[adeeds]

The smaller niche subreddits dedicated to a hobby or type of product are actually some of the worst for astroturfing from what I've seen. It only takes a few shills to start building consensus.

There's a really interesting pattern where you'll see one person start a thread asking "Hey, any recs for durable travel pants?" Then a second comment chimes in "No specific brands, just make sure you get ones that have qualities x, y, and z". Then a third user says "Oh my Ketl Mountain™ travel pants have those exact traits!" Taken on their own the threads look fairly legit and get a lot of engagement and upvotes from organic users (maybe after some bot upvoted to prime the pump)

Then if you dump the comments of those users and track what subreddits they've interacted on, they've had convos following the same patterns about boots in BuyItForLife, Bidets in r/Bidets, GaN USB chargers in USBCHardware, face wash in r/30PlusSkincare, headphones, etc. You can build a whole graph of shilling accounts pushing a handful of products.

[tengbretson]

The worst part is that in a lot of niche communities knowing the "best" brand for a given activity then becomes a shibboleth, so it really only takes a few strategic instances of planting these seed crystals for the group opinion to be completely captured, and reinforced with minimal intervention.

[thmsths]

How is that not treated as fraud? As you pointed out, with a little bit of detective work (which is well beyond the means and motivation of a casual internet user, but well within reach of a consumer protection agency) it's fairly easy to expose these manipulative tactics. Commercial communication ought to be clearly labelled as such.

[numpad0]

Because the cyberspace was lawless for far too long. Justice systems worldwide were too ill-equipped to handle anything involving computers logically, effectively nullifying broad ranges of laws.

[adeeds]

I think it is fraud but

a) Is the current FTC going to care?

b) The tricky part is probably proving a business relationship. Otherwise someone could be a jerk and start shilling for their competitors just to get them fined.