Moderators can't fix what Reddit's built to exploit

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1

The astroturfing isn’t the problem. It’s the symptom. Reddit made communities profitable for brands the moment they decided organic posts ranking in Google was a feature, not a bug. Now you’ve got bots gaming subreddits because subreddits are literally valuable ad space that just happens to have humans. A moderator can delete the spray bottle shill post, but the next one lands tomorrow because the incentive is still there and it’s not hidden. You can’t patch your way out of a business model.

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source: Can Reddit fend off a new wave of AI SEO spam? | The Verge

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Detection tools have the same incentive problem though.

Reddit’s not going to build a bot detector good enough to actually hurt engagement numbers, because engagement is the metric that makes the SEO traffic valuable in the first place. Nobody’s threat modeled this from Reddit’s side. They don’t want a fix, they want plausible deniability.