason marketing exists is to convince you into believing something you would not have otherwise. This marketing campaign would not have worked if it was not for Herd Mentality.
Herd Mentality is a social psychology concept — where if a group of people agrees with a statement or idea, newcomers to that concept will also agree with the information to conform with the rest of the group. This is often why post go viral on social media because if it gains enough traction at the beginning, everyone will talk about. A lot of algorithms follow this model to display what posts get shown to you on social media. They want to keep you engaged with their platform. However, when you understand Herd Mentality's concept, it becomes easy to manipulate platforms to show a post to others and increase the chances of becoming a viral hit.
So how can someone manipulate Reddit?
In 2020, Reddit was rated the 8th most popular website globally, estimating 1.22B Monthly Unique Visitors according to SEMRush. On Reddit, you can discuss with multiple communities about very niche ideas. From a business standpoint, marketing your product to a niche community allows for more interactions and better impressions on your advertisement. This makes Reddit susceptible to manipulation from third party users such as myself.
A major flaw with Reddit is how easy someone can manipulate a post to go viral. I have personally been using Reddit since 2013 and came across this method when I started to ask myself why some posts are getting shown to me or get any traction what-so-ever. I tested how to get a post to go viral on multiple accounts to understand what it took.
Reddit Terms:
· Upvote: When a user votes on a post they agree with or like.
· Downvote: When a user votes on a post they disagree with or dislike.
· Subreddit: A niche community board on Reddit where users can come together to discuss a specific category. Written as (r/…)
· Moderator: A user who oversees a subreddit, usually setting and enforcing rules in the subreddit.
· Admin: A user who oversees Reddit as a whole, enforcing the content policies of Reddit.
· Awards: A digital trophy that allows a user to show recognition for a post, these digital goods cost real money.
How Reddit Is Suppose To Work
The original process for a post to go viral starts when you post a picture or text in a subreddit. It will get shown on the new category of the subreddit, where users can then vote whether they like it or not. If the post gets enough traction, then it gets placed in the hot category for others to see it. Again ff the post gets more traction, it’s shown on the front page (r/all) of Reddit for everyone to see it.
The concept of manipulation came from users creating alternate accounts (mostly bots) to upvote and comment on their posts. The Herd Mentality comes into play when users see upvotes or engagement on a post in the new category; others feel compelled to engage with it because of its popularity. Allowing a new post to gain traction right at the beginning.
To combat this, the Admins allowed Moderators to turn off the visual counter on new posts to prevent herd mentality from coming into play. This allows specific subreddits to prevent manipulations through votes.
How Manipulation Comes Into Play
In July 2010, Reddit introduced Reddit Gold, an award system that allows users to purchase digital trophies for a post. This was a phenomenal way for Reddit to raise capital and monetize their platform without bombarding it with advertisements. Since then, Reddit introduced several new awards to reward posts with. However, it came at the downfall of introducing another exploit for Herd Mentality.
Spending real money on a digital good to give to someone else is an outstanding achievement; when others see it, they feel compelled to agree with the post mainly because real money was spent to acknowledge it.
We tell ourselves we do not get affected by seeing random awards on a post; however, psychologically speaking, it sparks our curiosity to understand why that post got awarded in the first place. If the post was well built, others will agree with it and engage with the post, boosting its odds in the algorithm. This also allows the post to bypass that new category placement if enough people agree with the post, pushing it to the hot category.
With a large enough budget, any marketing company can easily purchase an abundance of awards to award its own post, and I believe it happens a lot more than we think. I’ll explain what happened when I tested my theory.
Real Manipulation on Reddit
I have tested this a while back, trying to understand how posts go viral. The process is relatively simple; however, you can get caught and banned for doing this as it goes against Reddit’s Content Policy when you sign up. ***DISCLAIMER: I am only explaining this for informational purposes; I do not condone this activity nor encourage you to engage in it. This is not guaranteed to work 100% of the time but rather increase your chances of going viral.
Step 1.) Creating The Post — Creating the post you want to go viral is tough; nobody likes to be marketed to, so you’ll have to disguise the post as a regular post or meme. However, in some subreddits, you can be blunt about it. For example: if you start a small SaaS business, you can post in r/EntreprenuerRideAlong where users explain their business journey. There a user can pitch their product to other entrepreneurs while explaining their journey. The post has to be worthy of going viral and can’t be garbage; users will see right through it.
The reason why I stated r/EntreprenuerRideAlong is because that’s the subreddit I see this tactic often used.
Step 2.) Creating Traction—Humans are always aware when something is off, so you should never award a post quickly. However, you can use alternative accounts to interact with the post to create “fake engagement,” giving it that first boost to make it look like a regular post. After some real engagement comes in, you decided whether you feel it’s right to continue the manipulation or let it proceed organically.
