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"?