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Comment by root_axis | Hacker News Reader

I don't get the appending reddit thing. I don't see why reddit is considered trustworthy, marketers have been planting "organic discussion" on reddit for years.

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Yeah, I can't confirm it, but the weirdest I think I've seen is in r/science about research that was funded by the meat industry saying that a diet with meat is healthier than vegetarianism or veganism.

The study was poorly done and there were tons of comments pushing the same message: "vegetarians/vegans are annoying hipsters who will lecture you for eating meat and they'll be so deservedly upset by this."

Found it and most of those comments are deleted now (https://redd.it/qskxol). Is the meat industry losing a sizable chunk of profits to more people swearing off meat for moral reasons, or ditching meat as a financial decision?

Edit: Threw that link into a website that restores deleted comments (https://www.reveddit.com/v/science/comments/qskxol/meat_cons...).

Mods deleted all references to fact that the study was funded by a beef company. Blatant corruption?

It's actually very common for subreddits to eventually get owned or controlled by the industry leaders and then begin censorship campaigns. One of the most blatant examples of this is /r/bitcoin where any discussion of alternative scaling strategies except 1MB blocks with Layer 2 on top will earn you a ban.

The /r/science mods are extremely strict and delete any subjective comments. Some of them like posting clickbait of their own though…

But our uncanny valley detector is pretty good at sensing it imo and the upvote system helps and authentic people will comment or disagree.

SEO blogs are full uncanny valley for me.

In my experience reddit comments are less likely to be marketing than Google results are. Still not entirely trustworthy, absolutely.

The trick is to find an active community where they know their stuff and will downvote/delete spam. Unfortunately those needs to be extremist for their hobby and so they will look down on perfectly fine for normal use low budget things.

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