Reddit says its "communities are naturally commercial."
Reddit, AI spam bots explore new ways to show ads in your feed
#For sale: Ads that look like legit Reddit user posts
"We highly recommend only mentioning the brand name of your product since mentioning links in posts makes the post more likely to be reported as spam and hidden. We find that humans don't usually type out full URLs in natural conversation and plus, most Internet users are happy to do a quick Google Search," ReplyGuy's website reads.
And now ensues an arms race, in which advertisers attempt to plant adverts into comment sections naturally, while reddit attempts to stop them doing it for free.
No company with shareholders can ever avoid enshittification.
Next stop: advertisers pushing product placement into generative images, and generative images with product placement littering image searches. It's a pandora's box we can't close