Asian Junkie Asian pop. Without discretion.
On the K-pop subreddit on Reddit (obviously), there is a bit of drama happening involving some of their “power users”. At least one of the (and maybe two, if the comments are to be believed) “power users” of the subreddit threw a temper tantrum and deleted their account, but not before they went and deleted their submissions to the K-pop subreddit, ensuring that some of the all-time top-upvoted music video threads can now never be recovered.
As the more active users on this subreddit may have noticed, a certain power user, whose name used to show up on the frontpage almost daily, has recently disappeared from this subreddit and with them some of /r/kpop’s top MV submissions of all time (including Daddy and Twenty-three). Since there is no way for us as moderators to ever reinstate any of these submissions, this means they have robbed this subreddit of some of its most valued content for feeling “unfairly treated” (more about that later).
That’s petty as fuck, but the reason behind all this is tons worse and is absolutely fucking amazing. Basically the “power users” were competing for Reddit ‘karma’, which are utterly meaningless Internet points, and it got to the point where these people were setting up bots to win the race to major music video submissions to the K-pop subreddit for the karma.
Around the time this subreddit gained a lot more activity more than a year ago, some users realized they could amass a lot of karma easily by being the first one to post a highly anticipated music video. Since the most popular releases tend to come from just a handful of YouTube channels and follow a similar title format, it was trivial for them to switch from manual to scripted posting. Now, karma gained on /r/kpop is not worth more than what you get by reposting shitty memes to /r/AdviceAnimals, but sadly they did not realize that, and left us to deal with them using bots in order to “win” out against other users.
As if that wasn’t ridiculous enough, things then ESCALATED (lmao) to involve more “power users”, and even resulted in them having the bots eliminate the submissions of their competitors.
While we quickly realized what was going on, fighting against it with bans and post removals yielded nothing. New accounts would show up, complaints in modmail, etc. However, over the last 4 months or so, things have gotten even worse. With multiple people now using bots to make MV submissions, some of them got clever and extended their bots to mass-report their competitions’ posts (which is not allowed by reddit, and we have reported to the admins), thereby getting them removed (there are now additional precautions against this).
Look, I visit the K-pop subreddit almost daily and enjoy my time there, but holy fuck who does this kind of shit?
Anyway, now the mods of the K-pop subreddit are left to figure out a solution to stop these pathetic “power users” from competing for meaningless Internet points.
Sooo … I, uh … I’m … yeahhh. Alrighty.
