Reddit is a marketing platform. Manipulating users is it's function and purpose.

has been for a decade.

A couple years ago there was this shitty wallpaper company called Plasteur or some shit, that ran a guerilla campaign of overlaying a corner of thousands of gifs with their URL and releasing a bunch of bots that only replied to comments using gifs with the injected URL. Those bots were very hard to flag for removal because they operated mostly in the shitposting okbuddy subs, so if you called them out, you were downvoted to hell for "killing the vibe." Also the bots would block accounts that called them out so you could no longer reply to or report them.

There are also entire subs that are completely overrun with astroturfing bots, like r/malwares and r/free_vpn.

This is a problem that has been going on for years and it is magnitudes worse now than ever.

Way back in the day I was invited to a private sub that tracked various "stealth" advertising / scam / shill rings on Reddit. I guess one of the founding members noticed a comment or post of mine complaining about the very obvious behaviors I'd noticed, and turns out, there were a large number of people in this group keeping track of it.

I'm not going to bother watching a youtube video, but I have to wonder if it's pointing out the same kind of stuff we'd been noticing for well over a decade.

A YouTube video complaining about Reddit…. lol.

most notable and obvious was increasing russian propaganda bots back in '17 where the sudden rise had made the mods so overly sensitive that you are getting banned very easily. also pointing out such ragebait will get you similar astroturfing.

I don't imagine there are any online forums that aren't being manipulated by professional shills every day. I recently decided to block any community that posted anything political. The silence that has followed has been quite blissful.