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Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

> REDCmts sells one Reddit comment for $9.99 and 100 for $699.99, from what it calls "real, aged accounts", and shows a gallery of brand mentions it says it delivered. Soar says its accounts are "aged and manually warmed" for weeks before a single brand mention. Bazzly advertises automated replies to every post that looks like someone shopping.

Why doesn't Reddit make sure that shilling is disallowed by their ToS, and then sue these companies and all their customers?

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Because the only metric that matters for social media is engagement, and a war against active account, no matter the purpose, would make that line go down.

Also, shill accounts prove to advertisers that the platform works to make money. That’s the whole reason Reddit exists.

YCombinator is not a social company. They actually do a ton to try to stop this stuff, it's just hard.

Maybe they weren't before they IPO'd.

> Because the only metric that matters for social media is engagement

True, but what if a third party existed to measure and compare other metrics that users would actually care about across popular platforms?

For the same reason Amazon doesn't solve fake reviews. Their business needs the content and they're confident that the people who haven't left for better options will remain undiscerning.

> left for better options

Please name one

Genuinely asking

In Germany e.g. Galaxus works fine for many things. Also eBay surprisingly works better for many things because it has more filters, e.g. if you want to buy wood or window shades etc.

eBay has become a cesspool though, with their silly login requiring phone number and so on. I still remember I had a completely fine Kleinanzeigen account at the beginning of the Pandemic, because I wanted to offer math and computer stuff help for students and put an ad for that on kleinanzeigen. (Didn't ever get a request that was worth taking seriously.) Then at some point later, I suddenly was no longer allowed to log in, unless I disclose my phone number. What a shit. Since then that account sits stale or might already be deleted.

Kleinanzeigen != eBay

It displays their approach to things. It's not called "ebay kleinanzeigen" for nothing.

Not sure which you're asking about but, for example, Best Buy price matches Amazon for items where they overlap. And then I can go get the product right away without waiting for shipping. Or paying for Prime. Or supporting Amazon.

Literally any other seller.

I try to go to manufacturers own online store if they have one. Or a local retailer. Or a specialty online seller. Or Walmart but they have third party sellers too so you have to avoid those.

> For the same reason Amazon doesn't solve fake reviews.

Just like scam ads for Google and Facebook.

Obviously it's hard to prove such a thing but I've always wondered if the owners of Reddit actively support having these operations run on their site.

I've seen cases where the admins delete comments that talk about the issue

Owners of Reddit also own these companies.

I think that reddit's recent change to allow hiding comment history is exactly to help support shilling.

It makes it hard to see what's a bot and what's a legitimate account.

Yep.

It's extremely unrealistic to sue someone for violating your Terms of Service. It's not impossible -- you'd need to sue them for a breach of contract and demonstrate clear financial damages --, but the primary solution is to just refuse to provide them service.

Like, Reddit may know that Bazzly is selling fake comments, which violates Reddit's ToS. How many comments can they prove are tied to Bazzly? How much does an astro-turfed comment financially harm Reddit, and can they convince a jury of that?

Instead, most companies will aggressively shut down the bot networks, if they can identify them, and hope that the astro-turfers focus on other platforms, and/or make it more financially challenging to do it successfully on theirs.

If there's no payment ("consideration") there's generally no contract.

Because it would be a monumental waste of time and money. Even if you could track down the overseas operators doing this, there's not much damages you could sue for, and alternatives would just pop up in their place.

Overseas operators? Nonsense.

I know US people who do this for a living

Technically this is something the FTC could get involved in as it's illegal to advertise without making it clear you are.

A few years back a bunch of influencers were fined for doing just that.

Literally the example in the comment I replied to was an overseas operator. But my point is even if you did go after spam operators, alternatives will simply pop up in other jurisdictions, as has happened with literally every other form of spam.

Humans get paid to make astroturfing comments on old Reddit accounts? And make enough for a living?Where do I sign up ?

It's a padding.

Their main activities were click botting and general social media marketing (day job was in SMM analytics).

But if you're already there with the automation for thousands of accounts and the knowledge of what an account looks like why not also put some to ripen for 9 bucks a comment :)

Generally you can't stop them, they're shell companies run from countries that don't care. You spend a lot of time and effort trying to block one and they just spin up another, it's asymmetrical in that you expend more resources to stop it.

reddit wants engagement numbers to grow either way, so that disincentivizes it further

What does it cost for Hacker News comments? Is there no YC startup for manipulating this discussion?

A lot of these services are sold privately. I have no doubt it exists for HN

When I did dev relations I just messaged people who had decent accounts and an email or other contact and offered them some freebies on our platform, which did lead to a decent number of them posting about it, like I solicited ~200 accounts and had ~10 comment or post about it in the next month. Maybe some kind of service where people could opt into offers?

I'm assuming it already falls under rules 2 and 5, content manipulation and deceptive interactions

Based on what happens everywhere, they're paying reddit for leniency. Pink contracts have been around since Uunet was offering them to Usenet spammers.

Feel free to share your detection method!

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