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Discussion (70 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Why doesn't Reddit make sure that shilling is disallowed by their ToS, and then sue these companies and all their customers?
Also, shill accounts prove to advertisers that the platform works to make money. That’s the whole reason Reddit exists.
True, but what if a third party existed to measure and compare other metrics that users would actually care about across popular platforms?
I know US people who do this for a living
A few years back a bunch of influencers were fined for doing just that.
I've seen cases where the admins delete comments that talk about the issue
It makes it hard to see what's a bot and what's a legitimate account.
Please name one
Genuinely asking
reddit wants engagement numbers to grow either way, so that disincentivizes it further
This I think leads to a sort of toupee fallacy - where because you can spot the really bad examples you feel confident that you can identify the much better, more subtle examples. If an account which has only made 50 comments (all of which are very generic) makes 20 comments in a single month explicitly recommending ImageGeneratorDeluxeProMax then sure, you can guess they might not be legit. But if an account runs for a longer period of time and makes a lot more general organic contributions then if 1 in 500 of their comments are in favour of a particular product then it's harder to say.
I think ultimately account age is the only thing that will be difficult to replicate at scale. I know people buy older accounts but there is still a fundamental difficulty in obtaining them in sufficient numbers. And yes, obviously that will mean disregarding the many millions of legitimate accounts that are under (say) 2 or 3 years old. There is also no easy way of hiding accounts under a certain age when searching Reddit via Google.
By allowing uses to hide user profiles Reddit has also made detecting potentially bad actors that little bit more difficult. And from experience it feels like a large proportion of accounts now have hidden post histories. (It might also be the default for new accounts, I'm not sure).
When I see 2-weeks old account "Incendiary-Leg-8592" responding to a post by another weeks old user "Pivotal-Kitchen-0498", I have a hard time believing they are humans behind them.
For product reviews, I've been using GearLab (https://www.techgearlab.com/) for years with pretty reliable results. I have no affiliation with them.
Amazon nowadays is such a crapshoot. A link to a product isn’t reliable. The price could be different than what the review stated, and the link might be for an listing that shows as out of stock. I think GearLab tries to fix this by giving you a link to search results on Amazon instead, but in some ways that’s worse. In the couple of links I tried the reviewed product wasn’t the top result so now it’s up to you to decide which of the links is the real one.
That loses some of the value prop for me because part of what I want from a service like this is to give me a link to a legit product listing. That’s not GearLab’s fault, Amazon makes that very difficult, but it still reduces the utility for me. That said it’s better than nothing which just points to the sad state of affairs in e-commerce today.
Edit: it looks like at least some of their links take you directly to the product page. Not sure why some of them take you to a search results page instead, but my guess is it’s an issue with expiring links.
I pay for Consumer Reports, since you actually need a paid subscription to access the data, which makes sense structurally. I don't really know if the reviews are any good, though I've been relatively happy with it. I also paid a subscription for an independent supplement testing lab, but I forget what it's called at the moment.
Yes, they work on an affiliated model. From their About[0] page:
[0] https://www.techgearlab.com/about[0] https://www.techgearlab.com/about
> When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission, which helps support our testing.
That’s what the parent comment was referring to
Why would you assume any website is immune to this problem of bots and fake or paid reviews? Bots are so cheap now and smart enough to pass as realistic humans.
Even with good intentions, money runs out eventually (they say no ads and no sponsored content) and someone with deep pockets will exploit this.
Eventually everyone will just have to implement the foolproof solution of putting in the rules that saying that their website has a problem is "a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills" and be done with it.
I understand how they operate (it's in the middle of their main page) but that actually makes it more difficult for them. The site commits to test thousands of products each year and they don't do sponsored content, free samples, or ads.
They're walking on a beaten path, see Rtings [0] (even the methodology and visual style, which is a good thing). Everyone eventually needs to look for alternative revenue streams to support themselves especially when the competition is fierce and doesn't always play fair. Affiliate link revenue via Amazon.com is not a reliable long term financing strategy for a review website which has to constantly purchase new stuff and pay qualified reviewers.
