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Comment by wasyl | Hacker News Reader

Is it that big of a stretch to assume Reddit boosted their own apps ratings with fake/paid reviews, given one of the main arguments is that their apps still suck while they're killing third party ones?

> I can’t imagine anybody has time to do all the random stuff they’re being accused of.

Employees are probably not happy but they are still working. And you can literally find a page offering paid reviews in seconds, add an item to _a basket_ and pay with a credit card

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> is it that big of a stretch to assume

Absent evidence, for the HN front page, yes.

It’s rampant/common in industry. The evidence is self evident in the reviews characteristics.

Secondly the CEO has a history of posting fake user engagement himself or at his command in order to show more popularity than actual. He does this.

You’d look at twitter bot replies and say the same thing huh

Reddit before today: "Dark patterns, dark patterns everywhere"

Reddit today after collective forgetting: "What do you mean companies use dark patterns?!"

Yes, Reddit uses plenty of dark patterns. Like begging users to leave a positive review.

Which makes me wonder why y'all prefer to believe that reddit itself is buying reviews from black market bot farms in a giant conspiracy, rather than those dark patterns just being, you know, effective at pushing users to leave low effort reviews?

I wouldn't be surprised if a marketing team, either internal or external, coordinated contractors. It's their job.

its also not a big stretch to acknowledge anybody could harm anybody else’s app with an astroturfing campaign

something more obvious right now given how bad the astroturfing campaign is. one word reviews?

everyone knows Reddit is vulnerable to a thousand cuts right now, its the perfect time to do so

I’ve seen that in a lot of crypto projects, because people consistently develop a parasocial relationship with the founders and then try to digitally harm them after the founders dont do what they expect

this looks and acts like the same thing

True, although given there's no real competition to Reddit, I personally find it difficult to believe this particular scenario

> something more obvious right now given how bad the astroturfing campaign is. one word reviews?

I imagine one doesn't have a good way of making sure they'll get good, quality fake reviews from farms in 3rd world countries. But also, it's about as bad (in terms of PR) as spez's communications and interview so

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