Yes, yes it does. There's astroturfing of every variety: political, brands, image rehab, you name it.
Just look at how often Bill Gates gets glazing articles posted which receive suspicious rankings. None of the comments mention the Epstein-sized elephants in the room.
Politics is even worse, and it's useless as a platform for taking political temperature. Numerous companies openly admit to this activity and Reddit has never commented on this practice.
> REDCmts sells one Reddit comment for $9.99 and 100 for $699.99, from what it calls "real, aged accounts", and shows a gallery of brand mentions it says it delivered. Soar says its accounts are "aged and manually warmed" for weeks before a single brand mention. Bazzly advertises automated replies to every post that looks like someone shopping.
Why doesn't Reddit make sure that shilling is disallowed by their ToS, and then sue these companies and all their customers?
Because it would be a monumental waste of time and money. Even if you could track down the overseas operators doing this, there's not much damages you could sue for, and alternatives would just pop up in their place.
Because the only metric that matters for social media is engagement, and a war against active account, no matter the purpose, would make that line go down.
Also, shill accounts prove to advertisers that the platform works to make money. That’s the whole reason Reddit exists.
Generally you can't stop them, they're shell companies run from countries that don't care. You spend a lot of time and effort trying to block one and they just spin up another, it's asymmetrical in that you expend more resources to stop it.
reddit wants engagement numbers to grow either way, so that disincentivizes it further
Based on what happens everywhere, they're paying reddit for leniency. Pink contracts have been around since Uunet was offering them to Usenet spammers.
When I did dev relations I just messaged people who had decent accounts and an email or other contact and offered them some freebies on our platform, which did lead to a decent number of them posting about it, like I solicited ~200 accounts and had ~10 comment or post about it in the next month. Maybe some kind of service where people could opt into offers?
It's extremely unrealistic to sue someone for violating your Terms of Service. It's not impossible (you'd need to sue them for a breach of contract and demonstrate clear financial damages), but the primary solution is to just refuse to provide them service.
I gave up on any product related reviews on Reddit a decade ago. It can still be useful for guides that may describe what type of products you should look into, e.g., woodworking tools, skincare, etc.
For product reviews, I've been using GearLab (https://www.techgearlab.com/) for years with pretty reliable results. I have no affiliation with them.
What's their business model? A priori, I don't trust them because there's no reason for them to give out all that information for free. I assume it's a affiliate marketing / referral revenue stream? I suppose it could be fair within those parameters, but it would mean there's no incentive for them to test products that don't have such a program.
I pay for Consumer Reports, since you actually need a paid subscription to access the data, which makes sense structurally. I don't really know if the reviews are any good, though I've been relatively happy with it. I also paid a subscription for an independent supplement testing lab, but I forget what it's called at the moment.
GearLab is legit. Their outdoor sibling (https://www.outdoorgearlab.com/) is also great. I think the whole concept of "best" in a product category is fairly flawed, but they do it well; their individual product reviews are even better.
I wasn’t aware of GearLab, thanks for the tip. I will say, though I took a look and it seems like they heavily use Amazon links so they suffer from similar downsides as Wirecutter.
Amazon nowadays is such a crapshoot. A link to a product isn’t reliable. The price could be different than what the review stated, and the link might be for an listing that shows as out of stock. I think GearLab tries to fix this by giving you a link to search results on Amazon instead, but in some ways that’s worse. In the couple of links I tried the reviewed product wasn’t the top result so now it’s up to you to decide which of the links is the real one.
That loses some of the value prop for me because part of what I want from a service like this is to give me a link to a legit product listing. That’s not GearLab’s fault, Amazon makes that very difficult, but it still reduces the utility for me. That said it’s better than nothing which just points to the sad state of affairs in e-commerce today.
Edit: it looks like at least some of their links take you directly to the product page. Not sure why some of them take you to a search results page instead, but my guess is it’s an issue with expiring links.
> Adding "reddit" to a knife search still gets you humans, mostly. For a couple of brands, a quarter to a third of the buying advice comes from accounts that mostly recommend that brand. Whether those are fans or paid, I do not know, and after reading their histories I lean toward fans and hold the lean loosely.
Very long write up to unconfidently say I don’t know.
For a while people were suggesting that adding "reddit" to queries for shopping advice was a real way to get uncensored/genuine commentary and reviews.
