> 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 doesn't Reddit make sure that shilling is disallowed by their ToS, and then sue these companies and all their customers?
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.
Also, shill accounts prove to advertisers that the platform works to make money. That’s the whole reason Reddit exists.
Because it would be a monumental waste of time and money. Even if you could track down the overseas operators doing this, there's not much damages you could sue for, and alternatives would just pop up in their place.
Literally the example in the comment I replied to was an overseas operator. But my point is even if you did go after spam operators, alternatives will simply pop up in other jurisdictions, as has happened with literally every other form of spam.
For the same reason Amazon doesn't solve fake reviews. Their business needs the content and they're confident that the people who haven't left for better options will remain undiscerning.
In Germany e.g. Galaxus works fine for many things. Also eBay surprisingly works better for many things because it has more filters, e.g. if you want to buy wood or window shades etc.
eBay has become a cesspool though, with their silly login requiring phone number and so on. I still remember I had a completely fine Kleinanzeigen account at the beginning of the Pandemic, because I wanted to offer math and computer stuff help for students and put an ad for that on kleinanzeigen. (Didn't ever get a request that was worth taking seriously.) Then at some point later, I suddenly was no longer allowed to log in, unless I disclose my phone number. What a shit. Since then that account sits stale or might already be deleted.
Not sure which you're asking about but, for example, Best Buy price matches Amazon for items where they overlap. And then I can go get the product right away without waiting for shipping. Or paying for Prime. Or supporting Amazon.
Based on what happens everywhere, they're paying reddit for leniency. Pink contracts have been around since Uunet was offering them to Usenet spammers.
Generally you can't stop them, they're shell companies run from countries that don't care. You spend a lot of time and effort trying to block one and they just spin up another, it's asymmetrical in that you expend more resources to stop it.
reddit wants engagement numbers to grow either way, so that disincentivizes it further
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 promoting extremely niche products using very exact terminology.
This I think leads to a sort of toupee fallacy - where because you can spot the really bad examples you feel confident that you can identify the much better, more subtle examples. If an account which has only made 50 comments (all of which are very generic) makes 20 comments in a single month explicitly recommending ImageGeneratorDeluxeProMax then sure, you can guess they might not be legit. But if an account runs for a longer period of time and makes a lot more general organic contributions then if 1 in 500 of their comments are in favour of a particular product then it's harder to say.
I think ultimately account age is the only thing that will be difficult to replicate at scale. I know people buy older accounts but there is still a fundamental difficulty in obtaining them in sufficient numbers. And yes, obviously that will mean disregarding the many millions of legitimate accounts that are under (say) 2 or 3 years old. There is also no easy way of hiding accounts under a certain age when searching Reddit via Google.
By allowing uses to hide user profiles Reddit has also made detecting potentially bad actors that little bit more difficult. And from experience it feels like a large proportion of accounts now have hidden post histories. (It might also be the default for new accounts, I'm not sure).
Niche topics like linux feel somewhat safe from bots. But the last time I checked the more popular subs.. yikes..
When I see 2-weeks old account "Incendiary-Leg-8592" responding to a post by another weeks old user "Pivotal-Kitchen-0498", I have a hard time believing they are humans behind them.
I'll bet there's a browser extension to hide comments and posts from those auto generated user names. Like maybe you end up not seeing something interesting because someone used a throwaway account, but otherwise I don't really care what someone has to say that can't even be bothered to pick a name.
It would be trivial for spammers to at least use different pattern. I am afraid they keep to the default, cause real users do the same. I am not surprised, the chance of colliding with other user login, on registration, on such old and popular website is high.
It's crazy to me they are presenting sluggified account names as something that should be taken seriously. But I guess it doesn't matter because most people just don't notice, and worse, the technology surrounding reddit does not seem to care.
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 the subreddit.
* Young accounts, or accounts with histories that are hidden or wiped.
* Links to a store or an affiliate page.
It may be that the people most likely to blindly follow astroturfed suggestions don’t pay attention to these indicators. In which case volume is more important than camouflage.
I gave up on any product related reviews on Reddit a decade ago. It can still be useful for guides that may describe what type of products you should look into, e.g., woodworking tools, skincare, etc.
For product reviews, I've been using GearLab (https://www.techgearlab.com/) for years with pretty reliable results. I have no affiliation with them.
I wasn’t aware of GearLab, thanks for the tip. I will say, though I took a look and it seems like they heavily use Amazon links so they suffer from similar downsides as Wirecutter.
Amazon nowadays is such a crapshoot. A link to a product isn’t reliable. The price could be different than what the review stated, and the link might be for an listing that shows as out of stock. I think GearLab tries to fix this by giving you a link to search results on Amazon instead, but in some ways that’s worse. In the couple of links I tried the reviewed product wasn’t the top result so now it’s up to you to decide which of the links is the real one.
