I don't think the article is reassuring it is not astroturfed? He studied only a small case, for a brand on the smaller side, and found significant amount of bots.

If you see a single sheep on an island, it is safe to assume there is more than one sheep living on the island.

reddit is an echo chamber when it comes to most topics, and politics are probably the worst of all. Back in the Gamergate days it was all MRA types (throwback!); in 2016 it became 50% Bernie and 50% Trump; these days it's mostly mainstream liberal. I assume the actual political makeup of the user base hasn't changed that much in that time, but people who obsessively refresh and upvote/downvote posts based on their politics have an outsize impact on what comes to the top. I'm sure there's some impact from automated astroturfing, but humans drive it.

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.

Damn I haven't seen a Bill Gates conspiracy theory in a long time. What a throwback

eBay has become a cesspool though, with their silly login requiring phone number and so on. I still remember I had a completely fine Kleinanzeigen account at the beginning of the Pandemic, because I wanted to offer math and computer stuff help for students and put an ad for that on kleinanzeigen. (Didn't ever get a request that was worth taking seriously.) Then at some point later, I suddenly was no longer allowed to log in, unless I disclose my phone number. What a shit. Since then that account sits stale or might already be deleted.

I'm assuming it already falls under rules 2 and 5, content manipulation and deceptive interactions

Owners of Reddit also own these companies.

I think that reddit's recent change to allow hiding comment history is exactly to help support shilling.

It makes it hard to see what's a bot and what's a legitimate account.

Technically this is something the FTC could get involved in as it's illegal to advertise without making it clear you are.

A few years back a bunch of influencers were fined for doing just that.

Literally the example in the comment I replied to was an overseas operator. But my point is even if you did go after spam operators, alternatives will simply pop up in other jurisdictions, as has happened with literally every other form of spam.

YCombinator is not a social company. They actually do a ton to try to stop this stuff, it's just hard.

Because the only metric that matters for social media is engagement

True, but what if a third party existed to measure and compare other metrics that users would actually care about across popular platforms?

Generally you can't stop them, they're shell companies run from countries that don't care. You spend a lot of time and effort trying to block one and they just spin up another, it's asymmetrical in that you expend more resources to stop it.

reddit wants engagement numbers to grow either way, so that disincentivizes it further

Based on what happens everywhere, they're paying reddit for leniency. Pink contracts have been around since Uunet was offering them to Usenet spammers.

Eh. I see what you mean, but I'm more optimistic about GearLab. I think Wirecutter is different for three reasons:

1. Wirecutter has to review everything. GearLab is more limited; they steer clear of non-technical clothing and their tech arm doesn't even really do camera reviews. They obviously know to avoid categories where there are established review sites that most buyers are loyal to. If Wirecutter misses a category, people will complain - that's the curse of being the "everything" site. Rtings has a similar issue.

2. Wirecutter reviewers work for the Times and are unionized; GearLab hires freelancers.

3. The Times is relying on Wirecutter (alongside Games) to prop up their journalism, which is the spiritual core of their business, and the only part that clearly contributes something to society, but struggles to make money on its own. Putting Wirecutter behind the NYT paywall makes people more likely to sign up for a NYT subscription. GearLab isn't paying for any journalists' pensions.

Wirecutter affiliate links make the Times something like $60-70 million per quarter [1].

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/06/business/media/new-york-t...

Presumably because it's a good site and the qualms people are expressing with it here have no basis in reality.

At the top of the home page:

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

These days there are central clearing-houses for affiliate links that support basically every store, for the rare case where a product isn't available on Amazon/Best Buy/etc. Matic seems to use something called Impact.com. I don't see why that would be a concern.

Man, this comment is getting way more attention than I expected lol

Yes, they work on an affiliated model. From their About[0] page:

  How We Make Money
  GearLab is a free service that is entirely reader-supported. We select and review products objectively and independently. We only make money when you click on our affiliate links and buy products we've reviewed, which helps support our testing work.
  
  If you click on a retailer's link on our site and make any purchase, the retailer will contribute a portion of the sale to help support this site. It won't cost you anything extra, and it's a simple way to help us fund our gear reviews. Thanks for your support of our work!

[0] https://www.techgearlab.com/about

GearLab is legit. Their outdoor sibling (https://www.outdoorgearlab.com/) is also great. I think the whole concept of "best" in a product category is fairly flawed, but they do it well; their individual product reviews are even better.

I wasn’t aware of GearLab, thanks for the tip. I will say, though I took a look and it seems like they heavily use Amazon links so they suffer from similar downsides as Wirecutter.

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.

For a while people were suggesting that adding "reddit" to queries for shopping advice was a real way to get uncensored/genuine commentary and reviews.

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.

That this was posted by someone who's only here to post his own sites and those sites have never been submitted by another person is like performance art.

It may be that the people most likely to blindly follow astroturfed suggestions don’t pay attention to these indicators. In which case volume is more important than camouflage.

Unfortunately, advertisers are getting smarter and using bots...

I honestly thought this was a nag asking me to turn off my ad blocker!

I'll bet there's a browser extension to hide comments and posts from those auto generated user names. Like maybe you end up not seeing something interesting because someone used a throwaway account, but otherwise I don't really care what someone has to say that can't even be bothered to pick a name.

It's crazy to me they are presenting sluggified account names as something that should be taken seriously. But I guess it doesn't matter because most people just don't notice, and worse, the technology surrounding reddit does not seem to care.

It would be trivial for spammers to at least use different pattern. I am afraid they keep to the default, cause real users do the same. I am not surprised, the chance of colliding with other user login, on registration, on such old and popular website is high.

s between actual people.

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.

Isn't there? Especially when crypto was booming, that kind of opinion manipulation definitely existed to deceive people. I've actually seen it in freelance requests before too, and most of the time they run it through phone farms.

I've also heard it happens in some games as well, but either way, the one I can say for certain is crypto.

some people will expend a surprising amount of effort to justify their personal choices

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

A large portion of the "New LLM release" story comments here on HN also appear to be astroturfing ... would be interesting to see a correlation of comment sentiment to IP-derived geographic location!

Sounds interesting but I find it kind of annoying the github source either has been nuked or never existed in the first place.

Perhaps we can envision a future in which we analyze Reddit data not according to all the positive things people say about a product, but according to the negative things being said.

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 think due to the outsized power ads companies (and even those that aren't purely ads founded, like FB, but for which the model of profitability was always ads on the long-horizon) have over the current internet this won't ever go away, in fact it will only keep getting worse, hand in hand with the augmented agentic workflows.

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...

Yes.

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.

Per Reddit itself and Google, astroturfing is especially bad in political subreddits. Attempting to shape public perception is a big business.

There have been a few cases posted to the theoryofreddit subreddit where it's obvious that there were sets of accounts which were blanket recommending specific products a disproportionate amount of time. The user accounts involved were often banned shortly afterwards (or were deleted). These were (upon examination) really obvious though, often promoting extremely niche products using very exact terminology.

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).

Am I the only person who thinks many of the various "I don't touch code anymore" comments here come from bots?

Absolutely. For example, the blatant ads for Stake https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/1s3yscz/how_reddit_us...

Reddit added an option to hide your post history, making it harder to figure out if the account is a bot.

All this time I've been oblivious to this. To this day I still write site:reddit.com in my searches to get information from people. SMH.

Why would I trust an article written in Claudish with a broken link to a github repo?