Even the first time I saw the advice I was skeptical, reddit is rife with bots, and fake comments/posts. It's been well-known for almost a decade at this point that there are multiple individuals moderating many communities there, and that kinda power is rife for abuse.
I've been a sporadic reddit reader/poster for a few years, but this past month I've had enough and deleted my account. The main draw was niche-topics, but they've been overrun with AI slop, and even the local communities have become echo-chambers rather than posts of new bands, events, etc. The local newspaper can tell me about those already.
That this was posted by someone who's only here to post his own sites and those sites have never been submitted by another person is like performance art.
I think the items listed under "What astroturfing would look like" were a pretty narrow scope. If I were designing a ~spam system~ astroturfing solution, I'd engineer out these four simple indicators as soon as I could.
* Those accounts naming one brand almost every time they name any.
* Thin accounts: few comments, low scores, no real standing in the subreddit.
* Young accounts, or accounts with histories that are hidden or wiped.
* Links to a store or an affiliate page.
It may be that the people most likely to blindly follow astroturfed suggestions don’t pay attention to these indicators. In which case volume is more important than camouflage.
Niche topics like linux feel somewhat safe from bots. But the last time I checked the more popular subs.. yikes..
When I see 2-weeks old account "Incendiary-Leg-8592" responding to a post by another weeks old user "Pivotal-Kitchen-0498", I have a hard time believing they are humans behind them.
It would be trivial for spammers to at least use different pattern. I am afraid they keep to the default, cause real users do the same. I am not surprised, the chance of colliding with other user login, on registration, on such old and popular website is high.
Maybe some niche subs are safe-ish from targeted bots, but I'm seeing some niche subs constantly hit by bots who misunderstand what the sub is actually about and post something that maybe matches the words of the sub's name ... but not the actual intent of the sub. Basically lost bots, and they don't stop.
Also the software / programming subs are just spam hell now.
Doesn't even have to be bots. Just dumb humans who see a sub name like 'fostering' and don't bother to read far enough to see 'CHILDREN' so they post about giving away a dog.
In the electrician subreddits, it’s painfully obvious whenever something is a bot, since… nobody ever really has anything terribly positive to say about any new brands. There are a few established brands with respect like Fluek, Knipex, and Klein. But it’s mostly a community of haters.
Periodically an account shows up promoting something asinine and it sticks out like a sore thumb.
Do you use the "old" reddit view? Reddit introduced display names separate from account usernames, but old reddit doesn't show them. The user that shows up as Incendiary-Leg-8592 on old Reddit might have simply accepted reddit's suggestion when they created their account, and appear to everyone else (whatever the old/new reddit breakdown is) as something less spammy looking.
Assuming you do indeed still use "old" reddit, the next time you see such a comment, open their account page in a private window (or any browser that isn't logged in). They might look different to themselves and most others.
I was under the impression that those were the auto-generated usernames that reddit itself now offers (enforces?). Better to hide all the other bots, if the few humans look like bots too.
When you create an account via OAuth login (sign in with Google) you get auto-assigned a name like that without a prompt to choose your own. I suspect most new users are doing that now.
> When I see 2-weeks old account "Incendiary-Leg-8592" responding to a post by another weeks old user "Pivotal-Kitchen-0498", I have a hard time believing they are humans behind them.
One thing I found out is that normies really don't care about their usernames. They fundamentally don't understand the need for pseudonymity on the internet, so they are okay with whatever the website assigns to them.
It's just a little bit of extra friction to them to start sharing their opinions on the site.
Ads, scams, rage bait, trolls... The internet is pretty broken for almost all sites that pretends to carry conversations between actual people.
I don't understand why so many people and companies feel the need to just spam reviews, SEO and questionable ads. It's like almost no one has the idea that may we start with a good product, then we'll tell people about it. It's always a question of what you can have produced cheaply in China and how do we then trick people into buying it.
As it stand you can pretty much assume that if it's advertised, or is promoted on social media, it's going to be a shit product.
To some extend I'd exclude certain types of YouTube reviews, because they frequently aren't paid by the manufacturer and making a video with real people and real data is to expensive to waste on scams.
Only for arbitrary people. Gate kept or low member count communities that exist to facilitate a discussion between appliance repair men, literature enthusiasts, fly tying hobbyists or owners of a particular model of vehicle are largely alive and well (unfortunately a lot of them moved from forums to facebook, but still.
I'm on several email lists that serve communities like this. Email lists are unreasonably good for this sort of thing and it's too bad they fell out of favor.
