Reddit SEO Is Broken: The Spam Playbook, the Risk to Brands, and What Still Works

We are talking about the crazy marketing play that is Reddit right now. We're going to talk about what companies are doing, how it is a dis how it is a disaster, how Reddit can clean it up, uh how you can stay safe even if Reddit cleans it up, and we are being joined once again by Mr. David Quaid and a new face to the podcast, Anne Smarty. Ann, welcome. Hi everyone. Thank you for having me. Before we begin, an since you are new to the show, it would be amazing if you could just share your background. Yes, sure. I am an SEO, have been an SEO since 2004, so I have seen it all. Um, I'm on Reddit for more than 10 years. I have a team who is much better at Reddit marketing because they are kind of have been active there. I was mostly there watching but I have been heavily involved in the Reddit this year. I mean since 2025 because I started my own subreddit so I could see the whole drama problems that Reddit is having from the moderator's perspective which has been a challenge a lot and we even had a call with David on that and he tried to teach me how to handle all the spam which which is getting worse and worse because a lot more marketing companies and businesses are paying attention to Reddit and with AI, it's getting out of control for sure. So, definitely seeing all of that from both marketing perspective and from moderators perspective as well. And Ann, you are you're a very well-known figure in the SEO community, too. I'm always seeing your name pop up. Um, so, thank you for coming on. And David, David, I don't know, do you have any experience with uh with Reddit marketing at all? I do. Um, I've been on Reddit for about 7 years, 8 years longer. Um, so I have quite a lot of experience. Um, and I've had a couple of different incarnations. I' I've laid Reddit marketing for a couple of different companies and um, I was I primarily spend a lot of time on the Google support forum and I just found that that was um, it wasn't a great place to be. They I don't think Google recognized the um, effort made by volunteers and supporting the community on their behalf essentially. And so I found it was much more worthwhile to do that over on Reddit. Um, and so I've built a couple of subreddits myself. Um, and I've also uh worked on moderating other some other larger Reddits. Um, so it's been very interesting. And al also for listeners who don't know, I think most listeners and and viewers know at this point, but if you don't know, Reddit is the second most clicked site in Google and the second most cited site in LLMs. So if if you can get your brand uh if you can get a post recommending your brand indexed, it is going to be very very very good for you. Don't give don't give ideas. Let's discuss how to do that properly because that's exactly the problem of Reddit at this point. its visibility and how much we've been on Reddit for 14 years as a marketing firm uh for services and we've never had so much problem with even like building transparently authentic business official visibility on Reddit because it's it's a challenge for everyone because all that spam is making our job much harder as well. Why why is it so you're okay you're doing marketing on Reddit but then the other marketers are also making things harder for you? Well because they are trying to do a shortcut. They are trying to buy posts to automate comments to and Reddit is becoming very very strict about that with all the automated filters banning new accounts. We have to take extra measures to even after registering an account, an official account for a brand, we have to take like a month or two to just make sure it's safe from automatic suspension. It it wasn't that hard even a year ago. We are discovering new and new roadblocks because Reddit is getting much more suspicious to new accounts even if they're trying to do everything right. This method of marketing is so effective, I had to make sure it wasn't against Google's rules before I kept doing it. It's a form of SEO I call compact keywords. Whereas most SEO focuses on putting up articles to answer questions, how, what, when, compact keywords focuses on putting up dozens of pages that sell to searchers who are actually looking to buy. These pages rank on Google and convert so much better than normal that when I discovered this years ago, I couldn't believe this was allowed. It's less work, too. The average Compact Keywords page is only 415 words. Compact Keywords is a 13-hour deep course on getting sales with SEO. A customer recently said, "Each lesson is dense with information. You're giving years worth of experience boiled down into 15 to 30 minute lessons with no filler or fluff. I feel like I'm gaining a new superpower. Compact Keywords is about setting up an SEO funnel that brings you sales for years and years and years. It works with AI. It's less work than traditional SEO and it makes way more money. You can get it now at compactkeywords.com. Back to the podcast. Yeah, actually I've been um playing around with Reddit marketing myself since probably 2018 and uh cuz Oh, yeah. And and I would say that I would say that Reddit started taking it a bit more seriously around this time because it's when it's it's when crypto started to become more mainstream and you had these crypto subreddits that people were like, "Oh my gosh, like I can use this to promote my ICO or to promote my whatever it is." And since then, especially with LLMs, things started getting a lot more crazy. So, I guess uh David, I'll