[relaxing]

> My proudest growth hack involved Reddit's API. I filtered posts mentioning phrases like "NBA League Pass," "blackouts," or "where to" on team-specific subreddits. Then I gave my users lists of those posts and encouraged them to comment—transparently—about why they liked HeheStreams, including their referral link.

Any goodwill I felt towards this guy evaporated at the end. Reddit spam, unraveling the social trust in user recommendations, is a scourge. I’m sorry he wasn’t sent to jail longer.

And as with most criminal cases, it’s astonishing how little money he made for his trouble.

[VWWHFSfQ]

Yeah the whole endeavor was pretty pointless no matter how much the author is trying to glorify it as some kind of legitimate, special, important business.

Big "Our amazing journey" vibes with this one. Except the journey ended up in prison and all they have left to talk about is how proud they were to spam Reddit with pirate stream links.

[lifestyleguru]

Yeah, thank you for breaking reddit. After their nuclear ban of flagged accounts and disabling non-residential IPs I don't bother to create account anymore.

[joshmn]

I’m sorry you got the idea that my users were spamming Reddit with referral links. It was hardly like that and I personally checked that every user was being tasteful, and sent “don’t spam” only a handful of times. I had alerts setup for each source of referrer (via analytics) and for each one that came from reddit (parsed by the ID of the post) I'd individually check to ensure that it wasn't "bad," and that the user wasn't just schilling—if an unreasonable (see: 3) last comments were slinging a referral link, I'd straight up ask them to remove them.

That probably doesn’t change your perception—I, too, feel like Reddit is pretty bad these days—but I felt the need to say something anyway. I ran a pretty tight ship and had placed a lot of importance on perception and reputation. Building trust was important to my operation, from both a growth standpoint and a customer service standpoint. When shit broke (as it often did, considering I operated as the mouse instead of the cat), my users took my word that an attempted fix was in the works.

[relaxing]

1. Schilling was the MLB pitcher, the word you’re looking for is “shilling”

2. Paying commenters to spread positive buzz is worse. The term for that is astroturfing

3. Scumbag