- A headphone is released which is not flawless, but offers great value.
- The headphone is recommended on Reddit.
- Demand for the headphone goes up.
- The price of the headphone increases.
- The headphone is no longer a good value, but is still recommended.
- This continues until either a well-reputed user points out the poor value or a new headphone with great value is released.This is not a coincidence, I'm guessing Reddit is around 1/3 astroturfing to 2/3 legitimate discussion. I don't fault people for doing it, but I'm not going to pretend that Reddit is some pristine haven for genuine reviews.
HN is just as exploitable, but at least the ratio of informative content is higher, and the concerted marketing efforts are better disguised.
Reminds me how I once asked what's a good EU online shop for running gear on the running subreddit, and the top recommended post was about a premium priced boutique european manufacturer of clothes for "plus sized" runners...
On /r/personalfinance people say you must payoff a 2% mortgage before you can consider investing. Advice on there is hit or miss because of herd mentality
There’s also entire subs dedicated to illegal activity like sharing pirated content or sourcing scheduled substances, or discussing conspiracy theories or discussing violence, and Apple is ok with this while shutting down other apps like parlor which arguably didn’t do anything different
For small niche subreddits where you only get a few answers it seems less likely that those are advertisements (and user history is often telling)
And on bigger subs, it's much harder to manipulate the answer unless your product is already pretty decent and you're just fighting over some market spot. In other words, obviously bad products won't be able to advertise this way because of negative comments, but some covert brand building certainly can be done.
Negative comments can be downvoted and it's not a secret that you can buy reddit accounts and that there are lots of bots. A comment only needs what, 5 downvotes before it's automatically minimized by the default view? You're not seeing those comments unless you're digging, the same way you would on Amazon or anywhere else.
This is the trick I use too; but I found the result still isn't great enough for a few reasons.
1. People seem have a tendency to recommend products/brands that are niche or "in minority". Like some obscure ones that scratch particular itch for that user (and often expensive and hard to find). This is totally fine on its own, but you want to have the big picture (i.e. learn about the most popular ones) first when researching a new product.
2. The number of the answers is often so low (and most would have 1 digit upvotes) that it's very hard to judge when there is conflicting info.
3. People often just list the brand/name, without much more information.
4. you can't even sure if these answers are genuine (instead of marketing/soft advertisement).
Still, probably much better than anything else that can be easily found in general search.