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Comment by neuronic | Hacker News Reader

The subversive marketing and political astroturfing really annoy me as a long time reddit user.

Nowadays there are companies which sport hundreds or thousands of alt accounts to drive marketing or political agendas. Posts like the Enchroma (scam) advertising on r/pics last week are just the obvious tip of the ice berg.

Companies share post templates to just fill and spread in targeted subreddits. Many mods are paid for channeling the "right" content just like Instagram/YT influencers are paid for product placements.

It's not some hobbyist forum for the more popular subs. It's a marketing engine.

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The real money is in capturing subreddit moderators.

It’s an open secret in the PR industry that if you can get moderators of popular subreddits (for your market) on your side, then it’s easy to throw the conversation in your favor.

Moderators are the invisible hand the sway the conversation on Reddit. They have immense power to remove posts and comments that they disagree with.

PR companies are more than happy to arrange for subreddit moderators to receive free product, chats with company executives, even trips for office or factory tours. It makes the moderators feel like they’re “in” with the company, and they began moderating accordingly.

In some cases, popular subreddit moderators simply start their own businesses selling to particular subreddits. Some of them truly are honest, but others are looking to make a quick buck selling courses, putting affiliate links in subreddit Wikis and other activities.

>The real money is in capturing subreddit moderators.

Right. This also leads to some of the clearest evidence that Reddit (the corporation) isn't interested in actually being a discussion board, but has completely given itself over to leveraging its user base for money.

Despite years of issues with subreddit mods selling out, taking over, censoring users, in general behaving badly and a complete lack of transparency, Reddit has changed nothing about how that system works.

> Reddit has changed nothing about how that system works

I'd say they have changed for the worse. In recent years they have quarantined or banned many even remotely controversial subreddits. Reddit admins are increasingly forcing SV's political ideology onto it's users. Ramping up censorship will be the end of Reddit, as users leave to look for alternatives.

If they did, then they would have to pay them for their free labor and thats a can they do not want to open.

In the semi-official national subreddits for e.g. small-ish European countries you mostly see politics being pushed from moderators rather than products. I've grown quite suspicious of that lately, for the same reason.

All the $LOCATION subs have a strong political leaning, mostly in the same direction, with some $LOCATION specific variance generally permitted.

Yes, r/de for Germany is a heavily left leaning sub which routinely bans right opinion (note, I am not saying right extreme).

Don’t dare criticizing communism either, it’s especially fun having West German 18yo students yell at me for disliking socialism as a former Soviet Union citizen.

Exactly the same can be said about r/uk with it's trigger happy mods. Their bashing of "fascists" is rather ironic, considering their heavy handed tactics.

Add r/india to the list too.

The moderator problem was noticeable years ago: https://jakeseliger.com/2015/03/16/the-moderator-problem-how... and has become more evident today.

To add to your posts. Around 50 most popular sub-reddits are moderated by the same people.

I haven't read the article yet but I'm pretty sure the awful practices you and the parent post are describing are the real reasons why reddit is undervalued.

Correct that’s why I called it marketing engine. It’s not open about it though.

/r/redditminusmods

Yeah, reddit has suffered it's Eternal September several times over. The astroturfing and low value content/commentary makes the default front page with the default sub-reddits like looking at a magazine rack at the check out counter. The niche sub-reddits (non-default) are sometimes worth going to but have their own issues with being echo chambers. In either case, I've reduced my usage of the site and been looking for other alternatives (besides this one) that I can kind of get in on the ground floor with.

And in the vein of Eternal September, they're accidentally created a moat to prevent anyone from creating a board with its own unique culture because:

A) everyone assumes reddit culture is internet culture and will transplant it everywhere (see HN over the years)

B) reddit is big enough to have captured a large portion of internet discourse and therefore people who are deemed unwelcome are a significant portion of those who aren't on the platform. If you attempt to start a board, you'll quickly find that those individuals will descend on it and destroy it with hate unless you have exceptional moderation capacity.

> The subversive marketing and political astroturfing really annoy me as a long time reddit user.

It's not as if Hacker News is immune to this. Pay attention to some of the posts being pushed to the front page and the associated comments and you may notice similar shenanigans occuring here. This applies doubly so if the post is made during the weekend.[1]

Considering the fact that many users on HN are reddit transplants, there is the inevitable spillover effect. Comments of the lowbrow variety have become more commonplace (e.g. comment threads made of low-hanging puns).

Without strict moderation, this site too will devolve. After all, you can take the redditor out of reddit but you can't take the reddit out of the redditor.

[1]: As one example, a couple weeks ago there was a new account created by a user for the sole purpose of selling their book on HN; they've only been active on that account for that one single post and (I strongly suspect) they used alts to artificially boost their post to the front page.

At least here, we can flag-kill spam. On Reddit, flags go to the moderators to deal with. I will give you that: if @dang or @sctb are paid off, we’d be in trouble.

I feel like Reddit is evolving toward convergence with a chum box. It seems as though it was intentionally designed to be vulnerable to bad faith commercial activity, and its popularity is sort of sickening. Watching a bunch of kids sink their personal cash into a moribund pink sheet stock as part of a pump and dump and the subsequent David vs Goliath astroturfing was among the most depressing things I’ve ever witnessed on the internet.

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