Most people search the local market for the product and buy the best deal. It doesn't need to be Amazon.com and in many cases, it can't.
[0] https://www.rtings.com/company/revamping-our-membership-prog...
* Those accounts naming one brand almost every time they name any. * Thin accounts: few comments, low scores, no real standing in the subreddit. * Young accounts, or accounts with histories that are hidden or wiped. * Links to a store or an affiliate page.
I strongly believe that there's a lot of paid product placement and paid political talking points on Reddit, so it's actually remarkable that this (LLM-generated) article fails to find it. I suspect it's just bad design.
If you're already spending money on tokens, there's a very simple experiment you could do instead: just pay one of these companies to position a made-up product and see what they do.
at this point astroturfing is a given... corporations do it, governments do it, individuals do it... anonymous content in aggregate can not be relied on
An id-with-options-for-anonymity solution would go a long way but no one is remotely interested in that because it would just crater all these companies valuations if you figured out 60k subscribers were actually 45k bots, and 80% comments were automated agentic replies.
I had launched almost 10 years ago a campaign in indiegogo and immediately got spammed with people selling marketing campaigns, I launched a few days ago one in gamefound and the same happened. Without it, or you investing on your own marketing campaigns it's just impossible to get any traction of sorts, unless you have a network of contacts that themselves can reach organically other people, and the same for other things, like bootstrapping an online social platform. It's almost as if it's a "cost of doing business".
Most of these marketers themselves have automated funnels, now all using agents, there's a lot of tell-tales on the messages you receive and then on the follow ups too - sometimes to the point that the messages just miss completely things you made clear just on the previous message and just follow a funnel to get you through the door. At a certain threshold or when told explicitly sometimes a human goes into the loop, but 2 messages in it's like they reset back to factory defaults...
I do it locally to nudge political discourse. Doesn't take much to sway a lot of people.
I'm glad I agree with what I'm doing because its effectiveness is terrifying.
I don't understand why so many people and companies feel the need to just spam reviews, SEO and questionable ads. It's like almost no one has the idea that may we start with a good product, then we'll tell people about it. It's always a question of what you can have produced cheaply in China and how do we then trick people into buying it.
As it stand you can pretty much assume that if it's advertised, or is promoted on social media, it's going to be a shit product.
To some extend I'd exclude certain types of YouTube reviews, because they frequently aren't paid by the manufacturer and making a video with real people and real data is to expensive to waste on scams.
Only for arbitrary people. Gate kept or low member count communities that exist to facilitate a discussion between appliance repair men, literature enthusiasts, fly tying hobbyists or owners of a particular model of vehicle are largely alive and well (unfortunately a lot of them moved from forums to facebook, but still.
I honestly thought this was a nag asking me to turn off my ad blocker!
Shilling can’t prevent dissatisfied customers from voicing their opinions in a properly moderated subreddit, and astroturfing to spread misinformation about a competitor makes companies much more vulnerable to litigation.
I've also heard it happens in some games as well, but either way, the one I can say for certain is crypto.
Just look at how often Bill Gates gets glazing articles posted which receive suspicious rankings. None of the comments mention the Epstein-sized elephants in the room.
Politics is even worse, and it's useless as a platform for taking political temperature. Numerous companies openly admit to this activity and Reddit has never commented on this practice.
No serious person would ever suggest using it to take the "political temperature" of society at large. It's about as useful as Nextdoor for that.
Of course, AI coding agents, which the author works on, would also never be astroturfed on Reddit!
You know, astroturfing on Reddit also comes from long time accounts with moderator support.
If you see a single sheep on an island, it is safe to assume there is more than one sheep living on the island.
Very long write up to unconfidently say I don’t know.
Even the first time I saw the advice I was skeptical, reddit is rife with bots, and fake comments/posts. It's been well-known for almost a decade at this point that there are multiple individuals moderating many communities there, and that kinda power is rife for abuse.
I've been a sporadic reddit reader/poster for a few years, but this past month I've had enough and deleted my account. The main draw was niche-topics, but they've been overrun with AI slop, and even the local communities have become echo-chambers rather than posts of new bands, events, etc. The local newspaper can tell me about those already.