That loses some of the value prop for me because part of what I want from a service like this is to give me a link to a legit product listing. That’s not GearLab’s fault, Amazon makes that very difficult, but it still reduces the utility for me. That said it’s better than nothing which just points to the sad state of affairs in e-commerce today.
Edit: it looks like at least some of their links take you directly to the product page. Not sure why some of them take you to a search results page instead, but my guess is it’s an issue with expiring links.
What's their business model? A priori, I don't trust them because there's no reason for them to give out all that information for free. I assume it's a affiliate marketing / referral revenue stream? I suppose it could be fair within those parameters, but it would mean there's no incentive for them to test products that don't have such a program.
I pay for Consumer Reports, since you actually need a paid subscription to access the data, which makes sense structurally. I don't really know if the reviews are any good, though I've been relatively happy with it. I also paid a subscription for an independent supplement testing lab, but I forget what it's called at the moment.
Man, this comment is getting way more attention than I expected lol
Yes, they work on an affiliated model. From their About[0] page:
How We Make Money
GearLab is a free service that is entirely reader-supported. We select and review products objectively and independently. We only make money when you click on our affiliate links and buy products we've reviewed, which helps support our testing work.
If you click on a retailer's link on our site and make any purchase, the retailer will contribute a portion of the sale to help support this site. It won't cost you anything extra, and it's a simple way to help us fund our gear reviews. Thanks for your support of our work!
GearLab is legit. Their outdoor sibling (https://www.outdoorgearlab.com/) is also great. I think the whole concept of "best" in a product category is fairly flawed, but they do it well; their individual product reviews are even better.
I imagine they only review places that will give them affiliate points. I was curious if they tested the mattic in the robot vacuums category and they didn’t.
No Ads, No Freebies, No Promotion
We refuse to accept any manufacturer's free evaluation units, and we do not accept any paid endorsements. Our focus is strictly on creating content for the benefit of our readers, and we align our business model to focus on our reader's interests.
These days there are central clearing-houses for affiliate links that support basically every store, for the rare case where a product isn't available on Amazon/Best Buy/etc. Matic seems to use something called Impact.com. I don't see why that would be a concern.
Are you suggesting that all retailers even boutique/smaller ones use affiliate codes regularly?
That's an interesting development. I was under the impression that outside of larger retailers, affiliate codes weren't as common.
I'm curious then why did techgearlab not choose to review the matic which is certainly a new interesting player in the robot vaccuum game. I'll have to reach out!
Most items are available from retailers like Amazon or Best Buy that have affiliate programs that work on all items. (They may not have the very best price, but that at least gives the review site something to link to, and more price-conscious people will shop around.) Other retailers participate in clearing-house programs like Impact, and others with charming names like Skimlink, Geni.us, etc.
For the minority of products that are only sold directly by the manufacturer (which includes Matic), yes, I think it would be very unusual not to have an affiliate program. Matic even has a crappy one for consumers. For one thing, YouTubers, who keep absolutely no distance between business and editorial, aren’t gonna talk about your product unless they can put an affiliate link in the description. Sometimes manufacturers will use something like Impact, other times a publisher will need to reach out directly.
> For product reviews, I've been using GearLab (https://www.techgearlab.com/) for years with pretty reliable results. I have no affiliation with them.
Why would you assume any website is immune to this problem of bots and fake or paid reviews? Bots are so cheap now and smart enough to pass as realistic humans.
Even with good intentions, money runs out eventually (they say no ads and no sponsored content) and someone with deep pockets will exploit this.
Eventually everyone will just have to implement the foolproof solution of putting in the rules that saying that their website has a problem is "a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills" and be done with it.
Because they are not a review aggregator? They purchase the products themselves, do extensive testing, and then publish their results. You can find more about their process on their About page here: https://www.techgearlab.com/about.
I was editing my comment but I can go into detail about what I mean here.
I understand how they operate (it's in the middle of their main page) but that actually makes it more difficult for them. The site commits to test thousands of products each year and they don't do sponsored content, free samples, or ads.
They're walking on a beaten path, see Rtings [0] (even the methodology and visual style, which is a good thing). Everyone eventually needs to look for alternative revenue streams to support themselves especially when the competition is fierce and doesn't always play fair. Affiliate link revenue via Amazon.com is not a reliable long term financing strategy for a review website which has to constantly purchase new stuff and pay qualified reviewers.
Most people search the local market for the product and buy the best deal. It doesn't need to be Amazon.com and in many cases, it can't.
