[JasonADrury]

I do this kind of marketing on reddit. It's so incredibly easy.

Upvotes cost nothing, and even if someone figures out the astroturfing, you just spend a dollar or two and bury them in downvotes.

One of my favorite tactics is just to use throwaway accounts to keep repeatedly asking variations of the same question "What x should I get for y?" and then consistently replying from my main shilling account with variations of "Hey, this gets posted ALL THE TIME but here is what I suggested previously and people seemed to like it ...". This way I can just keep recycling the same high-effort copy endlessly.

The reddit shills you spot are either lazy or idiots. There's no chance you'd ever suspect any of my biggest earning posts, simply because they're entirely consistent with the other content in the community and could have naturally achieved similar levels of upvotes had I just been lucky. But with bots I don't have to be lucky.

[satvikpendem]

People on HN won't like that you do this but at least you're honest, and showing that this does actually happen, it's just that others are not so loud (at least sometimes, see the link below). This sort of thing is very common on reddit, there are even articles and studies about said astroturfing.

Due to the cyclical nature of posts and the exhausted moderators trying to mod all of them, it's quite effective for "organic" growth. Many companies use these methods to grow, because it's way cheaper than paying for ads and users online are simply too gullible to catch on. And even if they did, you can just delete the thread and make a new one later on.

It's the same strategy used in TikTok where the influencer subtly hints at the product rather than overtly talking about it (perhaps as one slide in a slideshow), and then when a commenter asks what they used, the influencer replies with the name of the product.

For example [0], there have been large scale astroturfing campaigns for things like games, posting large numbers of comments to influence users.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1ot0nvg/game_dev_adm...

[dgroshev]

Personally I don't like that they do that, not that they are pointing out that they do that.

[satvikpendem]

Yes I should've said, people on HN don't like that they do that, or that it happens at all, but the reality is that it does and especially for people on a forum run by a startup accelerator in particular (with tons of Ask HN questions on how to grow their product via marketing), posting on social media is one of the most effective ways to grow, whether people like it or not.

[maxerickson]

You should be ashamed of manipulating people for profit, not proud of it.

[Anon1096]

If someone reads the reddit post and decides to buy the Sriracha competitor then who has been ripped off? It's a win-win, competitor has gotten business and the customer has bought a product they now perceive to be superior.

People should probably be more aware that the social media they use is astroturfed to hell and back but marketing and advertising is far too demonized.

[BobaFloutist]

Advertising without disclosing to sponsorship is literally illegal because we as a society have decided that it's a social ill.

[JasonADrury]

I'm largely indifferent, but the products I promote are good and the customers spending 500k+ pa on the services I sell are not unsophisticated.

[maxerickson]

Well of course the people buying your services approve of your antisocial behavior, they are encouraging it. They also suck.

[JasonADrury]

The "customers" I speak of here are the people finding my antisocial content on reddit and deciding to enter into long term business relationships.

I don't get paid to sell bottles of sriracha, but the fundamentals of doing so on reddit are basically the same whether you're selling expensive services or sriracha. The only difference is the content.

[maxerickson]

Fake endorsements of a product is not what most people mean by "selling".

Like I get it, you are fine with what you are doing. Whatever. But you are being dishonest with people, maybe in a way that you see as small, and that sucks.

[snowwrestler]

If this is true, it implies that such marketing on Reddit is not worth much. Because if a marketing tactic is easy and effective, intense competition will drive up the price of doing so.

Conversely if Reddit astroturfing was actually valuable, "upvotes cost nothing" could not be true. Like, we know that Meta and Google ads are effective, and those cost something. Not because they're hard to do, but because everyone is trying to do them at once.

[red-iron-pine]

> Because if a marketing tactic is easy and effective, intense competition will drive up the price of doing so.

will it? who is occupying and competing in that space, in a business sense? and are they using reddit? if so, which subs and who are they targeted at?

the various build-a-PC subs are a great example -- they have ones for high end GPUs -- literally, r/gpu -- and others for more generic uses. you can shill all-day on r/buildapcsales and do well without having to battle on the more general buildapc

in a broader sense, building consensus is critical, and plenty of businesses or political entities are willing to take huge losses to completely corral public perception -- most notably the purchase of Paramount by everyone's least favorite villian Larry E

[snowwrestler]

You think GPU manufacturers are paying people to post fake positive comments all day in /r/buildapcsales in the hopes of materially increasing their revenue?