Step 3.) Pushing The Post To Hot— After you decide, you will steadily award the post in increments. Never reward a post all the awards at once, but award it with a small award till it gains more organic traction. If the post were worth going viral, it would have no problem.
Step 4.) Pushing The Post To r/all— After the post reaches the Hot category, you are one step closer to driving it to the Front Page of Reddit (r/all). At this point, you will take a risk and push a lot of awards onto your post to gain traction with most users that come across it. This relies solely on your content post. Great content will make this more manageable; however, it will fail if people can recognize it as an advertisement.
That is all it takes to make something go viral on Reddit, while I can’t explain a thorough process, out of respect for Reddit. The flaw isn’t solely with Reddit, but our human nature and psychology behind what makes us attracted to or engaged with specific posts.
The admins have warned me for engaging in this in the past; however, I would do it to push memes up in becoming popular. There was no real punishment except being asked to review the rules. I believe this happens far more than we realize; if I can perform this with a small budget, imagine what corporations and marketing teams that are leagues ahead of me are capable of doing? Imagine someone pushing political beliefs or agendas into our mind without realizing; we agree with it to conform with society.
Why is this important?
I want you to self-reflect on the first question I asked at the beginning of this article? “Are your thoughts truly your own beliefs?”.
We all use social media daily, which makes me wonder if our ideas or what we believe in is truly what we believe or if we were exposed to it so much that it just became adopted to our beliefs. There is a phenomenon called the Illusionary Truth Effect, in which repeated exposure to information causes us to accept that information as accurate, backing up the question of wondering how much of what we believe is our choice?
With social media able to be easily manipulated, how do we know that choices and things we believe are right because we feel so, or we’re conformed to believe it?
Applying it today r/WallstreetBets
A few weeks ago, a group of Reddit users on the subreddit r/WallStreetbets banded together to manipulate the stock market, short squeezing the GameStop Stock ($GME).
I had been in r/WallStreetBets since 2013. Initially, it was a place where people would risk their entire accounts to make outrageous bets. Often posting huge losses or massive gains in their stock portfolio. However, recently it changed after people learned to come together to manipulate a stock collectively. $GME rose over 1600% in less than 2 weeks. This caused others to join the subreddit, increasing the board’s size by 4 times with over 6.7 Million users joining in a week; Shifting away from the original focus of r/WallstreetBets.
Many people joined in because there was money involved and the opportunity to “stick it to the suits.” However, what followed the $GME short squeeze was interesting.
Multiple posts appeared claiming it was possible to short squeeze Silver ($SLV). These posts were instant viral hits on Wallstreet Bets providing fundamental data to back up the possibility. However, when you examine the posts closer, you’ll notice they fell in the same category as being marketed to. On some level of manipulation, it’s possible that hedge funds used r/Wallstreetbets as a tool to get retail investors to short squeeze Silver. To thin out their completion while reaping the monetary benefits of a Silver short squeeze.
The trend #SqueezeSilver trended outside of Reddit to other platforms such as Twitter, Tiktok, Instagram, and Facebook.
Silver Bullion Market is one of the most manipulated on earth. Any short squeeze in silver paper shorts would be EPIC. We know billion banks are manipulating gold and silver to cover real inflation.Both the industrial case and monetary case, debt printing has never been more favorable for the №1 inflation hedge Silver.Inflation adjusted Silver should be at 1000$ instead of 25$. Link to post removed by mods.Why not squeeze $SLV to real physical price.Think about the Gainz. If you don’t care about the gains, think about the banks like JP MORGAN you’d be destroying along the way.
Disclaimer: This is not Financial advice. I am not a financial services professional. This is my personal opinion and speculation as an uneducated and uninformed person.
The user posting this went by u/jjalaj30. When you examine his account, it only made 3 posts, of which 2 of them were in Reddit's r/Wallstreetbets. As of now, he has completely abandoned his account.
Multiple users speculated the post being orchestrated by a non-retail investor or entity after seeing who owns a majority of Silver. However, the damage was already done, and it was trending outside of Reddit. From the initial post, $SLV had risen 14% from pre-post conditions. Many people joined in because of that Herd Mentality, conforming to an idea because others believe in it.
Now we have to ask ourselves, was this a sign of manipulation? If it’s as easy as that, what else is being manipulated?
Thanks!
This article is dedicated to a friend Tamar Ciment (tamarciment), for reminding me about this topic with her “Ghost Hype” video on TikTok. If you haven’t seen it, it is a great video that introduces Ghost hype’s concept- The idea that things go viral because someone or something orchestrated it. You can see the video here.
