(InvestigateTV) — BACKLINKO shows that Reddit has 97.2 million daily active users who create all kinds of posts, including reviews of various products.
But WalletHub Managing Editor John Kiernan warned that not every recommendation is trustworthy.
“People are going to Reddit expecting an honest, unbiased recommendation and they’re getting spam without realizing it.” Kiernan said.
He calls these posts “marketing spam” – when a user recommends a product but stands to profit if someone makes a purchase through their link.
“They go and post another comment to get it approved by moderators and they go back and edit it and add links in it,” he said.
Kiernan explained that once their link is posted, anyone who clicks on it and makes a purchase will earn the poster a share of the sale.
“So, if someone buys this $678 standing desk on Amazon, the person who posted the link on Reddit is going to get a chunk of it,” Kiernan said. The person who brought the product likely doesn’t know the poster had a financial motive for their recommendation.”
He advised people to examine URLs carefully before clicking on a link to a product or service, as they often contain extra text and tracking parameters.
“That’s kind of a sign that it’s an affiliate link and it’s maybe a little bit less trustworthy,” Kiernan said. “I would also recommend checking out the people’s profiles on these sites. If you see they aren’t very active or they’re always responding at the same time or with the same type of comment.”
For those interested in a product, Kiernan recommended searching for it separately instead of clicking on links in a post.
We reached out to Reddit for comment. This is their response:
- Spam, vote manipulation, and impersonation are strictly prohibited on Reddit. You can see how we define spam here.
- We share data on the content we remove in our biannual Transparency Reports.
- · Our internal safety teams use a combination of human review and sophisticated automated tooling to detect and remove this content at scale.
- We discuss combating spam used to promote products and services here. Our internal data shows our approach is effective at removing this content.
- Another example of how our automated tools detect inauthentic behavior (such as bots) is the attempted coordinated influence operation, “Spamouflage Dragon.” As a result of our proactive detection methods, 85–90% of the content Spamouflage accounts posted on Reddit never reached real redditors, and mods removed the remaining 10-15%.
- In 2023, our team launched a new detection method to more decisively predict whether an account is exhibiting human or bot-like behavior. This led to identifying at least an additional 2 million spam accounts and actioning 3x more spam accounts within 60 seconds of posting or commenting.
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