Isn't there? Especially when crypto was booming, that kind of opinion manipulation definitely existed to deceive people. I've actually seen it in freelance requests before too, and most of the time they run it through phone farms.
I've also heard it happens in some games as well, but either way, the one I can say for certain is crypto.
My impression is that this doesn't show anything. It essentially implies that brand loyalty is equivalent to paid astroturfing, but if you've been around hobby communities on the internet, you know that a lot of people are just brand blowhards. And in any case, by its own admission, none of the results in this article are statistically significant, so it fails to find the effect it implies to have found.
I strongly believe that there's a lot of paid product placement and paid political talking points on Reddit, so it's actually remarkable that this (LLM-generated) article fails to find it. I suspect it's just bad design.
If you're already spending money on tokens, there's a very simple experiment you could do instead: just pay one of these companies to position a made-up product and see what they do.
I don't have good suggestions on what would improve the design while staying with the general approach, but I imagine reporting a "likely not significant" could have at least be improved to a "proven to be not significant" null result by adding the "obvious" control group. Just check how "unlikely" mentions of common memes and catchphrases compare to those brands. Are there non-brand mentions that are distributed similar to the brand mentions, showcasing that these numbers really do not mean much either way?
A large portion of the "New LLM release" story comments here on HN also appear to be astroturfing ... would be interesting to see a correlation of comment sentiment to IP-derived geographic location!
Perhaps we can envision a future in which we analyze Reddit data not according to all the positive things people say about a product, but according to the negative things being said.
Shilling can’t prevent dissatisfied customers from voicing their opinions in a properly moderated subreddit, and astroturfing to spread misinformation about a competitor makes companies much more vulnerable to litigation.
IIRC the Reddit founders used bots for initial traffic to skip over the cold start problem. I feel like this bit of lore is actually pretty terrible but is treated as a nice anecdote because it worked.
I think due to the outsized power ads companies (and even those that aren't purely ads founded, like FB, but for which the model of profitability was always ads on the long-horizon) have over the current internet this won't ever go away, in fact it will only keep getting worse, hand in hand with the augmented agentic workflows.
An id-with-options-for-anonymity solution would go a long way but no one is remotely interested in that because it would just crater all these companies valuations if you figured out 60k subscribers were actually 45k bots, and 80% comments were automated agentic replies.
I had launched almost 10 years ago a campaign in indiegogo and immediately got spammed with people selling marketing campaigns, I launched a few days ago one in gamefound and the same happened. Without it, or you investing on your own marketing campaigns it's just impossible to get any traction of sorts, unless you have a network of contacts that themselves can reach organically other people, and the same for other things, like bootstrapping an online social platform. It's almost as if it's a "cost of doing business".
Most of these marketers themselves have automated funnels, now all using agents, there's a lot of tell-tales on the messages you receive and then on the follow ups too - sometimes to the point that the messages just miss completely things you made clear just on the previous message and just follow a funnel to get you through the door. At a certain threshold or when told explicitly sometimes a human goes into the loop, but 2 messages in it's like they reset back to factory defaults...
Same. I got banned from mine for basically having the opinion of the median inhabitant of my city (read: politically moderate, appreciates the police, etc) which wasn’t to the liking of the mods. I gave up on that site after that. Whatever LLM I happen to be using can wade through the sewage and fish out the occasional useful info for me.
I'd say it failed in that it became an echo chamber - there isn't real public to shape. It would have probably been more effective if done a bit more subtly, which makes it scary to realize that 'effective' propaganda looks like open discourse to the average user.
Almost a bigger threat than astroturfing is biased parties, be it brands or brand managers, taking over as moderators to sway content and suppress content they don't like. Happened in a bunch of artist and influencer subs.
There have been a few cases posted to the theoryofreddit subreddit where it's obvious that there were sets of accounts which were blanket recommending specific products a disproportionate amount of time. The user accounts involved were often banned shortly afterwards (or were deleted). These were (upon examination) really obvious though, often promoting extremely niche products using very exact terminology.
This I think leads to a sort of toupee fallacy - where because you can spot the really bad examples you feel confident that you can identify the much better, more subtle examples. If an account which has only made 50 comments (all of which are very generic) makes 20 comments in a single month explicitly recommending ImageGeneratorDeluxeProMax then sure, you can guess they might not be legit. But if an account runs for a longer period of time and makes a lot more general organic contributions then if 1 in 500 of their comments are in favour of a particular product then it's harder to say.
