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Comment by rockostrich | Hacker News Reader

I think in niche subreddits are pretty resilient to this kind of gorilla marketing, at least in my experience. Folks who join them are usually pretty vocal when they've used a product and had good or bad experiences with it.

Even in large niche subreddits like /r/coffee, /r/homebrewing, and /r/skincareaddiction which are all over 1m followers, there's pretty good self-moderation and calling out of astroturfing. /r/skincareaddiction might be the most susceptible to it since there are just so many products and skincare is pretty specific to the person, but I still see folks calling out shill posts and comments.

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I don't think this is accurate.

People call out astroturfing, sure. But when do they call it out? When it's obvious.

If you are a member of these forums over time you see the same products / etc. get recommended.

For example, the /r/coffee forum always recommends 1-3 particular espresso machines. People are posting hacks where they add arduinos, etc. to control it better. There are github repos to describe all of this. Either its an incredibly elaborate marketing ploy (to sell a couple more $500 espresso machines..) or its organic content.

Also, redditers are incredibly harsh when shilling, etc. is discovered. In the /r/diablo2 forums, a moderator started a Discord for everyone (to play and trade items for Diablo2 Resurrected). He posted an ad (in the Discord) for a site to buy items (frowned upon in /r/diablo2). Redditors did a thorough investigation and kicked this guy out of the sub. So his $100 of profit from that ad lost him a moderator spot and his Discord community.

The risk/reward of sneaky marketing on Reddit is just not there (for many scenarios, I'm sure it still happens sometimes).

> redditers are incredibly harsh when shilling, etc. is discovered.

Ehhh that depends the subreddit, big corporate products as Disney are highly astroturfed and get downvoted in to oblivion if you call them out. That's why you see alternate subreddit as r/saltierthancrait and r/freefolk.

Their astroturfing gets more agresive as they lurk and comments on those subreddits too.

Sometimes the callouts won't be apparent. Someone will PM the moderator, the mod will review and remove that post.

Obviously, I only have anecdotal evidence. But I see it regularly happen on the subreddits I'm a part of.

Equally anecdotal--I've seen lots of examples of astroturfing that hasn't been caught. People who run social media marketing accounts have occasionally explained exactly how they create their marketing accounts and how they make marketing posts. The account will have legitimate Reddit activity--basically, because somebody will be using it as a personal account. And when someone asks for recommendations for hiking boots or whatever? "I've been using X for a while now, they seem pretty reliable." Anyone looking at the comment history or post history will see what looks like a normal Reddit account.

How much of the astroturfing is called out? 10%? 90%? Certainly nobody thinks it's 100%...

But at what point is "marketing" just engaging with the community? If you go out and develop a suberb product that some niche reddit community might love, you post it...and they like it... OK, good for you?

What I am saying is, if your product / marketing is sooo good that it passes the smell test of the relevant subreddits..maybe your not shilling / astroturfing but helping?

Similar to how a lot of SEO advise is: "Create good content". Where is the line here?

Just like it's really helpful for a waiter at a restaurant to suggest you get the <product with largest margin that is about to expire> if they, without you knowing, get a cut of the savings for doing so!

How great

    The account will have legitimate Reddit activity--basically, 
    because somebody will be using it as a personal account. 
    And when someone asks for recommendations for hiking boots 
    or whatever? "I've been using X for a while now, they seem 
    pretty reliable."

This would definitely work, but it seems like a large amount of work for a single organic-looking "I've been using X for a while now, they seem pretty reliable" post.

I don't think it's one size fits all. I moderate a niche hobby subreddit and we have been fighting astroturfing for years now. We're over 5,000 subscribers but this has been a problem for the mod team since we were around 1,500 or so.

I actually think if we were larger we'd have more subscribers who even knew what astroturfing is, how to spot it, and why it's important to shut it down.

If it’s posible to recommend a product earnestly, then you must take for granted that it’s possible to recommend a product dishonestly.

There’s no way to tell those two things apart when done well.

Catching the obvious cases only means you’ve caught the obvious cases. Reddit is really naive here. They’ll punish “look what I made” but not “look what I found” . We did it, Reddit! We beat ads!

> Catching the obvious cases only means you’ve caught the obvious cases. Reddit is really naive here. They’ll punish “look what I made” but not “look what I found” . We did it, Reddit! We beat ads!

Also catching the obvious cases can easily create an illusion of competence, which quickly leads to overconfidence.

    If it’s posible to recommend a product earnestly, 
    then you must take for granted that it’s possible 
    to recommend a product dishonestly.
    
    There’s no way to tell those two things apart when 
    done well.

This is true for some things, less true others.

For products that are almost purely subjective (books, movies, etc) yeah. There's really no way to spot well-concealed astroturfing.

As things become more objective the astroturfing gets a little bit difficult.

If I'm an astroturfer and I say, "I think brand XYZ leaf blowers are the best" but unless I go into some details that recommendation is not going to carry a lot of weight. And if I falsify objective details, things will start to smell more and more like astroturf to anybody that is actually knowledgeable.

Once products take hold as being "good" according to the groupthink Reddit's strong rewards for parroting groupthink make it almost impossible to go against the grain and get heard to listen to anything negative.

Anyone complaining about M18 tools, Toyota vehicle, Kitchenaid mixers, speed queen washers, etc, etc will find their comment shit upon by people looking for a few quick virtue points for dunking on the dissenter and downvoted to oblivion.

This perfectly sums up the culture of reddit.

Try shitting on javascript or react in /r/webdev your karma will be heading downhill even though you only speak fundamentals.

Meh, maybe “shitting on” a piece of tech just isn’t that interesting and your points aren’t as novel as you think? “Javascript bad amiright guys? :D” isn’t even so welcome here anymore.

Nah, I'm not "this thing sucks" kind of guy. More like urghh it's too late now to speak out about "this is unhealthy, don't you see, it needs fixing, shall we?".

Simplifying issues into kids' fistfight isn't even so welcome anywhere.

/r/coffee is a never ending stream of expensive paraphernalia. I don’t know how you’d tell the difference.

Looking at the top 20 hot posts on /r/coffee right now the only one that has to do with expensive equipment is 1 post where someone is asking if the Mazzer Super Jolly that they got from a business is overkill to use at home [1] (it is but if you got it for cheap then might as well use it) and another post about a calibrating a refractometer [2]. The rest are questions about tasting coffee and troubleshooting cheap pieces of equipment (pour over brewers that are all <$40, moka pots, french presses, etc.).

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Coffee/comments/x7lo4x/mazzer_super... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Coffee/comments/x75a35/refractomete...

fwiw s/gorilla/guerrilla/

But the marketers are monkeying around, swinging from thread to thread. Pounding their chest and hooting.

Nah, there are literal gorillas doing the marketing. Haven't you ever heard of the infinite monkey theorem?

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