The marketing on reddit is what gets me. Aside from the fact that reddit video is terrible.. if you spend enough time on reddit (which, sadly, I do) you start to see patterns emerging. These have gotten more and more blatant over the past few years to the point where it is ruining a lot of the larger subs. The particular case i'm thinking of is when the movie "IT" came out recently. There was so much guerrilla marketing everywhere it was just a real pain in the ass to browse around.

In general though it goes like this:

  "TIL XXX did YYY" - fairly innocuous postings about a movie, game, product, or company seemingly out of the blue, a few weeks/months before anything happens (in the case of IT there was a load of stuff about Tim Curry or Stephen King a long time before any real announcement the movie would be releasing soon)

  "XXX has rumoured to release a YYY v2" - sparked discussion about the possible launch of something, be it a movie, game, etc.

  *maybe a few more TILs/related content/memes digging up old screenshots of said movie, game, etc.*

  "XXX has released YYY" - a hugely voted post which gains a lot of visibility very quickly

  (depending on the level of marketing)
  *Floods of memes relating directly to XXX or YYY which don't usually look like fan content*

maybe i'm being overly paranoid, but there seems to be a definite trait in my head. Other than the occasional self-congratulatory Medium post, HN luckily doesn't seem to be falling to the same fate (HN funded incubators aside, which is fine). I guess thanks largely in part to the mods here. Gj dang!