[A_D_E_P_T]

Thing is, there aren't many marketing firms that don't have (or can't buy on a work-for-hire basis) upvote/downvote networks. It's trivial to promote comments in ways that look organic. It's equally trivial to downvote commercially harmful comments into oblivion.

What's more, Reddit posts are usually actively discussed only for a day or two. But votes can be cast, and new comments can be added, for months. One strategy is to wait until the conversation has completely died down, then hijack it with new comments that somehow seem to get as many votes as they need to rise to the top. When, a year later, somebody digs up that thread on Google, they'll see the promoted comments first.

Reddit has severe structural flaws that are, I think, unfixable. In making the upvote/downvote thing a kind of game, and in enabling easy throwaway accounts whose votes are weighed in the same way as those of the longstanding accounts of regular commenters, they've naturally made their forum easy for commercial interests to game.

[dawalker]

Great points, not sure those are fixable either. It definitely has some advantages from those same things in some respects, but monetizing reddit outside of ads (i.e. ecommerce like tiktok/instagram) because of these things is going to be a challenge for sure.