start with you and then to you, Ann. What What do you think the best ways to use Reddit for SEO and marketing are? Um, so I think there's been a a a good playbook where like you become the most useful person in the room, the the trusted expert, and you pay it forward. And if you really want to iterate on that, you you never self-promote, right? You basically go in, you provide the most comprehensive answer, you provide color, right? You don't just go like, "Oh, do XY Z." Um, maybe explaining how it works, where it went wrong. Um, especially in something like SEO, which uh people when they start out in SEO, they tend to think in checklists, oh, I need this, I need 1 2 3 4, which which is nonsense. It's a system. And so, you have to take a system approach. So, for example, if if you look at what Ann is doing in SEO, you as a newbie, you can't do that. An has a lot of uh leverage. She has access to authority. She knows how to build a website. what if an's working on a domain that's five years old that has sort of a thousand rank positions you as a newbie can't start there so you have to understand where you are what industry you're in what your ecosystem looks like um I think that playbook is becoming more and more damaged in Reddit because of the amount of spam and the spam has really changed in the last 12 months um so there was a very basic level of spam where people would just drop in brand recommendations um I got I was the subject of a LinkedIn rage post uh from a CEO who got banned from Reddit uh and blamed me for it. It it wasn't I didn't ban this person. Um they got banned because they were essentially spamming a subreddit and got got away with it. A lot of tool providers um brand new tool providers, existing tool providers think that it's okay to come in and recommend their product. Um it's not. Uh a lot of communities are built for the community. If you're going in and all of your posts are about you, that's not a community um engagement post, right? So, if you're just dropping links and say, "Oh, my product can help you," you're going to get banned now more than ever. Uh so, I think unless somebody asks you who you are, you shouldn't be dropping in any links or who you are. So, if you go in and say somebody's asking about what credit card is best and you've got a credit card blog and you say, "Well, I wrote more on this blog post." or you go in to share your articles or YouTube videos, you're going to get banned. I think moderators as well are going to start stepping up that uh it's not just going to be about links, they're going to be looking at blocking brands. So the tools that moderators have are limited, but they're also uh equally very powerful. So for example, if a moderator adds a a um an auto suspend to a comment or post because of a brand, your brand is essentially locked out of that subreddit. Um, I think there's also a couple of things that people need to understand. There's a couple of myths about Reddit. Um, also similar to parasitic SEO, I think a lot of people think that parasitic SEO is a shortcut, right? You can just go and add an article and you're going to be ranked and sited. That's not how it works. If you're looking at an LLM that's trained on Reddit, it's probably trained on a particular corpus of Reddit. And so adding new content doesn't necessarily guarantee you getting in. If you do a site search for Reddit on something, even on SEO, you will probably see that posts that are five, two, four years old still ranking. And that's because the same SEO replies to Reddit as any other site. So, if you've got a page that's already ranking for best SEO agency, it's likely that a post already has that, that's already ranking. We know from how duplicate content and cannons work, other posts aren't going to rank unless somebody does a lot of SEO to make that rank. So, it's not like some automatic freebie. It takes work. Um, it's not like a part-time job. It takes experience. It takes knowledge and expertise to market in Reddit. And so, you want to be careful because you don't want to get a lifetime ban. And you don't want to have to keep creating accounts. Also, Reddit has got extremely good in the last 60 days at detecting bot accounts. So, a lot of people used to fire up bot accounts. There were sort of single instant um Reddit accounts. they get banned in seconds. I've had people um say, "Oh, I got I got banned from your sub and before I can even reply, their account is suspended by Reddit." So, you're gone. So, uh for example, Reddit has banned all Fiverr links, for example. So, now if you're if you're trying to hawk your service on Fiverr, it in nine times out of 10, it's going to get removed. So, I think going in and being a helpful expert and not promoting yourself is probably the only way to start. But I I'll refer to Ann as well. She might have some other ideas. Yes, thank you, David. Um I have a long history with Reddit from business perspective which is not so much about personal branding but when businesses really want to have visibility there that is meaningful. What people are doing now is that there are a bunch of platforms that allow you to just buy posts from all kinds of accounts left and right. They buy posts, they like then they them buy comments to those posts and all of them with the same context. This is a problem and unfortunately in some cases it does work and I see that all the time aggressive commenting recommending the brand. I hope that is the problem that is already being solved. David is very right. Reddit is becoming very very