That's funny. I remember when nobody knew what TikTok was, and TikTok-watermarked videos were all over Reddit's front page. It was a great marketing spot for them.

Highly upvoted accounts are more valuable and can be sold

(Theoretically only, just opinion, not fact of course by any means) Mods could potentially get paid by building popularity of their sub through reposting popular content that gets upvoted. They then could charge other users and sponsors for prime placement and promotion within their subs all arranged possibly offline. Reddit normally collects money off the activity through the ad revenue generated by page views and ad loading, and through sales of ads purchased by platform users... It may not seem like a lot of money until you really understand how much traffic the site gets, and how much mods and corporate on reddit can control and even script what kinds of content makes it to the top/front of pages.

Also there's always old payment methods where crypto/NFT/digital payment services or even a bag of cash can be used under the table, though nobody can or would want to prove that of course, and of course it's not presented as fact because I have no stake whatsoever in reddit nor desire to see it made less skewed like it used to be in the past.... I've already given up on it myself, long ago when they banned me for no reason and took my sub.

Look carefully at each video you watch on any platform from now on for what products, slogans, and logos are placed in them, and the links/comments that are posted in the comments. There is advertising going on in the majority of reddit posts for something, even if most people don't know it. A lot of the time, even the music used in content is often being subtly imprinted across multiple sites so that it becomes an ear worm as a low-key psychological marketing tactic.

Many major companies are putting out completely engineered "low budget" home videos as ads, they're no longer marking paid ad posts as sponsored, and companies are regularly hiring the most popular and trusted creators to inject subtle advertising cues into otherwise organic looking viral videos. I'm pretty sure that most of what we see on social platforms with paid advertising options now is either staged/funded/enlisted/sponsored production, bot driven content, or low key psychological marketing. This does not include HN based on what I've observed, because they don't sell ad-based post boosting (as far as I know).

OC creators struggle often in futility to break past algorithm ratios just to be seen by small audiences if they don't have massive sums of money to pay for advertising for each post they make on each platform. Getting to the front page without the right funding may be damn near impossible by now, fair enough though, there are a lot of other users competing against you that have copied your style, branding, and/or content, so "F" it, maybe we're all doomed/