[whamlastxmas]

I have the sneaking suspicion that reddit has allowed and facilitated astroturfing for over a decade. As in, providing accounts, eliminating rate limits, artificially boosting posts and comments, and aggressively shadow banned contrary opinions. This is definitely a known phenomenon on a auto moderator level but I bet reddit ownership is complicit in it too

[quesera]

This behaviour is also openly acknowledged to have been used in early-Reddit growth hacking. So why not?

[AlexeyBelov]

They were caught multiple times doing shady automated things. Most recently auto-translating posts and misleading search engine users with this. At this point there is no goodwill.