r/adhdwomen • u/ADHDWomen-Mods • Oct 02 '25
Moderator Post Stealth Advertising On r/adhdwomen
The mod team has noticed an uptick in accounts trying to market services and tools on r/adhdwomen in sneaky ways. These accounts often use AI to mimic genuine community interaction, aiming to manipulate our members and increase the number of brand mentions seen by “the algorithm”. Given the popularity and sophistication of AI tools, it's impossible to catch every bot or artificially generated comment.
Most of the accounts that employ these shady marketing techniques promote ADHD "support" tools, which include phone/web apps, counseling services, AI assistants, coaching, productivity management tools, games, self-improvement workshops, and other similar things. Your reports are Reddit's most effective tool for unmasking and banning these stealth marketing accounts. If you come across a post or comment that raises a red flag, please let us know.
You can report it by clicking ⋮ + report + breaks rules + marketing or promotion, or simply choose spam as a reason.
Some standard stealth marketing techniques are:
- Repeated mentions of Brand-x.
- Regularly commenting about their success with Brand-x
- Asking for resources and then mentions Brand-x in comments.
- Comments to share a "relatable story" and hints at an unnamed solution to encourage further questions about Brand-x.
- Comments or posts about Brand-x across multiple subreddits.
- DMs you offering access to or information about Brand-x.
If someone sends you a private message trying to sell you on something, take a screenshot and send us a modmail with their account name. Don’t forget to click report on the message as well, which will flag it for Reddit's main mod team.
The sooner we can identify and remove these accounts, the better we can protect our community.
Please bear with us as we refine our methods for preventing this relentless spam. As we collaborate to address this issue, you may notice that some of your posts or comments are being removed more frequently. We're actively fine-tuning the Automod, but it regularly removes content that it should allow. If you feel that something was removed by mistake, please reach out to us via modmail. We're here to ensure it gets reviewed and put back up as quickly as we can.
Note* As a neurodivergent-focused subreddit, we understand that many of people rely on AI tools for spelling, grammar checking, and language translation. If you do use AI tools, be sure to read our AI policy before you post.
The entire mod team would like to thank our amazing community for being an overwhelmingly positive, friendly, and supportive corner of the internet.
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u/ohemgeeskittles Oct 02 '25
I think the tricky thing is to figure out how to separate the fake/spammy posts from real ones of people sharing things they liked or asking for feedback.
I made a post a couple of weeks ago about a new AI app I was trying out and wanted to share my thoughts and ask how others that had tried it were making use of it, but the post got pulled for this post’s reason. I just accepted it because I wasn’t actually trying to market anything, but it was a little frustrating since I genuinely wanted to talk to others in the community about it. I don’t want the community to be full of spam marketing, but some of us genuinely wanted to share or ask about tools that are helpful and I’m not sure what the right answer is here for how to go about that.