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Comment by paulpauper | Hacker News Reader

yeah because the majority of Reddit content reflects an objective and genuine human experience--not PR/fluff, or AI, or copywritten/outsourced shit. In a web overflowing with paid, shill, or automated shit or 'content', this is becoming increasingly had to find and is sought out. People do not want 'more content'-they want to read an experience by a user.

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I'm fairly certain that pr companies figured reddit out about 5 years ago.

It's still pretty good for niche products and hobbies, but as a recommendation machine, is pretty garbage.

Have any subreddit mods been exposed as paid corporate shills? I'm a bit surprised that I haven't noticed signs of that for subreddits with an obvious commercial angle. Maybe moderating is such a thankless slog that brands can't pay people to do it ;)

There's plenty of signs if you take a look. E.g. most subreddits concerning an interest with products being made will have recommended products and such. Is this an organic, community made list of tools that is regularly vetted? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. You can imagine how valuable it would be for your company if you convinced the niche forum in your space that you are the "buy it for life" option or some default no wrong move choice.

Sometimes there will also be discussion posts "hey anyone know a good x for z?" written by a shill account where other shill accounts come in with product recommendations, supported by upvotes from other bots over any other evidence.

Kind of an interesting thread on the subject in the marketing subreddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/marketing/comments/vf5wmv/do_brands...

Basically people are saying yes, marketing on reddit is very effective, especially if you aren't obvious and using /u/mybrandname but /u/randomuser123.

This user is talking about starting a B2B company for this sort of subtle organic reddit posting, after having apparently a lot of success and thinking they can handle more clients than they currently do:

https://old.reddit.com/r/marketing/comments/1c05w7c/thoughts...

     Have any subreddit mods been exposed as paid corporate shills?

Reddit is just as compromised as any place else, but (like Wikipedia) their user moderation system has effective and transparent enough to largely mitigate this -- at least relative to the rest of the internet.

Please don't misunderstand. The challenges and problems with content and moderation at both of those places are very real. But, relative to the most of rest of the internet, (a low bar to clear) they have coped very well.

r/gaming has a series of "I made a game" ads that the moderators allow users to run promotional organic posts

Some of the headphone and electronics subs seem to have promotional accounts.

There are frequent issues in gaming subs with youtubers bribing mods to promote their content.

Yeah there was a lot of that going on in 2012/2013. major scandals involving tech and gaming subs. Gaming and tech subs are especially vulnerable to this.

Also many affiliate marketers are trying to spam Reddit, since they lost a lot of Google traffic last year. We can't have nice things.

I would state that I have very little in the way of good objective experience with Reddit opinions. But at the same time, I have zero good experience with everything else.

Reddit comments are genuinely better, but not by much! One significant problem I find with Reddit users is that they tend to be unable to see past their purchase. Hordes of fanboyism. Even more Stockholm syndrome.

    One significant problem I find with Reddit users 
    is that they tend to be unable to see past their 
    purchase. Hordes of fanboyism.

This hasn't been my experience at all over 10 years on Reddit, but I can very much believe many subreddits are that way. Given Reddit's decentralization and breadth it makes sense that two people would have very different experiences.

I remember when "place" happened. It was a collaborative art project where for 72 hours users could place a single colored "pixel" on a blank canvas then had to wait 5 minutes before they could place another. Communities formed plans, and battles for space on the canvas were fought.

Given the freedom to create something unique and beautiful together what did reddit ultimately come up with? Mostly a collection of corporate logos and copyrighted characters along with memes and flags. (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnRCZK3KjUY)

"Hordes of fanboyism" seems fair.

If they did, they did a damned good job of being subtle about it.

Yeah that’s why you use Google to search back to the useful years

edit: also because Reddit search is so abysmal

All possible because of the work of countless unpaid moderators.

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