[JasonADrury]

I've thought about this same thing a lot, and the only explanation for the current state of affairs I can come up with is that marketers that have a good enough understanding of these communities are hard to come by.

It's also likely that many businesses are simply too risk averse to engage in things like purchasing farmed reddit accounts and upvotes.

[snowwrestler]

Oh, there’s risk? Somehow you forgot to mention that in your post about how incredibly easy it is.

I’m sure it’s possible to make small amounts of money with Reddit bots, just like it’s possible to make small amounts of money with email spam, and posting AI slop to Facebook and X, and SMS scams.

The idea that major brands do this habitually, is what I’m objecting to.

[JasonADrury]

>I’m sure it’s possible to make small amounts of money with Reddit bots, just like it’s possible to make small amounts of money with email spam, and posting AI slop to Facebook and X, and SMS scams.

I'm getting clients who are each spending a minimum of 500k USD pa on services.

There's a very wide variety of eyeballs you can reach on reddit. It's everything from people inserting impressively large items in their body to people trading eye-wateringly expensive jewelry from cult brands like Chrome Hearts and nerds discussing enterprise telco equipment and EDR platforms.

But sure, I don't think it scales.

>The idea that major brands do this habitually, is what I’m objecting to.

I doubt major brands do this habitually. There are countless smaller players who do.

[_joel]

So you're one of the reasons everything is shit. Got it.

[JasonADrury]

In a sense? Yes, and I don't care because other people are posting AI garbage everywhere and genuinely ruining things.

In another sense? Not really, because the one thing I've learned is that if the content couldn't work without the botted upvotes, it's not good worth posting.

The marketing posts I make are easily in top 1% of reddit content. That's not a hard bar to meet when you have more than an hour or two to spend on a single comment!

[Nemi]

It's called Tragedy of the Commons, and it is just how things are unfortunately. I don't like it either, but if it wasn't this guy it would be someone else.

[BobaFloutist]

Well, it wouldn't be me, and it wouldn't be a lot of other people, so maybe it's not "just how it is", maybe some people are more willing to abuse the commons than others and we should be quicker to identify and condemn antisocial behavior instead of just shrugging and saying "Oh well, it's society's fault for failing to plug every possible profit motive for bad behavior"

[OJFord]

GP is from a long line of enshittificators: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47218815

[zoeysmithe]

I mod a couple subs on reddit, and one that is fairly famous. I see this stuff all the time, even if this person is lying. Its a real phenomenon. Usually its messy like "haha, my husband just loves these cookies" and with a link to the site and its obvious its spam, but stuff like this happens too.

I take some supplements for health reasons and its pretty obvious in that space too. I remember one day one brand of a certain something (which came from a no-name company and over-priced compared to competitors) was near everywhere in comments. In fact, people just referred to the product by the brand name, not the actual chemical. Eventually people got wise to it, and you'd see a "hey this is astroturfing," but the comments remain and if you google or reddit search this supplement, the top results are people raving about this one specific brand still. This stuff works and I imagine it works very well because it keeps happening.

Its also especially bad in women's spaces because there's so many competing brands of fashion or makeup or whatever. Much of it using stealth advertising, relationships with influencers who won't disclose its a paid partnership, etc. A lot of makeup brands get big almost soley because of internet engagement, so there's a strong incentive to try.

You can see this happening in realtime almost. Suddenly this face cream or this mascara is big on reddit, with new-ish accounts raving about them. I've noticed lately that they've been buying old accounts and repurposing them. I've dug into people's posting histories (a mod can see this if youre on their sub even if private) and the account is 5 years old that went silent 3 years ago and now is suddenly back but this time its someone purporting to be a woman, when the previous posting history is very male-coded and even may call himself a man in comments. I don't think we fully appreciate how fake this all is and how little will there is to fight it. This is also done politically too, especially around election season, but is generally happening all the time.

I remember tracking this stuff for a while when Stellar Blade came out, which had some fair accusations of male gaze-y marketing and graphics. There was no shortage of "I'm a woman gamer/developer, and Stellar Blade is actually not sexist, its empowering," posts and comments on a popular women's gaming sub. It was really incredible to see this and again, a lot of these accounts were recently awakened accounts from someone who did not fit the profile. There is so much bot PR. I won't even go into the Depp-Heard case because its a huge topic, but wow, that was a great example of bots controlling the narrative almost entirely.

[NikolaNovak]

And then it's picked up by LLMs as a fairly trusted organic source. It slightly peeves me how often LLM cites random reddit post as an authoritative trust worthy data point :-/