Along with traditional explicit advertising models, internet marketing usually involves more subtle techniques such as seamless paid content interleaved with user content, as you see on Facebook and elsewhere. Subtle and invisible marketing is especially important on Reddit, as forum users are not tolerant of paid content, as evidenced by the collapse of Digg, so the operators of Reddit have to keep up the impression of Reddit being pristine and untouched by marketers.
But Reddit has to make revenue, as they are a business and not a charity. Reddit employees are mods of many of the default subreddits, and often post content to those boards that bubbles to the top of the front page. The evidence trail is direct, as you can directly view an employee's posts on their profile page. It would be absurd for Reddit to not use modern internet marketing techniques to generate revenue.
Not only does Reddit support marketing through posts, but they also control the narrative of Reddit. Just live television before it, advertisers are very sensitive to the content carried on the medium that their advertisements are part of, and use their dollars to influence what can and can't be said in that channel. The same goes for Reddit.
Can you address the specific claim made by baseten, namely that there are subreddits (whether default or non-default) that are managed for pay by other organizations?
I'll note that I don't visit Reddit unless linked to a specific conversation, so I don't have a proverbial horse in the race. I just have my curiosity piqued when a chain of rebuttals gets so far off base from the original claim.
As I explained in other comments below, I have extensive experience moderating large subreddits and in my time, have not seen a single shred of evidence which shows anyone is "paying to play". If something like that was occurring, it would inevitably be discovered and become viral news everywhere, just like how it was on Digg. I'm sure the administrators of the site keep an eye on the actions, messages and PMs of the top mods so there are more checks and balances on that kind of behavior. More than most people realize.
http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/2tzvhv/so_i_got_a_glim...
posted by Ryan Merket, Product Manager at Reddit, as a push for Samsung products:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanmerket
He subtly admitted in other posts that Reddit is looking to make money from posts such as this...
http://www.reddit.com/r/HailCorporate/comments/2u0czi/samsun...
Read this sentence of his:
"I think you summed it up pretty well in your last two sentences."
Referring to:
"But since Reddit users will run if they detect Reddit turning into Digg, Reddit has to be a lot more subtle about how they let marketing occur."
Of course corporations are going to post to reddit. Anyone who thinks that is nefarious in of itself is deluding themselves. If those people were trying to game the system in some way, to subvert the organic process, that's another matter entirely. Yet, there is absolutely zero evidence of that. Frankly, your dot connecting is like that of a paranoid child. It sounds like something from /r/Conspiracy.
As someone who is a mod of one or more default subreddits, I promise you, this is certainly not the case.
I can't "prove" it, but I work with these people every single day and have for years. I'm intimately familiar with the "power mods". We even have our own semi-private subreddit, /r/DefaultMods, where we actually talk about things like this. We discuss how the conspiracy wackos will accuse us of being reptilian shills for Pepsi today, then tomorrow turn around and accuse us of being shills for Coke. Next week we're shills for the U.S government, the week after we're shills for the KGB or the PRC. This is not an exaggeration. I personally have been accused of being all of those things on numerous occasions over the years. Truth is, I'm just a welder here in Chicago. Let me tell you how fun it is coming home from a long day at work only to be called a government shill by some teenage neckbeard who thinks aliens did 9/11.
At some point, you just get tired of it, ignore it, and you have to laugh at the situation. It's why some mods make fun/light about the whole thing. If you start taking it seriously, you're going to go crazy. Modding a large subreddit is a lot like babysitting, except you're not babysitting infants, you're babysitting high school kids.
The only real evidence that "mods are shills" is a minimal and extremely exaggerated. Years ago there was a mod who was busted for spamming links to their own stuff. SEO type spam. I think his name was SolInvictus. The admins caught him and shadowbanned his account immediately. There's also examples of other mods catching and busting mods for spamming (like the quickmeme guy). These things don't go left unchecked. If you think the admins aren't paying attention and catching/busting mods, then you'd be naive. They are, and have been. If there was someone working to systematically undermine their subreddit, the evidence to the admins and even to the other mods would be overwhelming and obvious.
By the way, /r/Undelete is populated and run by people from /r/Conspiracy. Overwhelmingly so. Mods will show up to explain why a submission was removed (which rule it broke and why) and the conspiracy crowd will blatantly ignore it and downvote the helpful mod. That place was nice in the very beginning, now it's as toxic as any stormfront forum. No exaggeration. You'll actually probably find more level headed people in a stormfront forum.
I don't know why people conflate the two when they're not remotely the same.
As far as wikipedia goes, that's an entirely different ball game. There's significantly less oversight. On reddit, the admins and other mods are always watching. They will see the PMs and requests and watch how those mods respond to them. If one of my co-mods started acting strangely and approving or removing things they shouldn't be, me and the other mods will call them out on it. It would be made public if we couldn't just immediately dismiss them. That happens all the time already, but it's not related to "shill" stuff. It's usually just internal mod struggles and policy disputes.
People, for whatever reason, imagine that all the mods know each other and are friends in real life. That everyone is close-knit. Nope, quite the opposite. A lot of the backroom politicking goes on is between mods within the same subreddit. You can bet your ass if someone was "bought and paid for", they would be outed by their co-mods, especially in a large subreddit with lots of mods (lots of mods = more eyes). They would do this if only because it allows them to gain more power themselves. Again, it's all about the checks and balances that are inherent to reddit's system. Those same checks and balances are absent from wikipedia's editing system. Most actions are quite public (it's easy to see when a front page post disappears) and it's also visible to the users themselves. Changes and edits on wikipedia aren't as visible and its editors aren't listed in the sidebar of every wikipedia page.
/r/technology?
Did everyone just forget?
Plenty of subreddits do the exact same thing. Some use automod to remove racist slurs, memes, and others use automod to remove all political terms because they have a "No Politics" rule. It doesn't mean the mods are shills.
And now that the terms were restored, take a look at the subreddit. It's absolute crap now. Quite literally. It's supposed to be about technology but it's now /r/Politics2, with every other submission about Comcast, Tesla, and the FCC. Seriously, go look right now. there are 10 submissions about the FCC, 5 about Comcast and a couple about Tesla right now on their front page. This isn't just a one time thing, it's been like that every day since.
What happened to actual technology?