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Comment by gzer0 | Hacker News Reader

I used to type “reddit” after my searches to look for genuine and real reviews, but even that is now being gamed.

Advertisers and shady affiliate marketing schemes have caught on and nearly every search result I try is now filled with junk, upvote farmed nonsense with fake accounts using similar naming schemes.

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For me the problem with Reddit is not even the astroturfing. It's that, similarly to SEO and Google, people have figured out the kind of posts and replies that get upvotes. So, on niche subreddits, you get a lot of folklore and second-hand advice repeated by people addicted to internet points, or, like other poster put it better below, "well meaning beginners offering advice outside of their skill level". The Geil-Mann Amnesia Effect is strong in that site.

yeah, the other day I ran afoul of that practice

The top post in the relevant enthusiast sub recommending stuff to buy had no actual information, but it was stuffed with Amazon affiliate links. It was basically a "Top 5 X 2022" post except it was on Reddit instead of its own spam blog

This is 100% the case when I was looking for a VPN recommendation.

So many of the Reddit threads were blatantly astroturfed.

Another think you'll see a lot of is bots looking for "listical" and blog info so some side hustle person can piece together an article on something they know next to nothing about.

By the way, while I have you here, have you considered extending your used car's warranty?

Most of the VPN discussion/coupon subs are literally run by the VPN companies themselves. r/VPNCoupons and r/VPN are run by Surfshark, for example. Nord and CyberGhost also run astroturf rings for themselves too.

This is one downside I will agree is a consequence of tracking technology on the web. There is no way for "genuine" discoverability to hide on the internet anymore. After a while, sites will start noticing that their purchase traffic is coming from Reddit so they'll start targeting it and before you know it, even the bad producers/products are being spammed there.

Meh if you put a little effort into it by checking the post & comment history of the person doing the review it should give you a clue. Sure some companies have bought accounts with lots of Karma and "good will" in the past but I think that's pretty rare.

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