And HN is different...how exactly? There's a definite air of superiority here, but I don't find the commentary any more insightful. Besides, "reddit" isn't a single entity.
It's almost as if reddit is made up of millions of users and you can deduce the "average" or aggregate opinion of reddit by examining voting patterns.
Really? I do. Some subreddits approach what I see as a clear quality advantage in HN comments, but even then there's the occasional joke or non-sequitur. Which is fine. Reddit is not HN, and if they were the same, there would be less overall usefulness.
I enjoy HN and its semi-official policy of down voting comments that are are jokes and don't contribute to the conversation (it's easy to joke on HN, just include something substantive to the conversation as well). On Reddit, even in the more serious subreddits and discussions, one-liner joke comments still pop up, because while they may not get many up votes on serious discussions, I rarely see them get down votes.
Not that I don't enjoy jokes, but if I want that, I'll find the same (or a similar) discussion on Reddit. I just like that HN tries to keep people to a higher standard of conduct, because then that place exists.
To get noticed, you have to have upvotes. If you have upvotes, that means that users appreciated the content. If, say, a company or person is promoting themselves and the community upvotes it, I don't see any problem with it. That's how it's supposed to work.
But I don't think that's what you mean by 'disguise'. I would guess rather that you mean that some entity is paying the reddit the company to create artificial upvotes (i.e. not originating from users) and maybe even paid commenters. I personally would be surprised if there were a lot of this clearly happening (there's a number of people on reddit that make a 'career' out of debunking stories, identifying brigades, etc).
Can you point to some popular posts presently on reddit that are examples of it?
http://www.redditsecrets.com/buy-reddit-accounts
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=725562.0
https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/32rr56/do_peo...
You can build a small voting ring for a few hundred dollars to boost posts. The problem is all of Reddit's countermeasures to reduce spam made it hard to tell how successful these things are.
However, the fact people are still buying in 2016, implies at least some people succeed at it.
> Can you describe this sponsored/organic content dichotomy?
Really, only Reddit can say how bad this problem is but my guess its non-negligible and cutting into their monetization via native ads as its basically an end run around paying Reddit.
"However, the fact people are still sending money to random emails they get, implies at least some people get the money they were promised in return."
I assume that's the official Reddit SlideShare account.
(but yes, totally agreed)