Starting a Reddit Farm

Weirdly, Reddit isn't a site I've looked at much in the past. You can't appear to be marketing or you'll get downvoted/banned but there is a ton of niche traffic. Since I've been experimenting with content curation I dropped a link into a subreddit and between Reddit and the Google suggest traffic spurred on by Reddit I gained about 1,000 visitors to that page from a relatively small sized subreddit.

Unfortunately, even though I've tried again with better content I haven't been able to replicate the same results just by posting. Must have just been luck that post got picked up.

So I want to be able to consistently give links a nudge in a couple of subreddits.

I took a rough idea and a test account. It went from a few hundred karma to around 6000 within a day or so. I've automated the account creation and the karma growth. In theory, I should be able to grow a couple of hundred accounts on complete autopilot.

The plan is to have the automated farm grow themselves on autopilot and act like real users, keep the footprint as low as I can and us them to boost quality curated content to my niche subs.

I see a ton of sellers talk about the age of the accounts. Haven't seen anything but anecdotal stories and a price tag to say it's worthwhile so I'll be trying new accounts but I'm also buying a bunch of aged ones to mix in. If nothing disastrous happens I'll run some tests between the two once there's enough built up.

I know nothing about Reddit. I've no idea how many upvotes I'm going to need to rank in the subreddits I want. No idea how much karma I want on the accounts. No idea how often I'm going to post. No idea how much I'm going to have to keep the farm separated to avoid ban waves.

Literally no idea. So let's find out.

Not sure what stats to update with. Maybe total karma and traffic numbers (if the project gets that far). Tests from the last couple of hours we've had a few dozen visitors (the priority has been on growing the accounts karma) and up about 1,000 karma.

It's obvious newer accounts get less traction as they try to grow themselves and there's a definite tipping point around 1-2k where they seem to grow a lot faster. Newer accounts can't post in some subs and they don't rank as well as the bigger accounts.

The main goal at the moment is to finish off some features of the code and buy a bunch more aged accounts to get them into the mix. Maybe take a smaller number of accounts into small subreddits and start trying to get an idea of what it takes to rank.

It will be great case study. My solution for manual karma is to repost top memes from the past on /r/meirl.

Sounds like an awesome idea that will take a lot of time to get established. I am watching this thread to see how your journey goes with this and hopefully all will work in your favor.

Interested to see if work or if account all get banned )

Tryingtomakebusiness said:

It will be great case study. My solution for manual karma is to repost top memes from the past on /r/meirl.

Click to expand...

You lost me at 'manual'.

LuckyGirl9334 said:

Sounds like an awesome idea that will take a lot of time to get established. I am watching this thread to see how your journey goes with this and hopefully all will work in your favor.

Click to expand...

I don't mind it taking time. I've plenty to be getting on with while this runs in the background.

That said who knows how long this will take. If it's long term it's long term. But I am going to start throwing some upvotes at my links in smaller subs once I'm finished with the rest of the setup to see how it looks.

blackh4t said:

Interested to see if work or if account all get banned )

Click to expand...

You and I both.

You create accounts automatically? What you do about the captcha?

Watching this thread. I always liked reddit.
Good luck.

With Reddit you have to keep in mind many things if you want your posts to stick at the top. Karma is an important factor but it is not everything. You cannot get your post to the top if you post it at the wrong time even with a high karma and trusted account.

Shaybib said:

You create accounts automatically? What you do about the captcha?

Click to expand...

Nothing new with recaptcha being automated.

nst1m said:

With Reddit you have to keep in mind many things if you want your posts to stick at the top. Karma is an important factor but it is not everything. You cannot get your post to the top if you post it at the wrong time even with a high karma and trusted account.

Click to expand...

Post at the wrong time? Do you mean to avoid the primetime for a sub so there are less new posts?

@SEOMadHatter
Are you maintaining separate proxy for the accounts you create and while you upvote/post etc?

Can you give us some pointers on how'd you made that 6000 karma in a few days? Not asking to spill all the beans
Is this from NSFW subreddits?

Do you upvote/comment on random posts to make your account look real?

Good luck with this journey. I subscribed to your thread.

I have plenty of experience on Reddit and I use it constantly to promote my sites, different accounts, different niches, etc... but I am always willing to learn more specially from your journeys, but in all honestly I would love for you to be less cryptic in your posts

The accounts have sleep cycles so growth will be a bit spiky. I'll need to swap things up and experiment with the time frames they post in. We're up around 2,500 karma while I caught some sleep. I'll get more accurate for tracking in place.

