Last time I read /r/funny for a period I noticed a wave of "look at what funny thing I did with these Coke bottles" posts that were so obviously part of a marketing campaign that surely reddit admins noticed it too.
I don't think they would allow that if they weren't in on it. In that case they may have even helped with the upvotes so no external service where you can easily buy votes (easily found through Google, [1]) would have been needed.
(top three search results when I googled "buy reddit votes")
Surely, given how visible such services are, monetizing reddit buy selling upvotes would be one of the first things anyone wanting to monetize reddit comes up with. The only difference to the 3rd party vote sellers is that they will have to hide it better and/or find justifications because the company itself doing it causes a bit more outrage.
I also don't think the more niche sub reddits will be (are?) safe. Anyone who wants to sell something more specialized has a target audience much better than anything Facebook can create by selecting the right subreddit, because the audience is self-selecting. Same as for the Coke campaign, since it's hard too hide what's going on from the admins they could stop much of that, so paying reddit to have your posts even boosted by them is safest for any marketer.
There's actually a good incentive for moderators to be in on this, as they aren't paid by reddit for their (in sometimes massive) unpaid labour. If a marketing company comes along and says, 'hey, you've done this so long, don't you think you should deserve some money? just let us run our campaign on your subreddit and we'll pay you!' quite a few moderators would agree. Admins might not notice.
They might not have noticed a few isolated cases, but they sure would have noticed the phenomenon as such by now. The company would have an even bigger incentive now to try to get such monetization for themselves instead of letting others make the money with their site.
Example:
Last time I read /r/funny for a period I noticed a wave of "look at what funny thing I did with these Coke bottles" posts that were so obviously part of a marketing campaign that surely reddit admins noticed it too.
I don't think they would allow that if they weren't in on it. In that case they may have even helped with the upvotes so no external service where you can easily buy votes (easily found through Google, [1]) would have been needed.
Some examples for upvote services:
- https://www.soar.sh/service/buy-reddit-upvotes/
- https://boostupvotes.com/
- https://reddit-marketing.pro/
(top three search results when I googled "buy reddit votes")
Surely, given how visible such services are, monetizing reddit buy selling upvotes would be one of the first things anyone wanting to monetize reddit comes up with. The only difference to the 3rd party vote sellers is that they will have to hide it better and/or find justifications because the company itself doing it causes a bit more outrage.
I also don't think the more niche sub reddits will be (are?) safe. Anyone who wants to sell something more specialized has a target audience much better than anything Facebook can create by selecting the right subreddit, because the audience is self-selecting. Same as for the Coke campaign, since it's hard too hide what's going on from the admins they could stop much of that, so paying reddit to have your posts even boosted by them is safest for any marketer.