good about that. So it is um not something that's going to be effective going forward. what we have been doing and it's getting very difficult to I wouldn't say sell those services is because it takes time like David said you cannot just register any account on Reddit especially if it's a business account and just go around Reddit and recommend yourself or even if you answer questions with some kind of expertise this is an transparently business account in most cases is whatever you say that is going to be oh you're trying to promote yourself if it's a business name in that account. So we've been building subreddits for our clients which are officially affiliated with the with the brand. The earlier you start obviously the better because it does take time for those subreddits to become part of Google ecosystem of LLM training data. It's about a year to actually see the results in inside LLMs. And I want to say on average six months we take for those uh threats to rank in Google. So it is it is a long path and when we start explaining that to clients because there's such a variety of agencies and tools that automate everything for you and promise thousands of dollars of revenue from Reddit within a month or three months, which I cannot even imagine the amount of spam that takes. Of course, businesses are like, "Oh, why wait one year if I can just buy this cheap comments services that are like um very fast and here is my revenue." Um the whole perspective, I mean, we can fight spam. Many subreddits, most popular subreddits are very careful about that and they either using filters or using manual moderators. most of them moderation most of them do both and it's um Reddit will fight this but the perspective I think the biggest thing those spammy Reddit agencies and platforms are doing is changing the perspective of business for for business owners or executive of how to do that right they are very loud they do cold outreach they do all of that to promise an easy getaway to Reddit Whether it works or not is the next question because we do get clients after buying those things around Reddit, their reputation is much harder to fix at that point because all those popular subreddits are flooded with their spam and they are being called out. Um, and it's the perspective of how to do it right is being lost in the noise. And that is that is the problem that we as an Reddit marketing agency are are facing at this point because most leads will come to us. They would be like, "Oh, why would I wait 12 months to make any difference if I can just go to a popular subreddit and buy comments and posts there and here you are. I'm ranking. I'm there. I want to give a I want to give a background on parasite SEO on Reddit for people who don't if it's if it's your first time hearing parasite SEO with Reddit. Like this is what it means. Uh so like let's say that you are a roofing contractor in Phoenix, Arizona. You go to the Phoenix subreddit, you put up a post and it says, "Who is the what's the the best roofing contractor in Phoenix, Arizona? My my roof shingles, they need to be fixed." All all this stuff. and and then uh the comments come in and maybe people buy up votes to that to that post and it's ranking really well in the subreddit and then a week later you edit it and you say edit I went with uh this contractor they did the best work they're the best ever and then because you used best roofing contractor in Phoenix, Arizona in the title and there was all that language in the body and in the comments Google goes, "Okay, this is what this is about and we love Reddit. Reddit is doing super well. we're going to put it number one. And then people see this and then LLM see this. They see the edit that the LLMs are recommending you and and the people are seeing this at the bottom and they're going to you and so uh and how are you that that's parasite SEO uh on Reddit. So I'm curious like an you you said that you are creating new subreddits. Does that mean that you are doing things like maybe like making a branded subreddit so that brands can use Reddit to rank for their branded keywords? So if maybe you have like a review that you just got and you put up a post in your branded subreddit for your review and then the your good reviews are showing up in the SERs or is it something different? It's a combination. Certainly this is branded subreddit. Um we do encourage the way we frame it for clients is that this is your safe space to Reddit because you can you it's officially yours. You can announce, you can change the perspective through that safe space because you will not be accused of trying to fake or promote anything because it's officially your space and bas based on the client's needs. Yes, most of them are struggling with Reddit reputation. And in many cases you will be surprised how much context people are usually missing when they go and uh talk about a brand and their bad experience. In most cases the business is very legit and there is a very good reason why something is happening like upfront price. Usually that's what people are talking about on Reddit. uh something that a business not necessarily can go ahead and explain what this money is for they or there is a problem with customer support with sales every all of that is visible on Reddit so it's not just create your subreddit and try to rank for those keywords it's also fix the problem and explain how you fix it on your own subreddit so that becomes part of the context and from there Yes, you can put the Reddit subreddit link in your review