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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

> potential value of subreddits and all the work it takes to grow one.

Isn't the monetary value of a subreddit zero to everyone but Reddit corporate?

Some companies (like gaming companies) "sponsor" a subreddit and give out prizes and benefits in small contests and whatnot. Those subreddits employ moderators who will delete, alter or chastise any negative content relating to that company and ban anything but positive reinforcement of that company.

cough Stadia cough - it is against Reddit ToS that employees (or at least reddiquette) to have a paid employee of a company moderating a subreddit for that company's product [1].

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/modhelp/comments/2v0dpa/moderating_...

Companies pay big money to get posts up in certain subreddits.

how come ? can you give some examples of how this works?

Lots of people get advice on what to buy. Imagine if company’s are able to manipulate buyitforlife, HomeKit, personalfinance, babybumps, travel subreddits etc.

Probably the best form of advertising. Have people just insert your products in random stories.

“I remember back when I was a kid and mom would make a cake with Betty Crocker icing”

I’m automatically suspect of any post mentioning products. Probably happens on hacker news too. And instagram. And everywhere else. We have ad blockers, but now the ads will move into the content itself.

Absolutely. And it is already the case, look closely at movies, TV shows, podcasts...

Product placement has had its teeth in movies/TV for a quite a while now. In some aspects it does help movies add more to its budget.

There’s product placement, and then there is inserting a literal advertisement into the story itself and having the actors talk about it, e.g. watching a car commercial when they get in a car and discuss all of its features.

The Oreo placement in Lost In Space was oddly fitting. If I'm off to another planet, that's the kind of thing I'll pack.

browser extension idea: Brandomizer - it detects brand names in text on pages, and replaces it with random other similar brand names.

“I remember back when I was a kid and mom would make a cake with Duncan Hines icing”

And watch the marketing people move into the Brandonizer business

Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat

You are a brand selling soda:

* /r/aww -> cat playing with a toy with your brand

* /r/HumansBeingBros -> a guy helping poor people by bringing free pizza and free soda to a shelter.

* /r/Fitness -> how about a gif of a clever workout then the main character drink a sip of your soda. After the effort the comfort.

* /r/DIY -> look what I achieve with 7919 cans!

You don't need to be a mod to post those, however.

But beeing a mod you could delete comments, pointing that out.

“Doritos are the best for walking tacos.” “Fritos make the best walking tacos.” Lord savior Jesu i never even had heard of walking tacos until this morning but then leave it to reddit to first inform me of something new and then to tell me the specific products I should use.

My poor colleague was incredulous when I told him reddit was gamed. Dear summer child, it is not just the obvious product placement for Doritos. It is also entire subs that are heavily modded to the point of being useless. r/sanfrancisco is endless pix of the gg bridge, thanks mods! It also divides the discourse into red team blue team with red team bad blue team good. High karma users sell their handle so trolls and sock puppets can have a vernier of credibility. Like San Francisco fromwhere it originates reddit is a cesspool that if you practice active denial, selective ignorance, ignore cognitive dissonance and pretend like all the bounders, freaks, fairies, bohos, hippies, punks, transhumanists, burners, and hackers that came before that everything is beautiful man, its a great place that can still surprise and delight on occasion.

Let me give you a different example. The main Indian subreddit r/india has been taken over by information warfare specialists and actually anything that does not match left leaning viewpoints are deleted. You can see all the power abuse chronicled on a subreddit called r/indiadiscussion. One mod is actually a Pakistani !

Shouldn't country subreddits be sacred ? Should'nt there be a due process to call out mod excesses, some kind of quasi legal means. Instead they continue their information warfare unabated banning anyone that goes against their viewpoints. They also actively browse people posting in other subreddits and ban them.

The beauty of federations of user-managed communities like Reddit, 8chan or Mastodon is that the friction to "voting with your feet" is low enough to be practical. Migration of user communities from hijacked subreddits happens all the time.

While I agree that there should ideally be a process to deal with obviously maliciously confusing community names, a country is an entity too big and diverse to have a single centrally-moderated conversation platform for anyway. Control of the exact country-name subbreddits could be offered to official governments, but is that in any way interesting? We already have country TLDs as official government communication platforms on the web.

They may not be handled over to the Govt, however the mods should not get so powerful that they create their own quasi dictatorship in terms of what is allowable and what is not. There should also be recourse for people to raise their issues at a neutral subreddit where supermods can arbitrate.

IMO, a little transparency into the subreddits' mod activity would alleviate this completely. People don't leave subreddits that are modded in a heavily biased way because they have no way to know.

I don't see why I shouldn't be able to unhide all modded posts if I choose to.

that's the secret sauce of the information warfare era. Keep non curious people in their own bubble without a way to find out if there are other options there. They cannot leave the bubble due to network effects and no one can do this all the time. Always project that your bubble is the cleanest one.

The abuses of mods in some subreddits if it were happening in real life would be subjects of class action lawsuits.

r/hailcorporate is full of examples, although beware:

1. Users on that subreddit can be quite paranoid 2. You'll become paranoid yourself if you spend enough time on that subreddit.

Hmm, browsing "top" of last month just kind of convinced me that real "hailcorporate" material is much much more rare than I expected

Could be that the subverting of posts has gotten better and the users who submit there are still looking for gifs of guys drinking refreshing cans of Pepsi™ after a crossfit workout

And people aren't always on the lookout, specially in casual conversations.

reddit.com/r/hailcorporate

Or get paid to suppress content.

I still consider this to be the best item ever posted by The Register:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/05/09/official_register_2...

Moderators can't get posts up, they can only take them down.

They can pin posts to the top of the subreddit though can’t they? I have to imagine that increases post traffic/upvotes/interaction.

Yes, but I've never seen this done for normal posts, just rule announcements and such.

Speaking from experience as a Redditor and Reddit mod, it does happen - just some subs are more diligent about avoiding shills than others.

Huh, I have the same experience and we never did it on my subreddits (and I rarely saw it, but I usually browse /r/all)...

It is a known fact that gallowboob will repeatedly repost and delete something over and over while deleting competing posts until his gains traction

There’s also value in controlling messaging in a community. You can really affect community think by controlling what messages they see.

I doubt it, they drive traffic to all sorts of places. I imagine the porn Reddits make a ton of money for people.

You can pin advertising and so on..

the sub owner can sell advertising? Or is it done under the table?

You can pin posts. A post can be advertising something just as easily as it can be a story or a link to a news article.

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