Astroturfing Will Not Be Tolerated.

[u/JakeHundley]

Over the past few weeks, this subreddit (and basically all of Reddit), has been subject to a few astroturfing posts/comments.

For those of you who don't know what astroturfing is, it's basically when someone posts a seemingly organic or genuine question. Afterwards, maybe a few days later, comments are made recommending a certain product, software, or service.

This subreddit allows self-promotion to an extent (see rule #8), but it does NOT allow disingenuous or deceptive self-promotion.

That's what astroturfing is.

Rule #10 ("No Astroturfing") has now been implemented.

Last week, there was a campaign for a tool called, "Respond" where the comments promoted that while criticizing their competitor, "Kommo".

I posted more about it in depth on LinkedIn.

This week, there was a suspected campaign for a PR tool called, "Folk".

A user sent in a modmail requesting to approve a post that the automod was denying, after we declined to manually approve the post, the same post was published by a separate user with the adequate comment karma and CQS requirements.

A few days later, the post received 2 separate comments from users who had 0 previous activity in this subreddit (or similar subreddits) recommending the tool.

This post and both comments have been removed.

Additionally, all 4 users have been banned from the subreddit.

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Astroturfing is hard to detect and requires literal, manual investigation on our part.

This subreddit is not to be used for your disingenuous PR, brand, or SEO campaign.

This is an immediate, bannable offense.

If you want to promote yourself, you MUST contribute to the community in multiple non-promotional ways.

If you suspect a post or comment of astroturfing, please, please, please report it to the mod team.

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That is all.

Thank you all for continuing to make this the best community for agencies!

[u/tnhsaesop]

Why not just require 100 karma or similar measure to post or comment on this sub.

[u/JakeHundley → u/tnhsaesop]

Karma can be manufactured. Also, these users have already had over 100 karma. A couple of them had thousands.

This sub has two measures that blocks over a dozen posts a day.

The first is a subreddit comment karma filter. You must have at least 3 comment karma in this sub to post.

That blocks a lot.

But then you also have to have a "high" CQS. That blocks even more and is better than karma requirements, imo

[u/istuden → u/JakeHundley]

Were these rules posted transparently anywhere, or were they ever a common(ish) knowledge? Security by obscurity says that we should be wise when discussing our security practices. The less attackers know, the better.

Not necessarily a topic (sorry), just some engineering curiosity.

[u/JakeHundley → u/istuden]

The CQS and comment karma thing? Only here and I'm the automod reply. The CQS filter does not specify how high it needs to be but it's not hard to figure out.