Why not? Wirecutter is a cash cow for the Times; if you can keep people's trust, recommending (and affiliate-linking to) products in semi-luxury categories is a lucrative business!
Wikipedia says the Wirecutter implemented a metered paywall a few years ago as additional source of financing. With the weight of the Times behind them they branched into other areas like podcasts and partnerships with countless other sites. This fits well into what I said in my earlier comment. Running this kind of business is hard and someone with deeper pockets will find an interest in it.
Just a few years after founding and shortly before selling to the Times for 1 year's worth of revenue, Wirecutter trialed a deal with Amazon for sponsored posts, along with exploring other revenue streams [2] like kickbacks.
> if you can keep people's trust
Trustworthiness and money don't always go hand in hand. Facebook is a cash cow and keeps people's trust as they keep coming back. Would you call it a trusted source of information? I remember the pendulum swinging against Wirecutter shortly after the sale. And plenty of reports since [1][2].
Rtings is the authoritative source for reviewing anything with a screen and they struggled financially, having to implement a subscription model.
And at the end of the day, taking Wirecutter as an indisputably trustworthy authority in consumer reviews, anyone else on the market has to compete with them with 2 possible options when reviews go head to head: agree and just be an echo, or contradict and go against the indisputably trustworthy authority. Talk about being between a rock and a hard place.
Maybe I'm, too cynical but the rug has been pulled from under me too many times to count by things that started out trustworthy than found the need or just the allure of money. With the internet only becoming more trustworthy over these past years I'm sure I have no reason to worry, right?
Eh. I see what you mean, but I'm more optimistic about GearLab. I think Wirecutter is different for three reasons:
1. Wirecutter has to review everything. GearLab is more limited; they steer clear of non-technical clothing and their tech arm doesn't even really do camera reviews. They obviously know to avoid categories where there are established review sites that most buyers are loyal to. If Wirecutter misses a category, people will complain - that's the curse of being the "everything" site. Rtings has a similar issue.
2. Wirecutter reviewers work for the Times and are unionized; GearLab hires freelancers.
3. The Times is relying on Wirecutter (alongside Games) to prop up their journalism, which is the spiritual core of their business, and the only part that clearly contributes something to society, but struggles to make money on its own. Putting Wirecutter behind the NYT paywall makes people more likely to sign up for a NYT subscription. GearLab isn't paying for any journalists' pensions.
Wirecutter affiliate links make the Times something like $60-70 million per quarter [1].
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 significant, so it fails to find the effect it implies to have found.
I strongly believe that there's a lot of paid product placement and paid political talking points on Reddit, so it's actually remarkable that this (LLM-generated) article fails to find it. I suspect it's just bad design.
If you're already spending money on tokens, there's a very simple experiment you could do instead: just pay one of these companies to position a made-up product and see what they do.
some people will expend a surprising amount of effort to justify their personal choices
at this point astroturfing is a given... corporations do it, governments do it, individuals do it... anonymous content in aggregate can not be relied on
A large portion of the "New LLM release" story comments here on HN also appear to be astroturfing ... would be interesting to see a correlation of comment sentiment to IP-derived geographic location!
IIRC the Reddit founders used bots for initial traffic to skip over the cold start problem. I feel like this bit of lore is actually pretty terrible but is treated as a nice anecdote because it worked.
I think due to the outsized power ads companies (and even those that aren't purely ads founded, like FB, but for which the model of profitability was always ads on the long-horizon) have over the current internet this won't ever go away, in fact it will only keep getting worse, hand in hand with the augmented agentic workflows.
An id-with-options-for-anonymity solution would go a long way but no one is remotely interested in that because it would just crater all these companies valuations if you figured out 60k subscribers were actually 45k bots, and 80% comments were automated agentic replies.
I had launched almost 10 years ago a campaign in indiegogo and immediately got spammed with people selling marketing campaigns, I launched a few days ago one in gamefound and the same happened. Without it, or you investing on your own marketing campaigns it's just impossible to get any traction of sorts, unless you have a network of contacts that themselves can reach organically other people, and the same for other things, like bootstrapping an online social platform. It's almost as if it's a "cost of doing business".
Most of these marketers themselves have automated funnels, now all using agents, there's a lot of tell-tales on the messages you receive and then on the follow ups too - sometimes to the point that the messages just miss completely things you made clear just on the previous message and just follow a funnel to get you through the door. At a certain threshold or when told explicitly sometimes a human goes into the loop, but 2 messages in it's like they reset back to factory defaults...
Ads, scams, rage bait, trolls... The internet is pretty broken for almost all sites that pretends to carry conversations between actual people.
