I think we all have wondered at one point just how much of the traffic we see online is by actual people or fans rather than bots, trolls, etc. Of course, there’s also the whole “dead internet” theory and with the recent reveal of account locations on twitter, it begs the question of how much of what happens in the reddit K-pop scene is legit.
Recently, I also noticed a statistic that is included for poll results which details “core contributors” who “have visited or contributed to this community consistently in the past month” according to reddit. If my understanding is correct, this is distinguishing long-time users or presumably active participants in the subreddit.
Now, what really intrigued me was that the number of core contributors were shockingly low. I looked at 10 of the most recent posts in a K-pop subreddit (the specific subreddit is besides the point IMO and unsure if naming another sub could be considered brigading) and here are the numbers:
| # of Core Contributors | # of Total Responses | Percentage |
|---|---|---|
| 12 | 166 | 7.2 |
| 4 | 55 | 7.3 |
| 14 | 138 | 10.1 |
| 14 | 95 | 14.7 |
| 5 | 44 | 11.4 |
| 13 | 547 | 2.4 |
| 31 | 1969 | 1.6 |
| 3 | 39 | 7.7 |
| 31 | 965 | 3.2 |
| 30 | 447 | 6.7 |
My questions here are why such low figures? Who comprise the remaining non-core contributor responses? Are these just new users? People who happened across the post? Non-Kpop fans? Casual fans? Bots? Is this something more nefarious like astroturfing or some sort of clandestine social media effort? All in all, I’m just curious about how many of the users and comments we see across various K-pop subreddits are genuine. I’m in the camp of there’s a non-zero percentage that what we see has to be bots or astroturfing with a mix of trolls and low-effort ragebaiters amongst actual fans.
submitted by /u/Sooyaa_Yah_Boombayah
[link] [comments]
