alt Hacker News> 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?
Replies
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.
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'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.
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
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.