Comment by raincom
5 days ago
That's common. A marketing company took over r/mattress in order to get rid of any unfavorable reviews and pump up any bed in box mattress company as long as these companies pay to that market company. For more, https://www.reddit.com/r/MattressMod/comments/1c28g7b/recent...
A happy(ish) ending: https://www.reddit.com/r/Mattress/comments/1l81nn6/and_were_...
I'm not interested in doing this at all, but how does a person take over a subreddit? That sounds like a very difficult thing to do.
"Hi I noticed you weren't that online as recently as you were are you ok?"
Wow that must be a lot of work
Wow I feel for you, friend
Yea id be happy to help out from time to time.
--- But needs to happen with other things.
Quite often seen in GitHub where an attacker can contribute to build trust. With Reddit, mini modding, regular submissions, good comments etc
Defense includes not being shamed or pressured when life seems more important.
The simplest thing is probably just to ask for it. I'm sure if you went now and asked to be moderator for a hundred different mid-sized subs, you'd get yes from a few. If you "seem trustworthy", probably more than a few.
This was exactly the playbook that led to the xz backdoor.
Just the quotes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XZ_Utils_backdoor
1 reply →
But can any mod remove other mods? How does that work in reddit?
3 replies →
Mods aren't set in stone, they tend to be active for a few years and then give up. Once that happens and you notice the current mods not posting anything for a period of time, you can simply file a request to side-wide admins to take over that sub, as giving it to anyone else is better than leaving it completely unmoderated.
it's surprising that this feature remains relatively unknown. the article doesn't seem to be directly aware of it. I recently requested a fairly important subreddit which had been taken over by mods of a competing to sub and locked down to prevent competition, and they gave it to me immediately
https://www.reddit.com/r/redditrequest/ - see the sidebar.
If the sub has an inactive or no mod, its as simple as making a post.
Probably in the same way as Jia Tan took over the xz.
https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/29184583611...
Apart from getting the existing mod team to hand over to you, you can also petition to the reddit admins. For example, there is a process to replace inactive mods and this could be used to take control of a subreddit with existing users.
People offer money to buy your reddit handle, assuming you are a mod of a reddit they want to control.
This is a second order effect of Google weighting Reddit heavily in Search.
And a third-order effect of every other link being SEO garbage or AI slop