management workflow. However, you're collecting reviews from your existing customers and some of them will go to Reddit. And I always tell the clients whether it's negative or positive review, you want all of those inside your subreddit versus somewhere else because this is where you can manage it, reply to it, explain, DM the customer, provide customer support. It's much easier if you consolidate all of this footprint inside your subreddit. And this is where you can also talk about your pain points, how you improve them. Um, most of our clients have delivery, some kind of delivery issues and they tried to fix it. One of our clients hired a special team who is now managing the delivery personally with like um dedicated account manager. and your subreddit is where you can talk about that versus if you go somewhere else this is going to be self-promotion whatever you say. Uh so this is kind of the point of having your face zone in the sub where you where you still collect both positive and negative everything. But this is where you can address all those pain points, explain what happened, why it happened, and give help to people who go ahead and actually want the resolution. It's not they just want to talk about that. They do appreciate that they get help. You know what's so crazy? You could put the same content on your website and even if your website outranks Reddit, and it might not, Reddit might still outrank your website for for the branded content. But even if your website did outrank Reddit, people might still click on Reddit anyway. And actually, just by clicking on Reddit anyway, then it's going to eventually rank above your website because people like to see people trust things more on Reddit. Like even if it's coming from the company, they're going to trust it more uh on Reddit. David, I see you're shaking your head. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I think um also because it's anonymous um you know, if if you look at LinkedIn, if people want to ask questions or explore something or having a problem, they may not want to do that under their personal profile, right? And so on Reddit, it's a great place to um make recommendations or perhaps even find um provide criticism, right? So it might be like, you know, I don't I don't think this tool is good for that. Um but I think if you're going to do that, do this. and there's there's no sort of like they don't feel like they're going to have their account shut off for doing that, right? So, um I think you know that that's another reason why Reddit might be a better platform than say LinkedIn or your customer support forum, right? Uh because it's it's not tied back to the person's user account or their company account. And so it's another way to provide feedback and I think that's one of Reddit's greatest um attractions is the anonymity for a lot of people um and so And that's why I think it represents such a good opportunity for brands to go into. It also repres It's a double-edged sword, right? It also represents a small bit of threat, but you have to realize that, you know, people are people. They have opinions and people have good experiences and bad experiences. Um, if you look at Ryan Air, for example, they they turn bad experiences into marketing on TikTok, right? They absolutely love it. That's all they get. Um, it's it's a strategy they've played for 30 years and they've played it very well. So, David, do you think uh anonymous Reddit marketing used to be easier even like a year ago and now it's a lot harder? It's it's definitely a lot harder uh because of the amount of spam and I think especially in the SEO and geo space. There are entire subreddits being set up by geo agencies. I mean there's a lot of good subreddits and has a fantastic subreddit um you know teaching AI for SEO uh which is really really great um and a good place for people to to learn more about specifically um SEO and AI but there's a lot of agencies that have set up GIO and they set up bots that that keep um posting questions. They're very easy to detect. Um you can see that the questions are crafted by LLM. They're very repetitive. they follow and and then they have a lot of bots that answer and they're posting across a lot of subreddits. And I think this presents a number of problems. One, it's going to use up people's time, right? People people don't want to be in the dead web. You don't want to be replying to robots. It it's it's a wasted energy. Um because of the volume and scale, a lot of I think junior moderators like the activity even though it's astrourfed. I think it presents a maybe a fiduciary problem for Reddit because they're now a publicly traded company. Elon Musk just lost his court case yesterday for um you know deforting um shareholders on X because he claimed that X was full of bot accounts and the jury actually cited against him and he lost that. So he so they he used that to devalue X's um share value when acquiring it. If you look at Reddit part of their KPI are things like views, clicks, impressions, daily engagements. in SEO, I would say as much of 40% of that is now dead, you know, very sophisticated bot farms. Uh, so you have bot farms, you have tools, you you have tools where you can buy a single reply, but you also have people setting up their own tools using things like n, um, relay.app, um, very where there's sort of like a person managing it. I've I've called out a lot of these accounts and had personal attacks from around the world on LinkedIn and stuff like that. It's really there there's a lot of very vicious