I don't understand why so many people and companies feel the need to just spam reviews, SEO and questionable ads. It's like almost no one has the idea that may we start with a good product, then we'll tell people about it. It's always a question of what you can have produced cheaply in China and how do we then trick people into buying it.
As it stand you can pretty much assume that if it's advertised, or is promoted on social media, it's going to be a shit product.
To some extend I'd exclude certain types of YouTube reviews, because they frequently aren't paid by the manufacturer and making a video with real people and real data is to expensive to waste on scams.
Only for arbitrary people. Gate kept or low member count communities that exist to facilitate a discussion between appliance repair men, literature enthusiasts, fly tying hobbyists or owners of a particular model of vehicle are largely alive and well (unfortunately a lot of them moved from forums to facebook, but still.
Perhaps we can envision a future in which we analyze Reddit data not according to all the positive things people say about a product, but according to the negative things being said.
Shilling can’t prevent dissatisfied customers from voicing their opinions in a properly moderated subreddit, and astroturfing to spread misinformation about a competitor makes companies much more vulnerable to litigation.
That this was posted by someone who's only here to post his own sites and those sites have never been submitted by another person is like performance art.
Isn't there? Especially when crypto was booming, that kind of opinion manipulation definitely existed to deceive people. I've actually seen it in freelance requests before too, and most of the time they run it through phone farms.
I've also heard it happens in some games as well, but either way, the one I can say for certain is crypto.
Yes, yes it does. There's astroturfing of every variety: political, brands, image rehab, you name it.
Just look at how often Bill Gates gets glazing articles posted which receive suspicious rankings. None of the comments mention the Epstein-sized elephants in the room.
Politics is even worse, and it's useless as a platform for taking political temperature. Numerous companies openly admit to this activity and Reddit has never commented on this practice.
reddit is an echo chamber when it comes to most topics, and politics are probably the worst of all. Back in the Gamergate days it was all MRA types (throwback!); in 2016 it became 50% Bernie and 50% Trump; these days it's mostly mainstream liberal. I assume the actual political makeup of the user base hasn't changed that much in that time, but people who obsessively refresh and upvote/downvote posts based on their politics have an outsize impact on what comes to the top. I'm sure there's some impact from automated astroturfing, but humans drive it.
No serious person would ever suggest using it to take the "political temperature" of society at large. It's about as useful as Nextdoor for that.
I don't think the article is reassuring it is not astroturfed? He studied only a small case, for a brand on the smaller side, and found significant amount of bots.
If you see a single sheep on an island, it is safe to assume there is more than one sheep living on the island.
> Adding "reddit" to a knife search still gets you humans, mostly. For a couple of brands, a quarter to a third of the buying advice comes from accounts that mostly recommend that brand. Whether those are fans or paid, I do not know, and after reading their histories I lean toward fans and hold the lean loosely.
Very long write up to unconfidently say I don’t know.
For a while people were suggesting that adding "reddit" to queries for shopping advice was a real way to get uncensored/genuine commentary and reviews.
Even the first time I saw the advice I was skeptical, reddit is rife with bots, and fake comments/posts. It's been well-known for almost a decade at this point that there are multiple individuals moderating many communities there, and that kinda power is rife for abuse.
I've been a sporadic reddit reader/poster for a few years, but this past month I've had enough and deleted my account. The main draw was niche-topics, but they've been overrun with AI slop, and even the local communities have become echo-chambers rather than posts of new bands, events, etc. The local newspaper can tell me about those already.
> 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 doesn't Reddit make sure that shilling is disallowed by their ToS, and then sue these companies and all their customers?
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.
Also, shill accounts prove to advertisers that the platform works to make money. That’s the whole reason Reddit exists.
YCombinator is not a social company. They actually do a ton to try to stop this stuff, it's just hard.
> Because the only metric that matters for social media is engagement
True, but what if a third party existed to measure and compare other metrics that users would actually care about across popular platforms?
What does it cost for Hacker News comments? Is there no YC startup for manipulating this discussion?
Because it would be a monumental waste of time and money. Even if you could track down the overseas operators doing this, there's not much damages you could sue for, and alternatives would just pop up in their place.
Overseas operators? Nonsense.
I know US people who do this for a living
Technically this is something the FTC could get involved in as it's illegal to advertise without making it clear you are.
A few years back a bunch of influencers were fined for doing just that.
Literally the example in the comment I replied to was an overseas operator. But my point is even if you did go after spam operators, alternatives will simply pop up in other jurisdictions, as has happened with literally every other form of spam.
Obviously it's hard to prove such a thing but I've always wondered if the owners of Reddit actively support having these operations run on their site.
I've seen cases where the admins delete comments that talk about the issue
I think that reddit's recent change to allow hiding comment history is exactly to help support shilling.
