I used to be a lot on r/travel. Back then there were posts with pictures that had upvote ls in the triple to quadruple digit range. There were also user questions, usually in the double digits.
Now the majority is just discussions that mysteriously have thousands of upvotes. And some of them quite boring. That must be bots or fakes directly by reddit. No way this happens naturally.
Is this common practice now or is that something r/travel did specifically?
Reddit accounts were associated because their professional name was plastered on products they each advertised, whether it was books/comics/memes/nfts/tshirts, it was all linked to the same personal brand(s). They also all shared mod duties on the same subs, and the way they wrote comments/conversed was very idiosyncratic, they had catch-phrases and quotes that seemed to be of their own making. The subs they spammed and account length were also indicators, because they almost always all crossposted to whatever subs would allow their content, from a sub only they managed, in order to drive content to their personal subs. Another thing is mod teams (I was occasionally in contact with over this spammer) would report the user as ban evasion and reddit admins would be able to associate the account, which is how most of their accounts get banned. We realized they always tagged their own accounts as “Quality Poster” on their subs too, a tag that was reserved for only their accounts and a few others, and it was pretty easy to tell the difference.
For the self-publishing side and professional pseudonyms, he would use the same publishing company between his different pseudonyms, which is something that book sites often encourage you to search based on. On lets say Book Depository for instance the publisher of a book is a hyperlink, so you can “find other books by…”, so it was like different versions of his name with different sort of professional personas. LLCs like a book publisher are all publicly filed entities through the business registrar in their respective states, so you can find out who filed the taxes, which consultant helped create the entity, just by searching the LLCs name on the government website. (I actually reported someone to the FBI once in relation to an act of violence because they had bragged about their shitty personal business on their online profiles, which they stupidly registered with their actual name to their home address, instead of properly with a PO box through a registrar.)
So really all it took was clicking on his own link to his own book, clicking the publisher name, and seeing all the books listed. In other words, doing the very thing he wants users to do on the site. However anyone who did this and mentioned it on reddit would be reported for stalking/harassing him, especially if they shared some of his content he didn’t think fit with his current persona. Ie a quote from the rape-pill book, or a comic he wrote making fun of people who protest police violence. It was all about crafting an image that redditors would approve of so he could sell his personal brand on the site and avoid paying for ad services.
Dang that is crazy.
So did you and the sub you guys created to track this guy present your body of evidence to the Reddit admins and that eventually got him banned?
Do you guys track other users who are attempting to manipulate forms for personal gain or was it just this one guy who was so egregious that you felt like you had to to band together?
I used to mod defaults on reddit back around 2011-2015 and only really cared about spammers, so I developed a good eye for it and I’d often report spam on reddit through the formal process, or there were subs like r/thesefuckingaccounts to present spam networks, and a lot of times they would get reported and banned.
In this case the spammer is more aware, and they still operate on the site to some capacity, but they understood they had to be careful and try and hide it/not present it as “spam.” They also basically harassed people who talked about them outside of their own subreddits and try to report and get rid of any negative discussion about them. When they spam it’s like they act as a public figure, but they report as if they are a normal user who’s being doxxed, even though they themselves spread their name(s) around the site. So I created a private subreddit and recruited (sane) people who had been mod-abused by this guy, and we collectively invited more people until we were a few hundred. Most of it was just making fun of him with cheap jokes and people venting, but we had a “current alts” list etc. and would contact mod teams if he was evading a ban with a new account. He only uses the most spammy trash subs now because of this, because any sub that cares about spam or quality of content has banned him many times by now.
I know of a few of these chronically online characters and they generally seem mentally ill in a certain way, so that complicates whether it’s good to directly interact with them or not. There’s a guy named John Mandlbaur who functions on a similar level. He thinks he’s discovered a law of physics is wrong and is everywhere on the internet trying to present his findings for years on end, being a complete asshole to everyone, digging himself into a worse and worse place mentally. I remember someone checked on this reddit spammer in January after the holidays once, and realized on all the days people normally mark by spending time with friends and/or family, he was active on a bunch of his alts the entire time. In all these instances, instead of accepting they may be wrong about even a minor superficial thing, they see it as an affront to their grandiosity and appeal to grand conspiracy theories or very significant things to explain why someone disagrees with them.