Reddit is one of the most astroturfed places on the internet, and there's an entire ecology of PR/marketing firms that focus exclusively on it. There's also a thriving market in "high karma" accounts, which can be bought for as little as $30.

> Reddit also doesn't have "promoted" content / responses

It does, though. Your karma basically determines the visibility of any new post you try to make. And low-karma or new accounts are de facto shadowbanned.

Basically, Reddit's system is terrible.

> Your karma basically determines the visibility of any new post you try to make.

User karma isn't factored into the site's sorting algorithms. Post score is, and that influences karma, but not the other way around.

edit: On reflection, you may have been referring to the ability to post, rather than the popularity of the post. In that case, the misunderstanding was mine.

It’s not part of the ranking algorithm, it’s part of the anti spam system. If you make a new account and comment, it’s almost never visible to anyone else.

You have to warm up accounts with a few comments over a week before they start showing up.

That's often true. Individual subreddits may filter new accounts or low-karma thresholds to prevent spam. The better subreddits will simply flag it for manual review rather than remove it outright.

An alternative: create an account, don't use it for a while, use it.

Mods essentially have two variables to work with: account age and karma. Some subs do set minimum karma (I've stumbled upon some that wouldn't accept below 2k karma), but most just go by account age to prevent banned users from going around the ban.

And a tip for spotting karma farmers: just go to one of those big subs that accept screenshots of tweets. If the screenshot has engagements/timestamp cropped, click on a profile. Like 8 times out of 10 it's gonna be an older account that never posted before reposting one of the older popular submissions.

EDIT: Here's an example that took me like 20s to find: https://www.reddit.com/user/DepartureSimples/

> Your karma basically determines the visibility of any new post you try to make.

Are you sure? How do you know this?

I think what they're trying to say is some subreddits auto-collapse comments from users with low karma and recent date of creation to combat bots. If reddit gives any more weight to high karma users I can tell you as one that it definitely doesn't seem noticeable at all. Right time and right place comments are always the ones that end up on top.

On most big subs if you have a fresh account your posts are hidden by default. Maybe they have to be manually approved? Not sure.

Source: Don't have a persistent reddit account, just made a new one for the few times I wanted to post something.

> Reddit's system is terrible

This doesn’t match my experience of reading Reddit

That's because you're just unaware of how astroturfed it is.

I just headed over to one of the popular subreddits and randomly picked an account that posted a top meme

https://www.reddit.com/user/esberat/submitted/

The account has 8 million post karma and every single post it submits to a subreddit ends up on the front page of Reddit... without fail.

The account isn't a mod of any of those subs, but they're clearly using upvote manipulation to get every single one of their posts to the front page.

But in the context of TFA - searching Reddit to get factual answers - what appears on the reddit.com front page from day to day is largely irrelevant, surely?

By extension, high-karma accounts that are run by marketing companies can post in a niche subreddit to subtly promote their product or disparage their competition, and they'll end up on the front page of that subreddit. They'll get a lot of views and a lot more engagement than the average unsophisticated user's post would -- and those astroturfed posts would, on average, rank higher in searches.

This is analogous to SEO, but rather more insidious and sneaky. You can spot SEO blogspam from a mile away. You don't know if a Reddit user is a real person, a bot, or a company's representative.

Reddit bots are used for upvote manipulation of legitimate posts by brand ambassadors/etc. The post histories are just to make the bot look legitimate.

I always assumed the botted accounts on Reddit were in the hands of marketing companies, ready to upvote posts saying "My Brand X headphones sound great" or "I changed from Brand Y to Brand Z cigarettes because the smooth taste never leaves me feeling over-smoked" or "I made big gains by putting my life savings into this sketchy investment" or whatever they're being paid to promote at the time.

I'd wager you could do a lot to influence public opinion with just an upvote ring, without the botted accounts actually needing to post messages.

Of course the front-page will look like that. Niche subreddits are a completely different experience.

Who cares? The real reddit stuff is not in the front pages.

Someone must care, no? Those threads get a large number of impressions, assumedly from real users.

> I just headed over to one of the popular subreddits

That was your first mistake, the defaults are cesspools full of karma farming bots. Nobody goes to those for advice.

What makes you think that the niche subreddits aren't also full of marketing firms, bots, and upvote networks? With very few exceptions, they are.

They also have an okay s:n ratio in my experience, as the mod team can work the experience. Like for example, q&a type threads tend to be useful. There are folks promoting things but it’s obvious when they are.

