Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dist-epoch 845 days ago
You're naive if you think reddit is safe from SEO spam.

Right now it's only because very very few people append "reddit". The moment that changes, it will be spammed into oblivion with subtle LLM written SEO spam.

Companies are sending people free products in exchange for an Amazon review, you think a free Reddit post will stop them?

1 comments

People on Reddit upvote and downvote comments all the time. You cannot upvote or downvote a Google search result. Unlike SEO spam surfaced by Google that only needs to satisfy Google's ranking algorithm, SEO spam on Reddit needs to do that and garner enough upvotes by a diversity of users. Even though some of the users might be sock puppets or bots, the value is still there as long as there are more humans than bots.
Suddenly Reddit user count is x5 and we have bots upvoting
Suddenly Reddit becomes a huge user of reCAPTCHA Enterprise and astoundingly, Google earns a bunch of money for improving its search results.