I think ultimately account age is the only thing that will be difficult to replicate at scale. I know people buy older accounts but there is still a fundamental difficulty in obtaining them in sufficient numbers. And yes, obviously that will mean disregarding the many millions of legitimate accounts that are under (say) 2 or 3 years old. There is also no easy way of hiding accounts under a certain age when searching Reddit via Google.
By allowing uses to hide user profiles Reddit has also made detecting potentially bad actors that little bit more difficult. And from experience it feels like a large proportion of accounts now have hidden post histories. (It might also be the default for new accounts, I'm not sure).
> But if an account runs for a longer period of time and makes a lot more general organic contributions then if 1 in 500 of their comments are in favour of a particular product then it's harder to say.
I've made recommendations a lot more often than that back when I used reddit just through being active in a specific niche-ish subreddit and regularly answering questions with answers that end up saying 'buy [well-known good product that solves this exact problem you want solved]'. Then again, my account was several years old by that point, and I was recommending probably 4-5~ different products depending on the question, all from different sellers, not to mention that I'd answer all kinds of different questions, building goodwill and recognition, so accusing me of being a bot (or just a human who has a financial interest in promoting certain products) probably wouldn't do much, but if you want assume ill-will, it'd be really hard to truly disprove that kind of accusation.
I suppose it depends on what the level of proof you need for your purposes. If someone is promoting Sony products at what feels like disproportionate rates then I don't necessarily want the person banned, but it would be useful to just filter that person out.
There's an additional problem that if an increasing number of people are getting their search results via AI summaries, the AI fetch bot is obviously including all this astroturfing.
It's often more useful to think about incentives than try to look for evidence. Even before AI is was relatively well known that "google is dead" and you couldn't research products using google because it was all just SEO slop, so instead people were googling "X product reddit" for recommendations on like menswear, or tools or whatever they were thinking about buying. And you just think to yourself, well yeah, if I were trying to drive sales for my brand, I would be astro-turfing on reddit. And what's the incentive that reddit has to stop this happening? They don't really sell effective ads, so it's not competition, it drives engagment, and the people really responsible for stopping this (if anyone is) are the moderators, who are unpaid and so are eminently bribe-able.
Everyone understands that pretty girl on instagram who has 300,000 followers is getting paid to show that make up in her stories, why on earth would you think the guy with 300,000 karma posting his fits on /r/malefashionadvice isn't getting the same?
I agree one should be suspicious by default but the two scenarios are a bit different. Having 300k followers is an audience which an advertiser would definitely pay to access. Having 300k karma doesn't mean that anyone will listen to your next post any more than anyone else. It might prove you are "good at Reddit" in some sense (or at least, heavily invested in posting there).
There are probably others who think those comments come from bots.
Many long-tenured blog authors claim they don't touch code anymore as well. I think that lends credibility to the veracity of the claim, as shocking as it is to you as an individual.
> And here's something I found extremely interesting. On the original post, a commentor noticed a strange detail. All of these posts use either the Cyrillic letter "a'' or ''e'' in the word Stake. So aesthetically it looks the same as a normal A or E figure, except its technically not recognized as the normal letter A or E.
> Why do this? Well, it's likely this is done as a means of circumnavigating some subreddits filters to ban mentioning of gambling. The word Stake has likely been filtered out of some subs or mentions of gambling outright banned, and this is a way around it. I noticed too when you utilize Ctrl + F, you cannot find the word "Stake" when searching for it on these posts, due to how these figures are considered different.
I saw the comment you linked a while ago and looked for some of the phrases on Google and turned up five or six hits before getting bored; there were a lot more in the search results that I never checked. This was also around the time that Kick was showing up everywhere because they had been paying for their clips to appear on other sites.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 69.6 ms ] threadOf course, AI coding agents, which the author works on, would also never be astroturfed on Reddit!
You know, astroturfing on Reddit also comes from long time accounts with moderator support.
Just look at how often Bill Gates gets glazing articles posted which receive suspicious rankings. None of the comments mention the Epstein-sized elephants in the room.
Politics is even worse, and it's useless as a platform for taking political temperature. Numerous companies openly admit to this activity and Reddit has never commented on this practice.
Why doesn't Reddit make sure that shilling is disallowed by their ToS, and then sue these companies and all their customers?
