I think it is becoming quite clear that Reddit is the most astroturfed place on the internet -- gaming Reddit for positive feedback and reviews is a lot easier and less painful than trying to game Google's results directly -- and there's an entire industry building up around it. Something to think about if you add "site:reddit" to product searches.
I think it's also pretty much impossible to avoid this.
As soon as something has enough trustworthiness and user base for product recommendations. It has value to the advertisers and they will "mine* out that value until it's exhausted.
Reddit has always been heavily astroturfed (cough, Eglin Airforce Base), but since the mod blowup last year it almost feels like the bots and astroturfers are outnumbering the real users. The site has become unusable.
They are gonna get sued if they try this on LinkedIn or Tiktok for sure. Circumventing those captchas (everyone who's tried scraping Tiktok before knows what I'm talking about, even in headed environments) is almost certainly illegal.
Oh, absolutely. Never heard of the LinkedIn scraping lawsuit before? They are totally willing to throw their lawyers at you for using the platform in a way it's not intended to be used in
More importantly I see this as a band aid for underperforming products. The startup space struggles with this already, but instead of focusing on the product deficiencies and building something people want now we just enable some SaaS that pretends to be a human spewing marketing masquerading as a legitimate human's perspective. Talk about a bottom of the barrel approach. The Internet is going to need to go insular and back to niche forums that are under lock and key from this toxicity.
Pretty much. Trust has always been a problem, especially on the internet, but people like this guy are going to simply ruin the public, free internet and destroy the very idea of crowd source.
We are going to resurrect the elite class of editors so we can ever find out any information that is not totally corrupt.
Back in the day you would read something on the internet and wonder if it was a cat that was typing it, or a human. Now people feel offended it might be an AI typing it directed by a cat or a human
It's weird to try to imagine why he thought showing it here would get anything other than hate. It's like saying he found a way to smear poop on everyone's doorknobs.
> that will directly make my own, personal life worse.
Have you considered doing things that will make your life better? I use ReplyGuy to save myself like 30-60 hours monthly on each of my projects and it has made my life better.
At the expense of making everyone else's life slightly worse through bogus product recommendations and slowly degrading the quality of the medium you advertise in? Guys, have you considered taking from the commons? There's all free stuff there, it's benefited me personally.
I actually had to ask myself whether this was written by a real person or by a bot like ReplyGuy. I've never felt the need to ask that before. I hate this.
I thought I was so obviously over-the-top mimicking the bot from the subject link that it would be obvious satire (and thus point out how easily something could be done on HN)… But I’m not so sure…
Heh, I was so paranoid about the bot thing that I didn't even consider it could have been sarcasm. I even checked your last couple posts on HN after reading your comment just to see if your account had a history and if it was all shilling for products.
I'm convinced you're a real person. Sorry for not catching on to the sarcasm.
You sound like a mechanic who dumps his used motor oil down a storm drain to avoid the expense of proper disposal. Yeah, it's good for you, but it pollutes the environment for everyone.
You are polluting the digital commons. You should be ashamed of yourself.
The user who posted this is perfectly legit, and not the person who created the site. As their follow-up comment makes clear -- they weren't doing this to promote the site, but to warn others of its existence:
Pretty sure this has been happening for a long time now. Before AI/automation, they would just hire people in developing countries to manually promote products on the platform. You can take some steps to mitigate this: for example clicking on the username of people recommending products and seeing if they promote the products more than once or have a history of being active on other unrelated subs. Although they also manipulate that sometimes (purchasing old/actual user accounts), but there's not much else you can do at this point. Even the old word-of-mouth method is more unreliable these days because people just echo what they saw on social media.
Pricing is interesting: They have a free tier that provides 2 replies/month, next tier is $10/month for 20 replies/month. This is probably still more cost effective than replies done by humans though I understand that LLM API access can get pretty expensive at the moment, what models are they using?
Other than that it seems pretty cool, and ReplyGuy is a perfect name lol.
Yea this is gross. Even the examples they provide are gross. Someone struggling with debt, and a some robot gives them the impression that there's a person that cares and, by the way, you should spend your money on this service. Ewww.
Slow though the FTC is I imagine that a bare minimum requirement for products like this will be disclosure that they've been written by an AI bot
Which will (a) Give consumers proper disclosure and (b) Give platforms the opportunity to filter or address as they like
Prior enforcement engagements like the CAN SPAM act etc didn't eliminate bad actors, but massively curtailed legitimate business participation in these areas
Many countries regulate fraudulent advertising, and the person _paying_ for it would generally be liable (along with the person providing it, usually).