Because the tiny niche audience isn't a cost effective marketing group? Advertisers want to maximize their reach and well, it's not like they know these groups even exist.

I'm sure it happens a lot regardless, but the vast majority of content in those is still just from regular people. You can tell by the information posted as it tends to be more or less truthful and useful. Once it stops being that it'll be obvious enough. Like when Russian bots invade your average Ukraine related r/worldnews post.

>Because the tiny niche audience isn't a cost effective marketing group? A

That's the magic of Reddit, 4Chan and every other cesspool where any niche is only a slight URL change away from any other niche.

It's trivially easy to add niche subs 2, 3 and 4 to the list of places that you target.

Yeah and then any mod with half a brain sees you're spamming things everywhere and bans you.

1) That's a whack-a-mole exercise when the astrorufer buys accounts in bulk.

2) You can tune these systems to be indistinguishable from a flesh and blood product fanboy at first glance. Not all spammers drop the same comments mentioning their product everywhere. You can dilute it with meaningless AI generated banter so the mod has to scroll through a couple pages and connect the dots before deciding whether you're a bot or just an idiot who happens to like some product.

Except that there is a culture of looking for and outing shills in a lot of subs, and since you can see someone's entire post history it's usually not hard to confirm or at least provide solid evidence for it once you suspect it. I had someone out an astroturfer who posted a banal non-response to one of my comments just the other day.

You don't need to be the size of Coca Cola to successfully astroturf, there are enough companies specialized in social media marketing.

Take r/mechanicalkeyboards for example, arguably a niche community. The enthusiasts there are very motivated to buy new things and are willing to pay quite a lot of money for them. Place a few of your bots there to promote your artisan keycaps and watch people pay top bucks for them.

Spoken like someone in a bubble. "Nobody goes there anymore; it's too crowded."

Well, if "nobody" goes there, how are the bots able to farm karma? Who's giving them the views and upvotes?

I guarantee you anything that's the "default" is being visited by many, many casual visitors, people not "in the know", and people who don't recognize karma farming bots for what they are.

I said nobody goes there for advice because there usually isn't any there, we mainly go to those for arguing nonsense and laughing at memes. And I'm not saying that there aren't many advertisements on those, but they are usually painfully obvious.

That looks just like making content tailored to subreddit it is posted, no shit it's popular.

Also how the fuck "Building a hobby-shelter while camping in Kelowna" or some random funny pictures is "astroturfing"?

As a reddit-addict this really depends on the subreddit you're using. In /r/askreddit you don't stand a chance that your question will attract serious attention, but there are so many subreddits with small usergroups and enough reactions. In /r/askreddit or other popular subreddits, my answers get reasonable attention, even if I'm not on the reddit timeschedule.

When two people say ´reddit´ they might be referencing two completely different worlds.

The prime reason I created a reddit account many moons ago was to get rid of all the default and behemoth subreddits from my feed, as they all looked like incredibly toxic and I´d have jumped through a window if I had to stay in them for more than 5 min. But these subreddits are all of reddit for many other people. And some user might only ever be looking at porn. And some others live in a diy bubbles.

That is to me the beauty of it, but also why it´s difficult to generalize trends. Low karma accounts getting shadowbanned ring nothing in my mind, but as there´s subs where you can only submit post titles ´cat´, there sure must be others were karma is everything.

Entirely depends on subreddit in question

> It does, though. Your karma basically determines the visibility of any new post you try to make. And low-karma or new accounts are de facto shadowbanned.

It's used more as protection from SEO spammers and this is just unfortunate side effect for new users.

Other problem is that karma is global which basically means user on popular subreddits will gain it quickly so any karma-based filtering is doomed to fail anyway

And it's not a great protection system at all. Just like how content generators are gaming Google search, there is a problem now with bots that find what is popular and repost it later (with a wording change) for karma farming.

> It does, though. Your karma basically determines the visibility of any new post you try to make.

User karma has no impact on the default sort ranking[0]. The source code is available here (as of ~2018): https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit/blob/master/r2/r2/l...

> And low-karma or new accounts are de facto shadowbanned.

User karma is impacted by mods' use of AutoMod on a per subreddit basis or fraudulent[1] accounts, but otherwise there is no site-wide application of user karma.

Source: I spent some time experimenting and implementing alternative rankings at Reddit.

0: Subreddit hot score, not applicable to logged in users' default feed.

