I already know Thanksgiving is gonna suck because it's an election year and there's awkward family drama.
My mom is a left-leaning redditor so if she starts talking political, I want to deflect and pick an easier target with a shorter discussion path. Pretty much dismissing everything with "yeah hopefully now Reddit can go back to normal"
While people can argue for weeks about whether or not reddit is astroturfed, I'm focusing on simpsonsshitposting. It was a moderate-sized sub where people combine elements of two old Simpsons scenes for comedic purposes.
Your average "top" post would get a couple thousand upvotes. Now with election season, any low effort "Bort sampson says Trump Bad" gets 40,000 upvotes in 3 hours.
The subreddit growth is sus. Sure, a popular post may hit the front page and you'll get an influx of subscribers. But this is a bit too much.
11-3, two days before the election, over 1700 new subscribers and posts are reaching numbers never before seen.
11-4? Twenty two.
Which brings me to my question -- what event happened on July 10th that either had a record number of organic subscribers, or record number of bots go online? Biden dropped out less than two weeks later but it was *after* the subscriber jump.
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Doesn't have to be a significant date. The bot farm might just move from sub to sub. Pooping them up with political posts and then moving on to the next one.
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"Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game, and dumb enough to think it's important."
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