I recently wrote a critical article on NEO that presented, among other things, mounting evidence that despite an advertised capability to support 1000 transactions/second, NEO actually has some serious scaling issues. The network has been mysteriously blacking out even with only one concurrent ICO occurring on the platform. For a blockchain that is supposed to be able to process 1000 transactions/second, it’s very surprising to learn that at times, it can’t even handle the load of one ICO.

I posted the article on Reddit (specifically /r/cryptomarkets) and noticed very suspicious voting activity about an hour after posting. Initially, the article was well received and the upvote/downvote ratio was quite positive. Within the first hour, the post had gained almost 54 points and it quickly rose to the front page.

Something incredibly sketchy happened soon after. In the span of 15 minutes, the post received a flood of downvotes that dropped it from around 50 to 0 points. It quickly dropped off from the front page and traffic from /r/cryptomarkets dried up. It was quite obvious someone turned on their legion of bots to censor my article.

I’m happy to report that even though the bots were able to censor the article from /r/cryptomarkets, they couldn’t censor it from other places like Twitter, Facebook, and /r/buttcoin. In fact, the post performed incredibly well on /r/buttcoin. So far, tens of thousands of people have seen the article and I’m happy to see that even after getting downvoted to oblivion, people are still able to discover and objectively evaluate my research.

There is so much social media manipulation in the cryptocurrency space because it’s so easy and profitable. If you don’t believe me, just look at all the scam bots that swarm tweets from popular cryptocurrency-related Twitter accounts. The botting on reddit is a little bit more subtle but it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the same bots that downvoted my post are being used to upvote and downvote other posts. The people behind these bots are effectively defining reddit’s narrative.

I see it all the time, yet when my own social media posts get botted, it definitely leaves a very bad taste. I highly recommend not basing your investment decisions on what you see on social media. Hype can be easily fabricated, dissenting opinions can be easily suppressed.