I’m not a heavy Reddit user but I’ve noticed a sharp increase in comment spam disguised as real discussion.

I think the turning point was when they allowed accounts to hide their comment history. Before, when you could click on an account and read all of their other comments it was easy to tell when an account only existed for fake conversations about a product they were spamming.

Now the spam accounts hide their comment history so they can do nothing but spam similar comments all over Reddit and walk the line where it’s not obvious if any single comment is spam or an one off comment from someone trying to be helpful.

Users are using Google and other services to find their other posts and post warnings, but it takes so much more effort now.

https://old.reddit.com/r/self/comments/1s3yscz/how_reddit_us...

This has been rampant on reddit for years.

This is a direct result of pretty much all of the LLMs using Reddit as a training tool. People are selling GEO services with reddit spam being a big part of that.