companies in this. Um, there's a lot of accounts that are clearly owned by agencies. They're not even trying to hide it. And so, um, I think that one, Reddit needs to step up. I also would encourage if if if you're somebody trying to build a personal brand and you see a big subreddit being being spammed, the only way to get Reddit involved in the moderation of a sub is to apply to take it over. And there's a special sub um where you can request to take over moderation of a sub. It's very easy. You just have to send a mod mail saying, "Hey, I'd like to be involved." And then if you don't get a reply in seven days, uh, and you've got an account that's seen to be big enough and you don't have too many subs to moderate, moderate, uh, Reddit could make you a moderator or or the god moderator of that account, which means you can then eject the other moderators. And this happens a lot. So maybe this is a way to control it, but some of the subs are just pure AI spam. And I think it's it's presenting an existential threat to Reddit. Um, yes, Reddit is cited and it's cited because it is a source of good experience. It's a source of good uh feedback. Again, the anonymity of is a good play. I think what happens on LinkedIn, a lot of LinkedIn is for show. A lot of LinkedIn is like, you know, you're you're trying to put the best you. It's an extension of your resume. Um, maybe Reddit has a a reputation for getting a little bit too gritty and a lot of egos involved. Um, but I think it's it's a really strong place. There's a lot of different personalities. I think there's like 500 million users on uh Reddit and 70% of them don't even have a LinkedIn account. So, from a marketing perspective, it's highly attractive because you can reach people on Reddit that aren't available like coders, product managers, um, you know, people that need SEO. But I think the amount of automated geo spam presents a huge risk. Um, so I'm hoping that some people will actually watch this and go, "Oh, you know what? I could run a sub like that. Maybe I'll take it over." And and uh you actually touched upon another good point, which is that one bad review can be so damaging for a brand. One bad review on Reddit can be so so damaging for a brand. And what happens all the time is competitors will put up fake bad reviews on Reddit. And so, is there a way to report comments that you know are blatantly fake? There's probably some people listening who this might have happened to their brands. So, I'd say first of all, if if somebody does put up a negative brand and you've got you've cured a good network, and Ann will probably know a lot more about this than me, but um it's great to see your network come to your rescue, right? Um and and again, you like like John Kennedy said, you can't please all the people all the time, right? It's just a fact of life. and maybe there are parts to your product that there are markets you can't serve. So, so be it, right? Um, if there are blatantly negative, um, you do have a couple of reces. One, you can send a mod mail to the moderators and say, "Look, this is defamation." Um, and then you can also appeal to Reddit. I would say your best place is to appeal to the moderators. And from that point of view, you that's why you want to be on the best foot with the moderators. So, for example, uh, read the rules of the sub. Um, if there's a if you need to have a a a brand flare, then do so. Ask the moderators before you go in. That's also, I think, a good strategy and say, "Look, I'm representing this brand. Um, we'd like to reply. We don't want to spam your sub, but we'd like to reply about certain things." And then if there is an issue, um, and say, "Look, this violates the terms of Reddit." And be aware of the terms. And if you are working with the agency, they'll probably be aware of those as well. Um, but there are at least two forms of recourse as well as replying to the the the bot as well. Oh, so the account as well. I definitely saw this happened so many times. So there are two things here to remember. We definitely have clients who have very strong negative attacks from competitors. You can usually tell when it's not a customer complaining because there will be no specifics of the bad experience that can be very easily verified. Uh so when that's a negative attack and that you can tell the root definitely talk to moderators especially if you have an established account with good reputation when you do not did not try to self-promote on that subreddit when you have very clean record in most cases moderators can definitely tell that is not authentic feedback. The other thing that may happen and David also mentioned there will be customers who are not happy. Every business have has them and when they start a thread saying this company is horrible or this horrible this company is scam and this starts ranking number one for a variety of branded searches. This is a not so easy problem to solve because this is the authentic feedback. You can keep saying to you can si keep telling yourself okay this happens to every business but this is impact this definitely impacts your bottom line and at that point that becomes much harder to tackle because you can tell sometimes I even ask clients if you read this are you sure this is about your brand first because sometimes brand get confused if like if those if that product describes what you offering and if it's outdated if it's like 5 years ago, those threads are still ranking. This company is a scam. Five years ago, it's an archived thread. No way to reply