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Comment by maest | Hacker News Reader

I feel like I'm losing more and more faith in Reddit reviews/conversations.

As the site has been growing, I feel like there are increasesd amounts of astroturfing going on. Maybe I'm being overly paranoid, or maybe I've visited r/hailcorporate too many times. However, consider this - reddit is a huge website with a lot of reach, where it's free to post. Even better than that, you can control discussions if you're a moderator. This means you can advertise comparatively cheaply, in a way that looks genuine and reach a wide, desirable audience with your message.

Would you be surprised if there are whole businesses that specialise in creating positive content about brands on reddit? I would be shocked if there weren't.

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Yeah the thing with reddit is you always have to take everything there with a huge grain of salt.

Especially because every non-expert thinks they are an expert, and if you aren't familiar with the subject matter, it can be difficult to spot

Can't even recall all the times I've posted on a topic I'm strongly well-versed in on reddit and ended up downvoted. It's very frustrating when something you know to be a fact is downvoted in favor of some popular conception of truth.

Some subreddits, like /r/askhistorians, have famously draconian moderation policies, intended to keep the quality of responses high; or at least the top level responses.

One thing that I'm interested in is the politics subreddit. How is it that so many paid subscription sites hit the top of the subreddit so often? I've never seen the popularity of subscription sites, and the lack of objection towards a subscription site, in any other internet forum.

On hackernews- there are rarely subscription sites- and when there is, the first comment is typically how to view for free. Likewise with literally every other forum I frequent.

It's particularly interesting in a /r/politics subreddit that is fairly anti-capitalist

I think post titles in /r/politics are better understood as writing prompts for outrage rather than actual article headlines. Can’t get hit by the paywall if you don’t click the link.

No doubt a lot of astroturfing goes on, that happens on any forum, but there's also sufficient checks in place (replies, voting, and moderation) to make the results still more useful than typical search results.

You might be surprised how easy it to game those checks if either the mods aren't extremely active or, worse, if they're incentivised to support certain posts/views.

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