1: Shadow banning (vs direct banning) fraudulent accounts makes it more difficult to reverse engineer signals used to identify malicious accounts.

> Reddit was

Yes, it was somewhat good in the past but an alternative is sorely needed. Most popular subs (at least the one I frequent) are moderated to the point that censored would be the more appropriate word to describe the situation. Then there are whole subs banned (including non political) for wrongthink.

> Then there are whole subs banned (including non political) for wrongthink

I don't really like defending Reddit, because I don't like them as a company, but I don't think this is correct. There's a financial incentive for them to not ban subreddits, so groups have to behave quite obnoxiously or blatantly break Reddit's rules to get banned. Just having a certain political disagreement is not nearly enough.

And if you disagree, please post some examples.

As an aside, I was curious about the use of the word "wrongthink". It sounds like something Orwell would have come up with, but a search suggests that it's actually a neologism that is used mainly by the alt-right.

> And if you disagree, please post some examples.

The Donald

The poster child for vote manipulation? Where front page articles would have 5000 upvotes 10 minutes after posting? The sub that fetishized persecution despite receiving warning by after warning?

There were a huge number of active users there who lobed up voting anything and everything.

It really didn't fetishise persecuting anyone. The warnings were arbitrary and capricious

Orwell's term is crimethink of course. I can only think of one party that recently passed laws making it a felony to say certain things to certain people. Thankfully you're still allowed to actually hold the thoughts in your head.

> I can only think of one party that recently passed laws making it a felony to say certain things to certain people.

No idea as to what you're referring to, but you must know many more examples throughout the world and history, no?

That's probably an US-centric comment. I have no idea what it is either, but the "one party that done X" line is a strong signal of it.

It has always been a felony to say “certain things to certain people”. See for instance fraud against the elderly.

Which certain people are you being unfairly restrained from saying what certain things to?

Looking into it I probably accepted a framing I shouldn't have.

They banned a large Covid sub r/NoNewNormal where the bulk of the content would be accepted as common sense today.

Themes in that sub were that “the cure is worse than the disease” (it was) and that “we shouldn’t throw away our way of life for Covid” (we chose not to in hindsight).

If you are a member of subs like r/lockdownskepticism even today then you frequently get banned from other subs.

"Common sense" indeed. That subreddit was a hotbed of unscientific anti-vaccine lies. However, it was actually banned for breaking Reddit rules on brigading.

https://www.reddit.com/r/redditsecurity/comments/pfyqqn/covi...

Quote:

  Claims of “brigading” are common and often hard to quantify. However, in this case, we found very clear signals indicating that r/NoNewNormal was the source of around 80 brigades in the last 30 days (largely directed at communities with more mainstream views on COVID or location-based communities that have been discussing COVID restrictions). This behavior continued even after a warning was issued from our team to the Mods.

no, this is BS. pretty much every big political sub does "brigading" against other subs, it's impossible to stop. a handful of bad actors can ruin it for everyone. reddit admins apply the anti-brigading rules selectively. there are big subs that have gotten away with it forever.

That’s some revisionist history. That sun was a cesspool of bad behavior. It wasn’t banned for believing the wrong thing, it was banned for organized attacks on anyone who dared to believe differently from them.

There's nothing wrong with a sub banning/censoring people. That's a critical part of having a trust value within a social network and if moderators of a popular sub don't think a poster is meeting the bar to post it is good for them to ban it and become higher trust. If they go too far than there won't be content on the sub at all though.

For instance /r/AskHistorians has a very high bar for posting and threads are commonly removed. As a result (and because they still have posters that meet that bar), the sub is considered very high trust. Some other subs anybody can say anything and I go so far as to filter the entire sub out so I never see it again.

>There's nothing wrong with a sub banning/censoring people. That's a critical part of having a trust value within a social network

I would not characterise a community moulded according to the whims of a few anonymous individuals as high in trust.

It's high in trust of a very specific type. Not, perhaps, the type we want or need, but the type we have nonetheless.

I muted USA Today in Apple News recently because their filtering was below the bar (click bait headlines, low quality writing). I don't know who the editors are that are making their decisions but I no longer trust that outlet anymore.

Channels with higher quality selection (Financial Times) now have more of my time because I trust them more based on previous decisions they have made (to show me fewer low quality articles under click bait headlines).

> I muted USA Today in Apple News recently because their filtering was below the bar (click bait headlines, low quality writing). I don't know who the editors are that are making their decisions but I no longer trust that outlet anymore.