It makes it hard to see what's a bot and what's a legitimate account.
Owners of Reddit also own these companies.
I'm assuming it already falls under rules 2 and 5, content manipulation and deceptive interactions
For the same reason Amazon doesn't solve fake reviews. Their business needs the content and they're confident that the people who haven't left for better options will remain undiscerning.
> left for better options
Please name one
Genuinely asking
In Germany e.g. Galaxus works fine for many things. Also eBay surprisingly works better for many things because it has more filters, e.g. if you want to buy wood or window shades etc.
eBay has become a cesspool though, with their silly login requiring phone number and so on. I still remember I had a completely fine Kleinanzeigen account at the beginning of the Pandemic, because I wanted to offer math and computer stuff help for students and put an ad for that on kleinanzeigen. (Didn't ever get a request that was worth taking seriously.) Then at some point later, I suddenly was no longer allowed to log in, unless I disclose my phone number. What a shit. Since then that account sits stale or might already be deleted.
Not sure which you're asking about but, for example, Best Buy price matches Amazon for items where they overlap. And then I can go get the product right away without waiting for shipping. Or paying for Prime. Or supporting Amazon.
Based on what happens everywhere, they're paying reddit for leniency. Pink contracts have been around since Uunet was offering them to Usenet spammers.
Generally you can't stop them, they're shell companies run from countries that don't care. You spend a lot of time and effort trying to block one and they just spin up another, it's asymmetrical in that you expend more resources to stop it.
reddit wants engagement numbers to grow either way, so that disincentivizes it further
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 promoting extremely niche products using very exact terminology.
This I think leads to a sort of toupee fallacy - where because you can spot the really bad examples you feel confident that you can identify the much better, more subtle examples. If an account which has only made 50 comments (all of which are very generic) makes 20 comments in a single month explicitly recommending ImageGeneratorDeluxeProMax then sure, you can guess they might not be legit. But if an account runs for a longer period of time and makes a lot more general organic contributions then if 1 in 500 of their comments are in favour of a particular product then it's harder to say.
I think ultimately account age is the only thing that will be difficult to replicate at scale. I know people buy older accounts but there is still a fundamental difficulty in obtaining them in sufficient numbers. And yes, obviously that will mean disregarding the many millions of legitimate accounts that are under (say) 2 or 3 years old. There is also no easy way of hiding accounts under a certain age when searching Reddit via Google.
By allowing uses to hide user profiles Reddit has also made detecting potentially bad actors that little bit more difficult. And from experience it feels like a large proportion of accounts now have hidden post histories. (It might also be the default for new accounts, I'm not sure).
Niche topics like linux feel somewhat safe from bots. But the last time I checked the more popular subs.. yikes..
When I see 2-weeks old account "Incendiary-Leg-8592" responding to a post by another weeks old user "Pivotal-Kitchen-0498", I have a hard time believing they are humans behind them.
I'll bet there's a browser extension to hide comments and posts from those auto generated user names. Like maybe you end up not seeing something interesting because someone used a throwaway account, but otherwise I don't really care what someone has to say that can't even be bothered to pick a name.
It would be trivial for spammers to at least use different pattern. I am afraid they keep to the default, cause real users do the same. I am not surprised, the chance of colliding with other user login, on registration, on such old and popular website is high.
It's crazy to me they are presenting sluggified account names as something that should be taken seriously. But I guess it doesn't matter because most people just don't notice, and worse, the technology surrounding reddit does not seem to care.
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 the subreddit. * Young accounts, or accounts with histories that are hidden or wiped. * Links to a store or an affiliate page.
It may be that the people most likely to blindly follow astroturfed suggestions don’t pay attention to these indicators. In which case volume is more important than camouflage.
I was only thinking about detection evasion. The indicators listed would stick out like a sore thumb.
I gave up on any product related reviews on Reddit a decade ago. It can still be useful for guides that may describe what type of products you should look into, e.g., woodworking tools, skincare, etc.
For product reviews, I've been using GearLab (https://www.techgearlab.com/) for years with pretty reliable results. I have no affiliation with them.
I wasn’t aware of GearLab, thanks for the tip. I will say, though I took a look and it seems like they heavily use Amazon links so they suffer from similar downsides as Wirecutter.
Amazon nowadays is such a crapshoot. A link to a product isn’t reliable. The price could be different than what the review stated, and the link might be for an listing that shows as out of stock. I think GearLab tries to fix this by giving you a link to search results on Amazon instead, but in some ways that’s worse. In the couple of links I tried the reviewed product wasn’t the top result so now it’s up to you to decide which of the links is the real one.