I've seen cases where the admins delete comments that talk about the issue
Also, shill accounts prove to advertisers that the platform works to make money. That’s the whole reason Reddit exists.
True, but what if a third party existed to measure and compare other metrics that users would actually care about across popular platforms?
reddit wants engagement numbers to grow either way, so that disincentivizes it further
For product reviews, I've been using GearLab (https://www.techgearlab.com/) for years with pretty reliable results. I have no affiliation with them.
I pay for Consumer Reports, since you actually need a paid subscription to access the data, which makes sense structurally. I don't really know if the reviews are any good, though I've been relatively happy with it. I also paid a subscription for an independent supplement testing lab, but I forget what it's called at the moment.
Amazon nowadays is such a crapshoot. A link to a product isn’t reliable. The price could be different than what the review stated, and the link might be for an listing that shows as out of stock. I think GearLab tries to fix this by giving you a link to search results on Amazon instead, but in some ways that’s worse. In the couple of links I tried the reviewed product wasn’t the top result so now it’s up to you to decide which of the links is the real one.
That loses some of the value prop for me because part of what I want from a service like this is to give me a link to a legit product listing. That’s not GearLab’s fault, Amazon makes that very difficult, but it still reduces the utility for me. That said it’s better than nothing which just points to the sad state of affairs in e-commerce today.
Edit: it looks like at least some of their links take you directly to the product page. Not sure why some of them take you to a search results page instead, but my guess is it’s an issue with expiring links.
Very long write up to unconfidently say I don’t know.
Even the first time I saw the advice I was skeptical, reddit is rife with bots, and fake comments/posts. It's been well-known for almost a decade at this point that there are multiple individuals moderating many communities there, and that kinda power is rife for abuse.
I've been a sporadic reddit reader/poster for a few years, but this past month I've had enough and deleted my account. The main draw was niche-topics, but they've been overrun with AI slop, and even the local communities have become echo-chambers rather than posts of new bands, events, etc. The local newspaper can tell me about those already.
* Those accounts naming one brand almost every time they name any. * Thin accounts: few comments, low scores, no real standing in the subreddit. * Young accounts, or accounts with histories that are hidden or wiped. * Links to a store or an affiliate page.
I honestly thought this was a nag asking me to turn off my ad blocker!
When I see 2-weeks old account "Incendiary-Leg-8592" responding to a post by another weeks old user "Pivotal-Kitchen-0498", I have a hard time believing they are humans behind them.
Also the software / programming subs are just spam hell now.
"i got tired of x so i built y" is my entire feed. none of my niches are safe. heartbreaking
Periodically an account shows up promoting something asinine and it sticks out like a sore thumb.
Word-Word-#### have become the norm ever since they've been pushing mobile users to use reddit. They also are a good source of questionable users.
Assuming you do indeed still use "old" reddit, the next time you see such a comment, open their account page in a private window (or any browser that isn't logged in). They might look different to themselves and most others.
And on new reddit you can see user names and display names even when accounts have their post/comment history hidden.
One thing I found out is that normies really don't care about their usernames. They fundamentally don't understand the need for pseudonymity on the internet, so they are okay with whatever the website assigns to them.
It's just a little bit of extra friction to them to start sharing their opinions on the site.
I don't understand why so many people and companies feel the need to just spam reviews, SEO and questionable ads. It's like almost no one has the idea that may we start with a good product, then we'll tell people about it. It's always a question of what you can have produced cheaply in China and how do we then trick people into buying it.
As it stand you can pretty much assume that if it's advertised, or is promoted on social media, it's going to be a shit product.
To some extend I'd exclude certain types of YouTube reviews, because they frequently aren't paid by the manufacturer and making a video with real people and real data is to expensive to waste on scams.
Only for arbitrary people. Gate kept or low member count communities that exist to facilitate a discussion between appliance repair men, literature enthusiasts, fly tying hobbyists or owners of a particular model of vehicle are largely alive and well (unfortunately a lot of them moved from forums to facebook, but still.
I've also heard it happens in some games as well, but either way, the one I can say for certain is crypto.
I strongly believe that there's a lot of paid product placement and paid political talking points on Reddit, so it's actually remarkable that this (LLM-generated) article fails to find it. I suspect it's just bad design.
If you're already spending money on tokens, there's a very simple experiment you could do instead: just pay one of these companies to position a made-up product and see what they do.