YOU MUTED is the key here.

"Majority of subreddit didn't like it so it got downvoted" is somewhat democratic will of community.

You muted a user coz you don't want their content is personal choice.

Moderator choosing to do so on a whim is neither of those. You do need moderators coz some people won't behave but many times rules of subreddit are basically there so moderator can point to excuse on banning or removing whatever they don't like, not to ban something people don't want there.

USA Today is the moderator ... and they do a poor job so I muted the entire 'sub'. USA Today is not an analogue for the user.

There's absolutely something wrong. They're not banning people for not adhering to posting rules in a sub, they're literally banning wrongthink, they're often banning political opinions they dislike or don't align with US democrat party hegemony.

They suppress subs or influence mods to suppress them for them.

There's a myriad of ways in which censorship to shape a narrative happens, and that narrative is as true as the narrative a few twitter users can set, if highlighted as "the majority opinion/the people have spoken" by mainstream media.

There's intervention via subterfuge, not an open contract you either adhere or not.

High bar is subjective, you're only filtering by the most superficial aspects: are there swear words? Do they have citations? Do they "sound" smart? Are they saying something "problematic"? Same here. There's no cadence. (I'm not talking about /r/AskHistorians though)

I've found hidden gems in free for all, no-karma, no-upvote forums such as 4chan. And you pay attention there, because people are not trying to sound smart.

> That's a critical part of having a trust value within a social network and if moderators of a popular sub don't think a poster is meeting the bar to post it is good for them to ban it and become higher trust. If they go too far than there won't be content on the sub at all though.

That's implying that there is a single one-dimensional quality metric. The problem is when moderators of popular subreddits (for a particular niche) or those with the most obvious names for a particular topic start to enforcing their own personal biases in the discussion rather than sticking to keeping the discussion on-topic.

I completely agree with the point that banning/censoring people is necessary in order to operate any internet forum. But I know from firsthand experience that bans are used to stifle valuable discussion both on major subreddits and niche ones. I've seen it happen to me and to others.

For example, on an r/news post a few years ago about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, I replied to another comment where my content was basically the following: "If someone threatened to bomb your house, and they had a history of bombing houses, would you respond? What about after they destroyed your house?". That's almost exactly the wording I used (wish the comment hadn't been deleted so I could repost it exactly). This not only got me permanently banned from r/news, but also reported to the admins who censored the account. I suspect I pissed off a reddit admin or power user who followed me around reporting me, as shortly afterwards in a niche sub, I made another post discussing the continuum of force when it came to violent crime, quickly received several reports, and my account was permabanned from reddit. Note that both the content and tone of my posts there were similar to how I post on HN, which I think is generally appropriate.

This sequence of events bothered me a lot, because I think discussion of the use of force continuum and the ethics of preemptive or retributive force are highly relevant to today's world, and that the places where I continued (didn't start) discussion of them were the appropriate places for them. If this conversation can't happen on reddit, which it appears it can't, then we need another forum. It is clear to me today that reddit has hit it's eternal september. I can't bring myself to respond to the multitude of low effort posts that typically bombard you when you post something other than memeing.

that is great for increasing the quality of search results, moderation is awesome

This point is always brought up and it has no relevance in terms of what we're discussing which boils down to opinions on products and services from people who have some expertise in the matter.

You're not going to get banned from a hobby sub for asking a question on something related to a product in that hobby.

Try asking why Aragorn is a black man in the future LotR set on /r/magicTCG and see how long you can ask a question on something related to a product in that hobby after that. There are other swift ways to get ban, like noting that the body shape of some characters were changed drastically in-between old and newer cards. Basically anything going against the pandering of WotC to some twitter users.

I got banned out of /r/games for asking "what rights trans people don't have that other humans do?" under post about someone yelling "trans rights are human rights" about Hogwart's legacy. Not being snarky at all, just curious (as I'm not from US and don't really get what the fuss is about).

Still haven't got a coherent answer out of anyone I asked, just insults

That... sounds like a very well deserved ban considering the topic, the reddit and everything that was happening around it.

As a moderator of online communities I'd do the same in a heartbeat. Take that to Twitter or somewhere.

How is that well-deserved? His comment was literally about the topic of the post, and the post was apparently allowed. "We allow politics but sorry, you're only allowed to have the Right Opinion here. Take all other opinions to Twitter!"

