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

In Germany e.g. Galaxus works fine for many things. Also eBay surprisingly works better for many things because it has more filters, e.g. if you want to buy wood or window shades etc.

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.

Because the only metric that matters for social media is engagement, and a war against active account, no matter the purpose, would make that line go down.

Also, shill accounts prove to advertisers that the platform works to make money. That’s the whole reason Reddit exists.

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.

Because they are not a review aggregator? They purchase the products themselves, do extensive testing, and then publish their results. You can find more about their process on their About page here: https://www.techgearlab.com/about.

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.

It seems like the parent comment is likely right

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

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.

I think the items listed under "What astroturfing would look like" were a pretty narrow scope. If I were designing a ~spam system~ astroturfing solution, I'd engineer out these four simple indicators as soon as I could.

* 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.

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.

Ads, scams, rage bait, trolls... The internet is pretty broken for almost all sites that pretends to carry conversations between actual people.

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.

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.

My impression is that this doesn't show anything. It essentially implies that brand loyalty is equivalent to paid astroturfing, but if you've been around hobby communities on the internet, you know that a lot of people are just brand blowhards. And in any case, by its own admission, none of the results in this article are statistically significant, so it fails to find the effect it implies to have found.

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.

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!