I don't have good suggestions on what would improve the design while staying with the general approach, but I imagine reporting a "likely not significant" could have at least be improved to a "proven to be not significant" null result by adding the "obvious" control group. Just check how "unlikely" mentions of common memes and catchphrases compare to those brands. Are there non-brand mentions that are distributed similar to the brand mentions, showcasing that these numbers really do not mean much either way?
Shilling can’t prevent dissatisfied customers from voicing their opinions in a properly moderated subreddit, and astroturfing to spread misinformation about a competitor makes companies much more vulnerable to litigation.
An id-with-options-for-anonymity solution would go a long way but no one is remotely interested in that because it would just crater all these companies valuations if you figured out 60k subscribers were actually 45k bots, and 80% comments were automated agentic replies.
I had launched almost 10 years ago a campaign in indiegogo and immediately got spammed with people selling marketing campaigns, I launched a few days ago one in gamefound and the same happened. Without it, or you investing on your own marketing campaigns it's just impossible to get any traction of sorts, unless you have a network of contacts that themselves can reach organically other people, and the same for other things, like bootstrapping an online social platform. It's almost as if it's a "cost of doing business".
Most of these marketers themselves have automated funnels, now all using agents, there's a lot of tell-tales on the messages you receive and then on the follow ups too - sometimes to the point that the messages just miss completely things you made clear just on the previous message and just follow a funnel to get you through the door. At a certain threshold or when told explicitly sometimes a human goes into the loop, but 2 messages in it's like they reset back to factory defaults...
I do it locally to nudge political discourse. Doesn't take much to sway a lot of people.
I'm glad I agree with what I'm doing because its effectiveness is terrifying.
This I think leads to a sort of toupee fallacy - where because you can spot the really bad examples you feel confident that you can identify the much better, more subtle examples. If an account which has only made 50 comments (all of which are very generic) makes 20 comments in a single month explicitly recommending ImageGeneratorDeluxeProMax then sure, you can guess they might not be legit. But if an account runs for a longer period of time and makes a lot more general organic contributions then if 1 in 500 of their comments are in favour of a particular product then it's harder to say.
I think ultimately account age is the only thing that will be difficult to replicate at scale. I know people buy older accounts but there is still a fundamental difficulty in obtaining them in sufficient numbers. And yes, obviously that will mean disregarding the many millions of legitimate accounts that are under (say) 2 or 3 years old. There is also no easy way of hiding accounts under a certain age when searching Reddit via Google.
By allowing uses to hide user profiles Reddit has also made detecting potentially bad actors that little bit more difficult. And from experience it feels like a large proportion of accounts now have hidden post histories. (It might also be the default for new accounts, I'm not sure).
I've made recommendations a lot more often than that back when I used reddit just through being active in a specific niche-ish subreddit and regularly answering questions with answers that end up saying 'buy [well-known good product that solves this exact problem you want solved]'. Then again, my account was several years old by that point, and I was recommending probably 4-5~ different products depending on the question, all from different sellers, not to mention that I'd answer all kinds of different questions, building goodwill and recognition, so accusing me of being a bot (or just a human who has a financial interest in promoting certain products) probably wouldn't do much, but if you want assume ill-will, it'd be really hard to truly disprove that kind of accusation.
There's an additional problem that if an increasing number of people are getting their search results via AI summaries, the AI fetch bot is obviously including all this astroturfing.
Everyone understands that pretty girl on instagram who has 300,000 followers is getting paid to show that make up in her stories, why on earth would you think the guy with 300,000 karma posting his fits on /r/malefashionadvice isn't getting the same?
Many long-tenured blog authors claim they don't touch code anymore as well. I think that lends credibility to the veracity of the claim, as shocking as it is to you as an individual.
> Why do this? Well, it's likely this is done as a means of circumnavigating some subreddits filters to ban mentioning of gambling. The word Stake has likely been filtered out of some subs or mentions of gambling outright banned, and this is a way around it. I noticed too when you utilize Ctrl + F, you cannot find the word "Stake" when searching for it on these posts, due to how these figures are considered different.
I saw the comment you linked a while ago and looked for some of the phrases on Google and turned up five or six hits before getting bored; there were a lot more in the search results that I never checked. This was also around the time that Kick was showing up everywhere because they had been paying for their clips to appear on other sites.
https://arctic-shift.photon-reddit.com/search
I'm sure reddit will kill it at some point like they did Reveddit and Unddit, but it works for now.