to it, no way to manage it, no way to replace it in search. And at that point, the strategy can be different. You can uh get in touch with moderators, giving them paperwork saying, "Okay, this what has changed. This is an outdated information. How we can address it?" Don't say delete it at the at the first message because moderators hate it when you try ask them to delete uh threads about their brand if it's an authentic one. But trying to address that in a way that we did our best, we listened to feedback. We changed our product. How can we manage this situation because this is no longer about our product. This happens a lot because those five fouryear-old threads are ranking like crazy everywhere and they are being cited and they are influencing the sentiment in LM answers as well. So tackling this case by case when it's an authentic feedback usually it's outdated. If you changed let moderators know how you changed it, why be very detailed. Don't ask to delete right away. ask them how can we help this situation because this is no longer our product. Um so this is definitely a long way. The most important thing at that point is to have a good account which you can use because uh asking moderators from an from like third party account that has no affiliation with the brand will be perceived as sneaky. They will oh you have an agency and whatn not. using your official account, being very transparent and having a good record on Reddit without like being reported for spam, without bad reputation within that subreddit. Usually businesses have like one or two huge subreddits that are about like have their target audience. It's not like you have to be to know everyone everyone. It's usually one or two subreddits to be honest. and making sure that you have good reputation within those subreddits always helps to manage those situations. Yeah, you make a great point and I've had other people share this on the show too, which is the importance of actually having a branded Reddit account and and you know, we're talking about anonymous accounts, but if you're like a if you're a oneperson shop, you can't you don't have all the energy to have an anonymous accounts and a one and one person account and do the SEO and do the social media and so just a simple trusted trusted account where trusted branded account I guess could be really powerful if something bad happens and you need to manage it even if it's just responding to a comment even if it's something not even contacting the mod it's just even responding to a comment for sure and and also if if um you know there's also OM in SEO right so if you do have a negative comment and it is ranking um it's not as easy right OM is like the reverse of SEO SEO focuses on how do I get my domain and its assets ass to rank OM often means how do I get 11 other assets to rank on other domains so I can push it down, right? So, um that is just a fact of life, right? Um and so, uh having an agency that understands um how to manage Reddit and how to manage content Reddit and effectively it's an extension of um parasitic SEO, right? So, how do I get content up there and how do I get it to outrank the negative content is very very doable. uh Google doesn't or at least I don't believe Google actually looks at the uh value of the account posting. So um I've seen things rank where the account is suspended. Um so I think it's a very common thing that Google interrogates it can't it can't interrogate Reddit knows the spam on Reddit and Facebook and LinkedIn. So if it it's really about history, who's who's got the best click-through rate history, and so there are definitely avenues to blocking out Reddit content, but you can't do that without being on Reddit, I think, is the is an important thing to know. So I think it's the sooner your company dives in, and I would encourage companies to also get their staff to set up their own Reddit accounts. I've been on a lot of calls where the company's thinking about Reddit and I know that some of the staff have their own anonymous accounts and obviously they don't want those to be linked but it's I think especially if you've got you know customerf facing roles like product marketing managers not being on Reddit and being in tech is kind of silly almost you know you should you should have some awareness of Reddit because like you said it's the second most clicked website on on the web and it's like 43 million clicks a day it's it's massive um and I think if you look at your analytics of of a an company with a mature Reddit account, Reddit probably outranks Bing and LLMs and LinkedIn in terms of a traffic source. So, it's not just people reading, it's people coming through to your site from that. And if that's how big it is and not having an in, you know, some sort of internal play is kind of reckless. Wow. Reckless. What um to to both of you and Ann, I'll start with you. What would there's probably people who have maybe reached out to mods for one thing or maybe just something as simple as like my post got taken down and I was it wasn't a spammy post and it got taken down like what is going on here and then the mods just ignore them and it's very very very common. Uh so what would you say to to those people in terms of like how to actually get mods to respond? Well, we to be honest with you, we minimize and for our clients, for our our ourselves uh bugging moderators. If anything gets removed, we learn from that lesson and move on. I do not recommend getting trying to get a hold of those poor moderators on every occasion. Usually