Thinking of gaming the Reddit community with a fib so you can make it to site’s the front page?
Be warned: You’re being watched.
The social news site’s front page is no easy nut to crack. The site, which relies on user-submitted content, registers about 20 million unique and over a billion page views every month.
Though the payoff for front-page exposure isn’t much in real life, the same is certainly not true on Reddit itself. The attention brings a whole lot of karma, the site’s internal reputation tracker. Considering that, it’s no surprise some ethically challenged redditors cheat the system with lies.
So earlier this month, redditor IAmA_Undecided launched a one-person army to expose these karma con-artists.
“Even on the Internet, where men are men, women are men, and children are FBI agents, people should be more skeptical of what they see,” IAmA_Undecided wrote in a message to the Daily Dot.. “It drives me nuts when I see really implausible things upvoted ahead of better content.”
So IAmA_Undecided created a subreddit, or section on the site, called r/fibs. There, the redditor calls out every lie he or she can catch. So far, IAmA_Undecided handles most of the submissions, though another redditor has recently started helping out.
“There are always a few stories on the front page that involve people lying,” I_AmA_Undecdided wrote. “I just try to highlight the ones that are the most popular – the ones that caught the most gullible redditors.”
IAmA_Undecided points two examples in a particular.
In one, a redditor posted a photograph he took of a drawing in a bathroom. “Guess who I ran into at the bar?” he titled the post.
The drawing in the photograph is of a “me gusta” face — a popular meme on the site that’s often used in Reddit’s user generated comics. The photograph implied a kind of oddly, perhaps grossly, serendipitous offline connection between redditors. The post quickly jumped to the front page.
But IAmA_Undecided and a few other redditors suspected the poster didn’t “run into” the drawing at all — he drew it himself, they believed. And when they called him out on the lie, he admitted as much.
As for IAmA_Undecided’s favorite example? That’s the redditor who posted dozens of phony question and answer threads to the site, claiming he was everything from a clinically diagnosed sociopath, to a person with autism, to a victim of a rare congenital heart defect.
IAmA_Undecided isn’t just some truth-telling crusader, however. The redditor said r/fibs focuses on entertainment as much as ethics.
“I wanted to create a space on reddit where like-minded users can sit back and have a laugh,” IAmA_Undecided wrote.