Researcher documents concentrated brand recommendations in Reddit knife communities
Analysis of six knife subreddits finds one brand mentioned in 31% of purchase-advice threads by just 5% of accounts.
What to know
- Vijeh's analysis found one brand receiving 31% of product recommendations from 5% of accounts across six knife subreddits—four times the statistical baseline—but public data cannot distinguish paid astroturfing from organic brand loyalty.
- Commercial services openly sell Reddit comments from aged accounts ($9.99 each) and offer automated shopping-thread targeting, but Reddit's business model appears to depend on engagement volume rather than enforcement against shilling.
- Hacker News commenters debate whether the concentration pattern proves systematic manipulation or reflects genuine enthusiast communities, with some users confessing to running astroturfing campaigns themselves for political and commercial purposes.
The dispute Whether the statistical concentration of recommendations represents evidence of paid astroturfing or merely reflects organic brand enthusiasm in hobbyist communities—the core tension between two interpretations of identical data. · positions read across 69 posts and comments
The concentration pattern is suspicious but unproven; brand loyalty can look identical to paid astroturfing in aggregate data.
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“This essentially implies that brand loyalty is equivalent to paid astroturfing, but if you've been around hobby communities on the internet, you know that a lot of people are just brand blowhards.”
socializer · Hacker News ↗
Reddit astroturfing is widespread and systematic; users describe personal involvement and 60% of discussions as fake.
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“I do it locally to nudge political discourse. Doesn't take much to sway a lot of people.”
zulux · Hacker News ↗
Reddit's business model incentivizes tolerating shilling; enforcement would reduce engagement metrics and prove the platform works for advertisers.
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“Because the only metric that matters for social media is engagement, and a war against active account, no matter the purpose, would make that line go down.”
mingus88 · Hacker News ↗
The article's methodology and presentation are flawed; AI-generated text obscures the core argument and results lack statistical significance.
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“Rather than pasting the analysis from Claude, the author should just explain it themselves. Just the core of their analysis.”
janalsncm · Hacker News ↗
Peter S. Vijeh Researcher; New Knife Day creatorREDCmts Commercial astroturfing serviceSoar Commercial astroturfing serviceBazzly Commercial astroturfing service
The record 1 articles and posts · last 30 days
What people are saying 24 voices from 1 site · best of 69 · verbatim
- Why does Reddit not ban shilling under its terms of service and sue the commercial astroturfing services?
- Can Reddit product recommendations be trusted if 60% of discussions are potentially inauthentic?
- What would constitute definitive proof of astroturfing without access to account metadata Reddit does not publish?
- Oct 1
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This is an interesting topic presented in a very poor article.Many others have already mentioned the LLM prose, but I'll add that the data presented is not human legible as well.Take the chart titled "How much buying advice comes from the brand-heavy 5%". Firstly, how do you even begin to disect the meaning of "brand-heavy 5%"? Are these: 1…
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Mods are doing what the platform is designed for - create "echo chambers". If a sub-reddit causes cognitive dissonance then that means (from the perspective of the platform), you aren't in the "right" sub-reddit (i.e. echo chamber). If you are posting something that isn't within the accepted "norms" of the echo chamber the mods are supposed to…
- Sep 29
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This is a good place to remind everyone that Ghislaine Maxwell is a moderator of /r/worldnews. She stopped using her main account when she was arrested but we suspect she's still moderating from prison using other accounts. If you comment or post about this on Reddit you will get an account level shadowban.Let us see if the pedophiles control this…
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I visit two subs every day and get banned from both of them maybe three times a year. I am an expert in one area and experienced in the other. I typically respond only to outrageous responses to someone who asked a seemingly innocent question. Because I disagreed with the majority I typically get my karma down so low that my comments aren't…
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It was clear that Reddit had an astroturfing problem, even pre-ChatGPT.Funnily enough, Reddit got so bad that I stopped appending "reddit" to my queries and I often find myself appending "hackernews" instead (or more commonly, I ask the LLM to find HN discussions on the topic), just because the signal is much higher.It also makes me think about…
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Yeah. I don't want to be conspiratorial, but there is some heavy censorship happening in certain (or maybe most) subreddits.A good example is worldnews. For a long time I thought it was a pretty good source of, well, news. But at some point I started noticing that certain topics (cough Negativity about Israel cough) which got a decent amount of…
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My favorite anecdote for an astroturfing suspicion I had was in German subreddits.Whenever somebody was talking about rolled oats, without fail, somebody would chime in that Kölln brand rolled outs were strictly superior and they would gladly pay the 4x markup for them.It is hilarious because rolled outs are probably one of the most fungible goods…
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If you're trying to sell knives, do you get more bang for your advertising dollar by paying some TikTok influencer to do knife-tricks with your knives, or by paying off the mods of a reddit sub that people already go to when doing research on what knives to buy? Reddit is, after all, the place people search when they don't trust the reviews on…
