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Ask HN: Does anyone use this for marketing on Reddit?

2 points by blushingboom ↗ HN
I recently discovered a website called replyhub.co that automates marketing on Reddit. Since I have potential customers on Reddit, I am considering trying it out. Has anyone else used this platform before? What are your thoughts on it?

14 comments

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pavel_lishin
> The AI that talks about your product in the best places automatically

"automates marketing" is a weird way to say "automatically spams subreddits".

Heck, I wonder if OP is actually just replyhub, testing the waters on HN.

PaulHoule
On some level I'm not really against it but boy you are very likely to get into the kind of trouble that Mickey does in The Sorcerer's Apprentice if you are not really in control of automated systems. (e.g. you can piss people off with 10 bad posts, with a machine you can really piss people off with 10,000 bad posts)

If he was good at spamming he would be generating cover traffic, that is, 80% or more of what he'd post would be just random run-of-the-mill stuff that would be average in as many ways as you can measure and only a small amount would be "money traffic."

The trouble with fields that are structureless and rapidly growing though is a lack of historical memory. People today are infuriated that their content will be "ripped off" by AI who never got mad when their content was being ripped off by Google, Baidu and such. People who see AI and think it will be great for spamming will have to learn the hard way what successful web spammers knew in 2009.

pavel_lishin
I'm against it. I don't particularly want some automated marketing broom trying to sell me things when I'm trying to talk about some fandom, or trying to troubleshoot a technical issue.
PaulHoule
It's stupid to post irrelevant spam, particularly if it is perceived as spam.

If your product is a solution for problem X, however, it's fair to join conversations where X comes up if you do it with some sensitivity. If people are bitching about your product Y online it is good business to find out and reach out to the poster to resolve their problem if at all possible and I think tooling for that kind of "social CRM" can be a good thing.

fragmede
if the technical issue is particularly novel, sure, but it probably isn't. for the majority of users who can't be bothered to read the manual and try provided troubleshooting steps, is a bot posting a copy and pasted answer really that different from a low-paid human doing the exact same? do you really need to have a human do that boring job to satisfy some weird need that it be a human doing that copy and paste?
pavel_lishin
We're not talking about a bot copying and pasting an answer, we're talking about a bot shilling advertisements for someone.
fragmede
it's a bot that auto replies. if you set the auto-reply for "can't login" or "bug feature X" then it's a bot copying and-pasting answer.
fragmede
it's a bot that auto replies. if you set the auto-reply for "can't login" or "bug feature X" then it's a bot copying and-pasting answer. an advertisement is just a particular string of text, same as an answer to some question.
pavel_lishin
> same as an answer to some question.

It's absolutely not, and it's foolish to try to treat anything online as "just a string of text", as if the actual content and intent didn't matter.

fragmede
we separate out business logic vs application logic for a reason. there's now an API call to classify the comment and then generate a relevant English response. yeah there's a difference in the English being read and generated but the underlying program looks exactly the same.
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JohnFen
One of the surest ways to get me to ignore your product forevermore is to spam online fora with advertisements for it.