That loses some of the value prop for me because part of what I want from a service like this is to give me a link to a legit product listing. That’s not GearLab’s fault, Amazon makes that very difficult, but it still reduces the utility for me. That said it’s better than nothing which just points to the sad state of affairs in e-commerce today.
Edit: it looks like at least some of their links take you directly to the product page. Not sure why some of them take you to a search results page instead, but my guess is it’s an issue with expiring links.
What's their business model? A priori, I don't trust them because there's no reason for them to give out all that information for free. I assume it's a affiliate marketing / referral revenue stream? I suppose it could be fair within those parameters, but it would mean there's no incentive for them to test products that don't have such a program.
I pay for Consumer Reports, since you actually need a paid subscription to access the data, which makes sense structurally. I don't really know if the reviews are any good, though I've been relatively happy with it. I also paid a subscription for an independent supplement testing lab, but I forget what it's called at the moment.
Man, this comment is getting way more attention than I expected lol
Yes, they work on an affiliated model. From their About[0] page:
[0] https://www.techgearlab.com/aboutGearLab is legit. Their outdoor sibling (https://www.outdoorgearlab.com/) is also great. I think the whole concept of "best" in a product category is fairly flawed, but they do it well; their individual product reviews are even better.
I imagine they only review places that will give them affiliate points. I was curious if they tested the mattic in the robot vacuums category and they didn’t.
From their About[0] page:
Again, not affiliated; just a satisfied user.[0] https://www.techgearlab.com/about
At the top of the home page:
> When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission, which helps support our testing.
That’s what the parent comment was referring to
Yes, I assume when they choose "who to test" affiliate commission is factored in.
These days there are central clearing-houses for affiliate links that support basically every store, for the rare case where a product isn't available on Amazon/Best Buy/etc. Matic seems to use something called Impact.com. I don't see why that would be a concern.
Are you suggesting that all retailers even boutique/smaller ones use affiliate codes regularly?
That's an interesting development. I was under the impression that outside of larger retailers, affiliate codes weren't as common.
I'm curious then why did techgearlab not choose to review the matic which is certainly a new interesting player in the robot vaccuum game. I'll have to reach out!
Most items are available from retailers like Amazon or Best Buy that have affiliate programs that work on all items. (They may not have the very best price, but that at least gives the review site something to link to, and more price-conscious people will shop around.) Other retailers participate in clearing-house programs like Impact, and others with charming names like Skimlink, Geni.us, etc.
For the minority of products that are only sold directly by the manufacturer (which includes Matic), yes, I think it would be very unusual not to have an affiliate program. Matic even has a crappy one for consumers. For one thing, YouTubers, who keep absolutely no distance between business and editorial, aren’t gonna talk about your product unless they can put an affiliate link in the description. Sometimes manufacturers will use something like Impact, other times a publisher will need to reach out directly.
> For product reviews, I've been using GearLab (https://www.techgearlab.com/) for years with pretty reliable results. I have no affiliation with them.
Why would you assume any website is immune to this problem of bots and fake or paid reviews? Bots are so cheap now and smart enough to pass as realistic humans.
Even with good intentions, money runs out eventually (they say no ads and no sponsored content) and someone with deep pockets will exploit this.
Eventually everyone will just have to implement the foolproof solution of putting in the rules that saying that their website has a problem is "a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills" and be done with it.
Because they are not a review aggregator? They purchase the products themselves, do extensive testing, and then publish their results. You can find more about their process on their About page here: https://www.techgearlab.com/about.
I was editing my comment but I can go into detail about what I mean here.
I understand how they operate (it's in the middle of their main page) but that actually makes it more difficult for them. The site commits to test thousands of products each year and they don't do sponsored content, free samples, or ads.
They're walking on a beaten path, see Rtings [0] (even the methodology and visual style, which is a good thing). Everyone eventually needs to look for alternative revenue streams to support themselves especially when the competition is fierce and doesn't always play fair. Affiliate link revenue via Amazon.com is not a reliable long term financing strategy for a review website which has to constantly purchase new stuff and pay qualified reviewers.
Most people search the local market for the product and buy the best deal. It doesn't need to be Amazon.com and in many cases, it can't.
[0] https://www.rtings.com/company/revamping-our-membership-prog...
Why not? Wirecutter is a cash cow for the Times; if you can keep people's trust, recommending (and affiliate-linking to) products in semi-luxury categories is a lucrative business!
Don't ignore survivorship bias.
> Wirecutter is a cash cow for the Times
Wikipedia says the Wirecutter implemented a metered paywall a few years ago as additional source of financing. With the weight of the Times behind them they branched into other areas like podcasts and partnerships with countless other sites. This fits well into what I said in my earlier comment. Running this kind of business is hard and someone with deeper pockets will find an interest in it.
