this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2024
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It is worth noting that marketing companies have picked up on this and they will often create oddly specific questions on Reddit then answer them with a bought account.
Yeah there are multiple ways. Nevertheless it's public, so people can vote on stuff and reply when the response is bullshit. That's why I think visible downvotes are very important. If you have an answer botted to be on spot one of the replies but it has like 200% the downvotes, it's possible that there's something fishy going on and one can evaluate. That's not possible if you can't see this addition info and only the sum of votes.
This is an excellent argument for showing downvotes!
Picked it up years ago too. Its worth it to check multiple threads, and read multiple comments, and then do an additional deeper dive from there, but the amount of guerilla marketing and astro turfing on social media is astounding. I do miss those early days when the old farts in charge of marketing didnt pay attention to message boards.
This is illustrated pretty nicely at the end of the article; where they highlight just such a comment, the link it posted, and the suspended account page for the user.