What MS responded with was crappy marketing speak, which would have worked on 'normal' people. Normal people would have swallowed it up. But Reddit did not - ie they are hard to monetize.
Opera did an IAmA, had ten engineers answering every question in a very informative manner, and I feel that they got a million times better publicity than Microsoft ever did.
It's not about 'fooling' people though. It's about people being overly skeptical, assuming everything is a scam, assuming conspiracy theories, ulterior motives.
I'm simply saying that the Reddit userbase is untrusting and not an easily monetizable demographic.