Just a few years after founding and shortly before selling to the Times for 1 year's worth of revenue, Wirecutter trialed a deal with Amazon for sponsored posts, along with exploring other revenue streams [2] like kickbacks.
> if you can keep people's trust
Trustworthiness and money don't always go hand in hand. Facebook is a cash cow and keeps people's trust as they keep coming back. Would you call it a trusted source of information? I remember the pendulum swinging against Wirecutter shortly after the sale. And plenty of reports since [1][2].
Rtings is the authoritative source for reviewing anything with a screen and they struggled financially, having to implement a subscription model.
And at the end of the day, taking Wirecutter as an indisputably trustworthy authority in consumer reviews, anyone else on the market has to compete with them with 2 possible options when reviews go head to head: agree and just be an echo, or contradict and go against the indisputably trustworthy authority. Talk about being between a rock and a hard place.
Maybe I'm, too cynical but the rug has been pulled from under me too many times to count by things that started out trustworthy than found the need or just the allure of money. With the internet only becoming more trustworthy over these past years I'm sure I have no reason to worry, right?
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/08/wirec...
[2] https://www.xdesk.com/wirecutter-standing-desk-review-pay-to...
Eh. I see what you mean, but I'm more optimistic about GearLab. I think Wirecutter is different for three reasons:
1. Wirecutter has to review everything. GearLab is more limited; they steer clear of non-technical clothing and their tech arm doesn't even really do camera reviews. They obviously know to avoid categories where there are established review sites that most buyers are loyal to. If Wirecutter misses a category, people will complain - that's the curse of being the "everything" site. Rtings has a similar issue.
2. Wirecutter reviewers work for the Times and are unionized; GearLab hires freelancers.
3. The Times is relying on Wirecutter (alongside Games) to prop up their journalism, which is the spiritual core of their business, and the only part that clearly contributes something to society, but struggles to make money on its own. Putting Wirecutter behind the NYT paywall makes people more likely to sign up for a NYT subscription. GearLab isn't paying for any journalists' pensions.
Wirecutter affiliate links make the Times something like $60-70 million per quarter [1].
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/06/business/media/new-york-t...
Why are you answering questions for this site and pointing to their official material?
Presumably because it's a good site and the qualms people are expressing with it here have no basis in reality.
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 significant, so it fails to find the effect it implies to have found.
I strongly believe that there's a lot of paid product placement and paid political talking points on Reddit, so it's actually remarkable that this (LLM-generated) article fails to find it. I suspect it's just bad design.
If you're already spending money on tokens, there's a very simple experiment you could do instead: just pay one of these companies to position a made-up product and see what they do.
some people will expend a surprising amount of effort to justify their personal choices
at this point astroturfing is a given... corporations do it, governments do it, individuals do it... anonymous content in aggregate can not be relied on
Reddit added an option to hide your post history, making it harder to figure out if the account is a bot.
Sounds interesting but I find it kind of annoying the github source either has been nuked or never existed in the first place.
A large portion of the "New LLM release" story comments here on HN also appear to be astroturfing ... would be interesting to see a correlation of comment sentiment to IP-derived geographic location!
Yes.
I do it locally to nudge political discourse. Doesn't take much to sway a lot of people.
I'm glad I agree with what I'm doing because its effectiveness is terrifying.
IIRC the Reddit founders used bots for initial traffic to skip over the cold start problem. I feel like this bit of lore is actually pretty terrible but is treated as a nice anecdote because it worked.
I think due to the outsized power ads companies (and even those that aren't purely ads founded, like FB, but for which the model of profitability was always ads on the long-horizon) have over the current internet this won't ever go away, in fact it will only keep getting worse, hand in hand with the augmented agentic workflows.
An id-with-options-for-anonymity solution would go a long way but no one is remotely interested in that because it would just crater all these companies valuations if you figured out 60k subscribers were actually 45k bots, and 80% comments were automated agentic replies.
I had launched almost 10 years ago a campaign in indiegogo and immediately got spammed with people selling marketing campaigns, I launched a few days ago one in gamefound and the same happened. Without it, or you investing on your own marketing campaigns it's just impossible to get any traction of sorts, unless you have a network of contacts that themselves can reach organically other people, and the same for other things, like bootstrapping an online social platform. It's almost as if it's a "cost of doing business".
Most of these marketers themselves have automated funnels, now all using agents, there's a lot of tell-tales on the messages you receive and then on the follow ups too - sometimes to the point that the messages just miss completely things you made clear just on the previous message and just follow a funnel to get you through the door. At a certain threshold or when told explicitly sometimes a human goes into the loop, but 2 messages in it's like they reset back to factory defaults...
