alt Hacker News> 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.