You've created a disgusting thing that makes everyone's lives worse. And you'll justify it to yourself with the old "if I didn't do it someone else would have". Despicable.
As hard as it would be to enforce, I wonder whether this runs afoul the FTC rules regarding advertising/disclosure. It does seem to me like this qualifies as a “Robo-influencer” and thus should adhere to the guidelines the FTC put out [0].
The link to the "Stealth Marketing" site in the site footer looks like they don't care about adhering to any guidelines...which I guess should make the FTC's case clear-cut!
- Painkiller Ideas and Replyguy both use Azure DNS and Microsoft hosting which means the footer probably contains the creators' other projects
- while stealth.marketing is hosted very differently, it uses partially the same and partially very similar CSS
- stealth.marketing says it's "powered by reddit" with the reddit logo which I'm sure the Reddit PR department will absolutely hate when finding out, given they ruin the platform (probably not even using the API)
Looks like there's an easy way to make this all collapse
I was upset about it at the time, but last year's round of hostility to users that caused me to delete my reddit/twitter accounts when 3rd party clients were lost was a blessing.
You're a horrible person. Your mother should be crying. You're the vanguard of a trend that will damage the mental health of millions or billions, especially if taken at all farther.
87 comments
[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 157 ms ] threadI think it is becoming quite clear that Reddit is the most astroturfed place on the internet -- gaming Reddit for positive feedback and reviews is a lot easier and less painful than trying to game Google's results directly -- and there's an entire industry building up around it. Something to think about if you add "site:reddit" to product searches.
As soon as something has enough trustworthiness and user base for product recommendations. It has value to the advertisers and they will "mine* out that value until it's exhausted.
Yuck
We are going to resurrect the elite class of editors so we can ever find out any information that is not totally corrupt.
Okay, sorry there, I couldn't even finish that. Laughing too hard.
Reddit.
Credibility.
I know, I know, too much for me too.
They're on the frontpage so it's definitely worth it.
There are always entire comment chains talking about how important it is to invest wisely and then plugging some random person's name.
The only way this ends is with either requiring strict identity verification for posting, or giving up on comments altogether.
You should not be showing this as if you are proud on HN. You should hide it and whimper in shame.
Have you considered doing things that will make your life better? I use ReplyGuy to save myself like 30-60 hours monthly on each of my projects and it has made my life better.
Classic Reddit joke: “Did you know that the ducks at the park are free? You can just take them!”
I'm convinced you're a real person. Sorry for not catching on to the sarcasm.
You are polluting the digital commons. You should be ashamed of yourself.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40236860
As such the post is unfortunately all too relevant, and shouldn't have been flagged.
Other than that it seems pretty cool, and ReplyGuy is a perfect name lol.
> We are currently adding support for Hacker News
They could be any one of us!
Which will (a) Give consumers proper disclosure and (b) Give platforms the opportunity to filter or address as they like
Prior enforcement engagements like the CAN SPAM act etc didn't eliminate bad actors, but massively curtailed legitimate business participation in these areas
[0] https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/plain-language/10...
- Painkiller Ideas and Replyguy both use Azure DNS and Microsoft hosting which means the footer probably contains the creators' other projects
- while stealth.marketing is hosted very differently, it uses partially the same and partially very similar CSS
- stealth.marketing says it's "powered by reddit" with the reddit logo which I'm sure the Reddit PR department will absolutely hate when finding out, given they ruin the platform (probably not even using the API)
Looks like there's an easy way to make this all collapse
> If Hacker News hates your product, that's what I call product market fit.
> When Dropbox launched, they got tons of comments like this:
> [Screenshot of a HN comment - you know the one]
> Hackers can build things themselves and therefore underestimate the power of productizing something. Our launch was met with the same skepticism.
I guess we're all underestimating the power of productizing… spam bots?
https://twitter.com/ReplyGuyApp/status/1773132507153654123
The original hacker did sell stuffs too but they mostly follow the path of introducing computing and products of computing to the mass market.
This one? It's just an ads grab.
Probably not, but we can hope.
I wonder what they could mean by "high quality" here. And I'm guessing/hoping that these accounts won't stay "high quality" for long...