Why would I trust an article written in Claudish with a broken link to a github repo?
Ads, scams, rage bait, trolls... The internet is pretty broken for almost all sites that pretends to carry conversations between actual people.
I don't understand why so many people and companies feel the need to just spam reviews, SEO and questionable ads. It's like almost no one has the idea that may we start with a good product, then we'll tell people about it. It's always a question of what you can have produced cheaply in China and how do we then trick people into buying it.
As it stand you can pretty much assume that if it's advertised, or is promoted on social media, it's going to be a shit product.
To some extend I'd exclude certain types of YouTube reviews, because they frequently aren't paid by the manufacturer and making a video with real people and real data is to expensive to waste on scams.
>s between actual people.
Only for arbitrary people. Gate kept or low member count communities that exist to facilitate a discussion between appliance repair men, literature enthusiasts, fly tying hobbyists or owners of a particular model of vehicle are largely alive and well (unfortunately a lot of them moved from forums to facebook, but still.
> Unfortunately, advertisers are getting smarter and using bots...
I honestly thought this was a nag asking me to turn off my ad blocker!
Perhaps we can envision a future in which we analyze Reddit data not according to all the positive things people say about a product, but according to the negative things being said.
Shilling can’t prevent dissatisfied customers from voicing their opinions in a properly moderated subreddit, and astroturfing to spread misinformation about a competitor makes companies much more vulnerable to litigation.
That this was posted by someone who's only here to post his own sites and those sites have never been submitted by another person is like performance art.
anyone who ever says no to this hasn't ever posted on reddit.
All this time I've been oblivious to this. To this day I still write site:reddit.com in my searches to get information from people. SMH.
Per Reddit itself and Google, astroturfing is especially bad in political subreddits. Attempting to shape public perception is a big business.
Am I the only person who thinks many of the various "I don't touch code anymore" comments here come from bots?
I think a lot of them came from people who never touched code in the first place.
Isn't there? Especially when crypto was booming, that kind of opinion manipulation definitely existed to deceive people. I've actually seen it in freelance requests before too, and most of the time they run it through phone farms.
I've also heard it happens in some games as well, but either way, the one I can say for certain is crypto.
Yes, yes it does. There's astroturfing of every variety: political, brands, image rehab, you name it.
Just look at how often Bill Gates gets glazing articles posted which receive suspicious rankings. None of the comments mention the Epstein-sized elephants in the room.
Politics is even worse, and it's useless as a platform for taking political temperature. Numerous companies openly admit to this activity and Reddit has never commented on this practice.
reddit is an echo chamber when it comes to most topics, and politics are probably the worst of all. Back in the Gamergate days it was all MRA types (throwback!); in 2016 it became 50% Bernie and 50% Trump; these days it's mostly mainstream liberal. I assume the actual political makeup of the user base hasn't changed that much in that time, but people who obsessively refresh and upvote/downvote posts based on their politics have an outsize impact on what comes to the top. I'm sure there's some impact from automated astroturfing, but humans drive it.
No serious person would ever suggest using it to take the "political temperature" of society at large. It's about as useful as Nextdoor for that.
Damn I haven't seen a Bill Gates conspiracy theory in a long time. What a throwback
Absolutely. For example, the blatant ads for Stake https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/1s3yscz/how_reddit_us...
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A truly load-bearing article that reassures us that Reddit is not astroturfed.
Of course, AI coding agents, which the author works on, would also never be astroturfed on Reddit!
You know, astroturfing on Reddit also comes from long time accounts with moderator support.
I don't think the article is reassuring it is not astroturfed? He studied only a small case, for a brand on the smaller side, and found significant amount of bots.
If you see a single sheep on an island, it is safe to assume there is more than one sheep living on the island.
> Adding "reddit" to a knife search still gets you humans, mostly. For a couple of brands, a quarter to a third of the buying advice comes from accounts that mostly recommend that brand. Whether those are fans or paid, I do not know, and after reading their histories I lean toward fans and hold the lean loosely.
Very long write up to unconfidently say I don’t know.
For a while people were suggesting that adding "reddit" to queries for shopping advice was a real way to get uncensored/genuine commentary and reviews.
Even the first time I saw the advice I was skeptical, reddit is rife with bots, and fake comments/posts. It's been well-known for almost a decade at this point that there are multiple individuals moderating many communities there, and that kinda power is rife for abuse.
I've been a sporadic reddit reader/poster for a few years, but this past month I've had enough and deleted my account. The main draw was niche-topics, but they've been overrun with AI slop, and even the local communities have become echo-chambers rather than posts of new bands, events, etc. The local newspaper can tell me about those already.