It's a good question, and one that their activists don't like answering because "the right to impose oneself on spaces designated solely for the opposite sex" isn't what most people would accept as a human right. So they ignore or block or ban or attack instead of engaging reasonably.

I don’t think anyone would take you seriously enough to give a coherent answer if you’re echoing the language of the bigots, even just unintentionally. It’s like asking “why should black people be able to use the same restrooms?” during the civil rights movement. Even as a totally honest and not at all disingenuous question, it blends into the rhetoric of the reactionaries.

The whole story related to Rowling supposedly being transphobe is crazy. All that canceling because she stated in a twit that "person who menstruate" is a stupid circumlocution around the word woman. Then, like religious taboo, it extended to whatever was linked to it. The irony is that all these cancelers are acting very 10-100 worst against whoever is the target of the anger than what happened to the people they are supposedly defending.

So you’re saying they have little interest in entertaining someone who just wants to culture war? And that’s somehow bad?

What are you speaking about? The company owning the father of all trading card game, which had a strong place in geek culture, is buying for millions a beloved IP very relevant to that demographic too and is making huge controversial changes to push for woke ideology and you claim that's the people rebelling against it are trying to start a culture war. This is pure victim blaming and shaming. That's outrageous honestly. Especially given the even the (worth watching) Peterson Jackson's movie adaption was already controversial to a part of the fanbase, and that the Amazon adaptation showed clearly that radical-left agenda wasn't welcome in the lore.

I mean but really who cares right? A fictional character is black, are the people worked up about this just children? Or just privileged? I struggle to understand why the intensity of people's feelings about this

Maybe re-read your post and consider whether it is really so inexplicable that a community focused on a trading card game doesn’t want that kind of outrage and vitriol.

It's getting a lot worse I agree. It seems like anything that might be offensive to anyone having any emotions under any circumstance is now blurred and labeled "NSFW".

I never understood how Reddit isn’t an advertising powerhouse. Their users literally voluntarily segregate by interest, but the proper tech never got built out. Last I checked they integrated a 3rd party solution for that.

If you look at their software dev efforts it should be painfully obvious why they're not a powerhouse of anything :-)

They had great product-market fit early on, were boosted by YN, and inertia is a huge thing.

Yeah, it's an absurdly poorly managed company.

Which is why it's still useful.

I would guess they have a huge problem with ad blocking

Especially that places like Reddit attract more "tech-savvy" people who have a high amount of ad block users. Naive web ads on places like that or e.g. Ars Technica is tricky most probably.

I think that was the case a few years back, but these days a lot of casual users are accessing it through the official app and getting served tons of ads.

It was a weird moment seeing a reddit comment where someone referred to the site as "this app." Made me feel old.

They need to make the ads and relevant HTML look identical to "real" posts so adblocking doesn't work

This devaluing content to humans, thus breaking what makes the site good.

reddit became massive overnight because digg imploded. digg imploded because they tried to turn into an advertising powerhouse.

I remember how their idea of paid ad was just a reddit post you can comment on.

Which was kinda cool from user side but advertisers didn't like people taking piss on them in the comments so they undoed it

Reddit definitely has promoted content and native advertising. Perhaps you're not seeing it because you're using the far superior old.reddit.com?

The biggest form of this advertising isn't actually done with the knowledge of Reddit. Organizations use Reddit accounts to astroturf narratives together, since Reddit is pseudonymous. Companies who need better PR, or just a good controversy, can do this much more cheaply on Reddit than any other internet forum.

Still, the high-quality advice on Reddit that is authentic can be the most useful stuff on the internet.

True but, for example, I still find that restaurants and travel advice is far superior on Reddit than Google.

Reddit is often my starting point for beginning research on purchasing decisions.

Although when buying a digital piano, I ended up finding dedicated boards like pianoworld to be better

EDIT

Ironically, I also find YouTube to be a great source of research, mostly because the cost to produce content is higher and I think it's somewhat harder to produce inauthentic content (at least to me so far for the things I am researching)

or download alternative mobile app becouse they allow it, and use adblock

Google held control of who they reward using AdWords, they decided who lives and who dies, who goes bancrupt and who prosper It is their system that rewards SEO spam

If you are a creator, you can put up a website, pat for deiagn and hosting fees, and hopw google finds you amongst SEO spam.

Or you cam put a oage on instagram, for free, and deal with none of that shit

You can submit your site to Google and they will index it. If your content is good, you can rank highly - even if nobody links to you! Even if you don't pay Google a dime.

