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Astroturfing on reddit has been a thing for over a decade and has really accelerated over the last few years. There's several companies where literally that is their business model to promote your product or service on reddit. I saw one for sale on acquire.com a while back for 7 figures
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It's so painfully obvious too. On my local subreddit: "what's the best ice cream shop in $CITY?" Check their post history, one "lol" on a cat pic on /r/aww 8 months ago. 4 lines of code could catch this.
> Check their post history, one "lol" on a cat pic on /r/aww 8 months ago. And now Reddit has made it possible to hide your post history. Probably because of this exact issue.
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HN is so prime to sockpuppet on because of its fairly low comment rate but high concentration of users who can make technology decisions at companies.
Sure, but I suspect also harder because it's full of contrarians that will point out at least five better ways of solving the problem and people that upon being greeted with anything that looks like disguised marketing copy will spontaneously combust. And if you do manage to sneak a URL into a discussion without anyone thinking it's marketing, the next four comments will be about whether the design of the landing pag…
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Can you make a case why you'd be an authority on the matter?
To be fair, a moderator has stated this many times https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
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Can you make a case why you'd be an authority on the matter?
I know a bit how HN works: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented But as noted by freehorse, dang has stated it multiple times and I personally have not seen any threads memoryholed and would call out YC if they were.
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For those like me who didn’t know: Astroturfing is the practice of creating a fake "grassroots" movement to make it look like a cause, product, or candidate has widespread public support when they actually do not.
Also for people who don't know, if you pay someone to post something (including just giving them a free product) it has to be disclosed. Astroturfing is (in simple terms) a form of fraud and the FTC does go over companies for it.
Where would one find some reddit users willing to do such reviews, by the way?
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Those are job ads (a special type of post), not normal user discussions. Actual YC announcements do not have comments disabled.
They do however often ask friends and family to upvote and leave comments. Like "we have been very happy using XYZ" which is against HN rules but not that strictly enforced. I feel like it is extra-lax towards YC companies but maybe I'm imagining things.
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I know a bit how HN works: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented But as noted by freehorse, dang has stated it multiple times and I personally have not seen any threads memoryholed and would call out YC if they were.
Downvoted for not recognizing HN royalty, what a charming community.