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Comment by PoignardAzur | Hacker News Reader

You know, I was joking the last few times the subject came up, but I'm getting seriously worried that the more people mention using that kind of trick on HN, the faster advertisers will catch on and start building reddit-based SEO strategies.

Not sure how we should react :/

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Reddit has been gamed by guerilla advertisers for years, everyone knows it, and the admins there don't seem to care/are unable to do anything about it.

r/HailCorporate used to be about calling out stealth marketing/advertising but it's morphed into just discussing how things can inadvertently act as an advertisement aka society is full of branding and consumerism. It's a shame because it used to be a very high quality sub.

Prefer resources that have some governance and aren’t entirely crowdsourced. For example if I’m looking for web tech answers my first search is ‘[whatever topic] mdn’.

Oh, it's no secret. Google's autocomplete will actually suggest appending "reddit" to certain queries. For example, let's take one of the most SEO-spammy queries imaginable, "best mattress 2021". Google will suggest:

- best mattress 2021

- best mattress 2021 consumer reports

- best mattress 2021 reddit

- best mattress 2021 for back pain

- best mattress 2021 wirecutter

etc.

But of course Reddit is already rife with shills. Not sure about CR.

I remember in the late 2000's I had a CR account. I had two weeks left on the period I had paid for. But when I cancelled the account... poof. My access was revoked immediately. Very much not consumer friendly. I was done enough with their crap that I didn't even bother with an email.

FWIW I signed up for CR recently when I was car shopping, and I canceled my subscription within the first month. They assured me that I would still have access for the remainder of the period. Of course, you're forced to subscribe rather than buy access for a set period, and they sent me a couple dozen emails during the time I was signed up, so they're not completely innocent... but at least that part felt reasonable.

I've been trying to unsubscribe from CR email spam for months now to no avail. Looking at the browser tools, it seems that their api can't handle the fact that I registered with a single letter first/last name so therefore my attempts to unsubscribe silently fail. There also appears to be no way to change my name since the api for that also fails on the single letter first/last name. I wish ungood things to happen to the people who 'designed' this Kafkaesque rubbish and in the meantime, thank GMail's mark-as-spam feature for throwing away their unrelenting pablum to the memory hole. This experience has led to me canceling my print subscription to CR plus my donations to their organization.

Don't search for "best". That's specifically requesting spam.

I use colloquial language to try and target actual human reviews on forums. "Are audio-technica any good?"

Mostly works, but Google drops keywords pretty quickly now so you still get lots of spam or shopping sites.

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