Instagram doesn't allow links out, so you can not promote or sell your content - only if you pay them through their spy/ad service.

> If your content is good, you can rank highly - even if nobody links to you!

I m sorry, this is like news from a different universe.

There is an absolutely world-shattering report on how children have lost all freedom ovet the past 40 years. They used to roam the neighbourhood, then they were allowed to stay in one street, and today we dont let them out of backyard.

I have it on my PC, but can't find it in Google. Its impossible now

I can only talk from my own experience, I've launched several websites that became high ranking on Google solely because of content and speed. Without anybody linking to them. Hell, there's still nobody linking to them years later, and Google still keeps them highly ranked. In niches with well established competitors.

Without Google, I doubt I would have had any chance to reach a public, because nobody except search engines will give you the time of day when you're not already established.

There's many bad things about Google, but they truly allow many people a chance to get their voice out and many small businesses a chance to exist. That is brilliant.

You seem to be providing a brilliant explanation why Google has failed -> I don't need to be found, I need to find a specific piece of information. It's a report by a major university about children. It's basically impossible to find. The university probably has crap website, maybe it's slow, it doesn't follow google guidelines - but so what? As a consumer, I don't care if the website is fast, if it's providing wrong information.

Alternatively, if I search for something related to registering a company in UK, the top 3 results are scams. Does Google rate scammers higher because their website is fast? Is it too difficult for Google to identify the .gov domain and rank the result appropriately?

I am not claiming Google is evil, I am claiming Google is incompetent.

They have destroyed their own food supply or they failed to protect it, and that's why now their search results have gone to shit.

It seems the average Joe that used to run their own website or forum has gone bankrupt or is berried under SEO spam. Joe was replaced by Average Tom.

Average Tom doesn't even know how to make a website, instead he registers on 5 different platforms - Instagram, Ticktok, Etsy, whatever else is popular, and pushes their content there. No SEO spam, they get results. Yes, they lose freedom, have to deal with arbitrary rules, moderation, etc. They are willing to take that deal over what google is offering. Maybe Google should have parted with some of the profit to convince content creators not to go to closed platforms.

Users have voted with their feet, and most of the world's content is no longer accessible to Google. Today's teenagers don't even search on Google to find a barber, they search on Instagram, and make a booking right there.

Google search is already dead inside, they just don't know it yet.

Google has seen a massive decline in quality and they are a company of very questionable morals. I think it's fair to say they are evil.

Still, Google is the reason millions of people can make a living, who would have been locked out of their industry by gate keepers if search engines didn't exist.

The standard static HTML website that can be found by Google is vastly superior to social media offerings. Creators and businesses can not sell their products through social media like Instagram, because you can not even put a link unless you purchase their spy ads. With crusty old WordPress you can create great online publications and articles as long as you want - no popular social media offers that.

The general public use the internet exclusively for social media, and at most a couple of web sites for work or other functions. That is because the general public has an insatiable appetite for mindless entertainment. That doesn't mean the traditional web has failed, it's still there and Google is still king on that hill. The social media hordes are the same people who would be glued in front of the TV in the past. Social media attention and likes are close to worthless in the end for creators and businesses. I'd rather have 100 customers brought by Google and a traditional web site, than 1 000 000 Instagram likes from people looking at my post for 0.03 seconds while scrolling. When people are looking for important information or want to make a purchase online, they go by Google almost all of the time, and almost never by social media.

> They are willing to take that deal over what google is offering. Maybe Google should have parted with some of the profit to convince content creators not to go to closed platforms.

Google is not taking anything from anybody. You can index your content with them for free, and they will send visitors to your site. Social media will just use your content to get eyeballs for their own ads.

The average business owner treats their traditional website as an annoying hassle, when it could be a window into the world and massively increase their sales and customer service. They love social media, because Facebook and Instagram feeds them like and heart icons.

> Reddit also doesn't have "promoted" content / responses

Reddit does have promoted content, but it's only at the toplevel, if you use new.reddit (possibly the official client as well) and you don't have an adblocker you'll see them interspersed in feeds (on subreddits anyway, not sure e.g. /r/all has ads as I don't use it, and usually use the old theme anyway).

It also suffers quite a bit from astroturfing / content farms, but it's not always clear how the accounts are monetised, they're mostly visible as repost bots farming karma.

The advantage of Reddit to the broad internet is that there are always people trying to prove you wrong and call out BS.