In order to scale the farm and get more accounts running, I'm looking around for more aged accounts. It's one thing to let the account creator go once a while and slowly add fresh accounts but if the whole lot are registered on the same day that's way too obvious a footprint. I'm looking at marketplaces selling accounts. I don't really like buying a lot of accounts from the same provider as if they have a footprint it'll be fairly obvious - but I need a bunch of accounts running to get an idea if this is going to be worth expanding on.

javabro said:

@SEOMadHatter
Are you maintaining separate proxy for the accounts you create and while you upvote/post etc?

Can you give us some pointers on how'd you made that 6000 karma in a few days? Not asking to spill all the beans
Is this from NSFW subreddits?

Do you upvote/comment on random posts to make your account look real?

Click to expand...

I have a ton of proxies from other projects of various types so Reddit is piggybacking on that. Every account has a proxy to itself. I've seen mention of a more churn and burn approach but I'm experimenting here to see if I can keep accounts surviving for at least the medium term.

Yes, the accounts try to act as normal human beings would. The tradeoff being I want to be able to control accounts on scale (since I've no idea how many accounts it'll take to rank) so I want to be doing things as automated as possible.

I also need to look at how to do the upvotes themselves. If every account in the farm all upvote my links in a subreddit they normally don't go to - that's no good. So the plan is to get them interacting with my niches ahead of time and splitting the farm up into different niches when it comes to it.

patadeperro said:

I have plenty of experience on Reddit and I use it constantly to promote my sites, different accounts, different niches, etc... but I am always willing to learn more specially from your journeys, but in all honestly I would love for you to be less cryptic in your posts

Click to expand...

My bank account comes first I'm afraid. If I run a journal writing 5000 words and buying links to it there's nothing new there. But when I'm experimenting with new methods with twists open to saturation - if I spill the beans I make less money.

SEOMadHatter said:

My bank account comes first I'm afraid. If I run a journal writing 5000 words and buying links to it there's nothing new there. But when I'm experimenting with new methods with twists open to saturation - if I spill the beans I make less money.

Click to expand...

I do understand that your bank account come first, but then why to write a public journey? is this some type of public commitment so you can keep going? (you don't seem the kind of people to need that, but what do I know I am just a pug) or probably a little bit of ego praising in a very lonely environment? (I could understand that honestly, but you could get it in an easier less crytip way IMHO) best of luck.

I took a look at the sub which spiked my traffic originally. The post which brought in the spike of traffic has less than 50 upvotes on it. Far less than I was originally expecting. Of course, there are going to be other metrics to it than just the # of upvotes but that still bodes well.

Adding a few dozen accounts to the farm today. Experimenting with different proxy types and providers. Most of the sellers I've seen so far have obvious footprints but I really don't know how much Reddit goes looking. Guess I'll just throw shit at the wall and see what sticks.

patadeperro said:

I do understand that your bank account come first, but then why to write a public journey? is this some type of public commitment so you can keep going? (you don't seem the kind of people to need that, but what do I know I am just a pug) or probably a little bit of ego praising in a very lonely environment? (I could understand that honestly, but you could get it in an easier less crytip way IMHO) best of luck.

Click to expand...

Yeah... my self-worth really doesn't hinge on an internet forum. As for the lonlely enviornment I'm currently in Chiang Mai. I could toss a stone from where I'm sat and hit at least one other marketer.

I post journals mostly for my own accountability. If what I can share helps or motivates others then that's a plus. If you don't get anything from them that's cool to - go and do something more productive.

The farm went down 6k karma this morning. Not because of a ban (as you'd probably expect) but because of a daft screw-up. I was updating the account management side of things to make things easier and managed to delete account data.

Pro tip: Don't do that.

On the bright side, the code works. On the downside... oops. Not a huge deal at least since we already made most of that back.

Talking to a few folk who do this kind of thing. Everyone stresses account age but I'm not convinced yet. Aged accounts with little history also suffer a lot of the same limitations so I've had to tweak the code a bit to automatically put the accounts through a warm up period.

Talking to Reddit marketers is good. I'm getting the farm to try and act more natural and grow faster.

What also works is what I've done in every other project. Look at what people are doing but not talking about. There's a definite element of autoblogging going on in smaller subreddits with fairly new accounts. Seems to be happening on an alright scale. Normally this would be like catnip to me but I was kind of hoping to try and provide some quality for once. So I'll leave that one to the side for now but it's worth keeping an eye on. My rule of thumb is always if someone keeps doing something there's a reason behind it.

Dealing with a bit of a bottleneck in the system tonight. Trying to walk the line between footprints and manual work. Think I've found the solution but it's going to take a couple of hours to put together.

Goodluck brotha, another journey.

You changing the game

Interesting, how are you able to automate karma growth?

Any problem after reddit update ? Some bots stop working

Hello,

good luck with the journey!

What method you using to automate your accounts?