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does it matter?The quality is so low, of submission, discourse, and people.I can take only a few minutes of scrolling through naively instructive subcomments "fun fact, water is actually wet", or needless authority seeking "as an AuDHD can confirm", the prepending of "super" to everything "this is super not good", it's like reading pure cliche…
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I feel like most of their problems come from downvoting, not mods though. It's just not possible to have a real discussion on reddit anymore, because anything that is not the mainstream opinion just gets insta downvoted. People will literally downvote anything they don't agree with, and seem to be more likely to do that if they see the comment has…
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It's had a problem for 10+ years. Not just astroturfing, but proper propaganda pushing on various topics & countries. It quite obvious as an 'outsider'. Then there is all the ai bots/posts that are being fine tuned by humans (deliberate incendiary posts, logical fallacies, which then get corrected by humans). Then the yearly cyclical repost of the…
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While I do think quality of subs can be quite high (much higher than discourse here for certain topics and certain subs), this is a pretty well known problem. Discussion on this [1] from a post I made earlier.r/sanfrancisco is quite negative on the current mayor Daniel Lurie and frequently expresses approval for Zohran Mamdani even though Lurie…
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Not that long ago to find both sides of an argument in the comments you could search by "controversial" and the negative comments would be at the top and often you'd agree with them, or at least appreciate the debate. Now they are mostly gone. It was probably a combination of banning wrong-think and dissidents learning to not waste their time.The…
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The biggest problem I have with reddit is mods can slowly but systematically ban users who express unfavourable opinions, and over time, anyone casually browsing could mistakenly believe those views are unpopular, whereas in reality everyone with that view (everyone who spoke it, anyway) was banned.To give a simple example, one video game…
- Sep 28
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> Thin accounts: few comments, low scores, no real standing in the subreddit.> Young accounts, or accounts with histories that are hidden or wiped.DDG search "buy pre-aged reddit accounts" and you will find all of these. You can even search reddit for this.The author of the article has no fucking idea what they are talking about. Buying "comments"…
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All public forums have an astroturfing problem including this oneGoogle, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, etc they all have hundreds of thousands employees and even if they are not explicitly paid to astroturf, they try to be subconsciously loyal to their employer, downvoting everything that goes against their subtle wiring, and happily…
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This is why Reddit is a low value high effort distribution channel. When your userbase is hostile and suspicious constantly to any commercial introductions, advertising there becomes just an exercise in futility. The demographic also is problematic on Bluesky. Same on hackernews. Astroturfing is certainly a response to this friction and in turn it…
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This is why you need to write your own content.> If the tail shows up in buying threads only because it posts a lot, random reassignment says it should write about 7.9% of the brand mentions there, and almost always between 6.3% and 10.1%. It wrote 11.3%.Is it just me or is this just a block of painfully hard to parse text? This is core to the…
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Too many subreddits still have minimum karma or account age requirements. Most of those are ruled by tyrant moderators so you're not missing much, but it's made the site largely useless. I estimate 60% of discussions on Reddit are fake or fabricated on some level.Can't post honest questions anymore without posting obviously phony pandering banter…
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From my experience, they have been astroturfed quite a lot, its' been that way for a while.During the Laquan McDonald innocent and trial there were tons of accounts from the_donald, and not-connected to that were pretending to be experts and live in chicago (despite not having history on the sub). In the threads these accounts weren't positively…
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There have been a few cases posted to the theoryofreddit subreddit where it's obvious that there were sets of accounts which were blanket recommending specific products a disproportionate amount of time. The user accounts involved were often banned shortly afterwards (or were deleted). These were (upon examination) really obvious though, often…
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My impression is that this doesn't show anything. It essentially implies that brand loyalty is equivalent to paid astroturfing, but if you've been around hobby communities on the internet, you know that a lot of people are just brand blowhards. And in any case, by its own admission, none of the results in this article are statistically…
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I think the items listed under "What astroturfing would look like" were a pretty narrow scope. If I were designing a ~spam system~ astroturfing solution, I'd engineer out these four simple indicators as soon as I could.* Those accounts naming one brand almost every time they name any. * Thin accounts: few comments, low scores, no real standing in…
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> REDCmts sells one Reddit comment for $9.99 and 100 for $699.99, from what it calls "real, aged accounts", and shows a gallery of brand mentions it says it delivered. Soar says its accounts are "aged and manually warmed" for weeks before a single brand mention. Bazzly advertises automated replies to every post that looks like someone shopping.Why…