moderators do not remove anything for no reason at all. There will always be a lesson there. And I would start by understanding that lesson and um moving from there. when we do have to reach out to moderators those usually for outdated threats that impact our organic search for any for any other reasons I wouldn't do that to be honest because it's very easy to annoy moderators when we start any client who has reputation problems on Reddit on Google on Reddit subsequently on Google and from there on LLMs when we starting new client and They want us to tackle negative reviews from day one. I always say no. We need at least three months to un to first set you up with a trusted account to understand the pain points to understand those subreddits and their style. All the subreddits are so diverse. Some moderators are very responsive and they actually communicate on the subreddit as well. They post, they comment, they are there and it is easy to get their attention in a positive way by just being useful or just being there in the subreddit. So we take time to understand the subreddit where the problem is occurring because just attacking the problem right away it is very easy to say something wrong to annoy moderators to make things worse. So we take some time definitely to create a strategy around developing managing those negative threats that are very visible but also at the same time we take this three months to create the strategy for our subreddit to start ranking and balance those Reddit packs uh which I like I say it usually takes about six months but those official threads are also going to rank if you do that right if you collect actual feedback back from actual people that use your product that it verified, not fake. Again, there comments and get a flood of positive comments inside your official thread and try to rank it. This is not how you are supposed to do because that is that is going to be very obvious what you're doing here and LLMs will understand that, people will understand that no one click that and no one will pay attention. If you do things right, you have about six months when you balance the the those Reddit packs with your official stance on what is happening, why it is happening, and how to do the best of your service or product. So this is this is not going to be a fast solution and this is the hard time to try and convince executives that no let's not rush with it because there are so many solutions that promise you a quick resolution right away. And what what would you say to the people who are like well wait like there's a million sites that allow me to purchase comments and purchase up votes to that com to those comments. Why can't I just do that? This is a continuous struggle for sure, especially this year. This is the first year when we are really struggling. Luckily, I do have a confident voice in the industry. So, I can talk to the clients and tell them exactly what it is. First of all, it's it's illegal. I don't know how much American businesses are concerned about law. They should be very concerned because buying reviews is illegal and there is a very easy report uh on the GP site that uh form where you can report businesses who try to buy uh reviews or in any way um curate the positive feedback that is not their actual customers feedback. So I don't know how much of an argument that is but it should be a huge one. It is illegal guys. You cannot do that. Where is Where is the report form? I I I will send you the link uh in one of my newsletters. I have it. It's uh um on some official American GF website which I cannot remember right now, but it's very easy to find and customers who are very annoyed can use it for sure. It is illegal. First of all, then you are fueling the fire and in mo and like I said, we have to deal with clients who tried that and made the situation much worse. When you start buying fake reviews on existing negative threads, those unhappy customers are notified. They come back. They see fake reviews. They start calling you out. Those threads become even more active, even more popular, even more visible. And there is no easy way at this point to negotiate with moderators on removing them because the moderators also saw what you were doing. We have to deal those clients who come to us after these services are much harder to deal with because it takes much more time to replace that sentiment or even balance it with whatever you're doing right at this point. And this is a huge risk and one of the reasons why we're not doing this because it's a huge responsibility. for the to the client. Like if we stop start stop start doing that even if we want them off the risks those that mess that happens after that is much a harder situation than it was at the beginning when you didn't take three or four months to do that right David. Yeah, absolutely agree with everything an said and um coming back to sort of like the moderator's perspective um you know moderators can't be shown to show favor with brands right and one thing I see um is uh brands coming out saying hey can we advertise on your site and that's a big no no right that's it's not legally illegal it's Reddit laws illegal so uh Reddit will get involved in very little to do with the moderation of a sub so if you think oh I posted um a comparison page and a mod took it down, I can file a complaint. Forget about it. Reddit isn't interested. However, if Reddit thinks that a sub is taking money from a brand, those those Reddit moderators are gone, right? So, if you think, "Oh, I'll just send a mod mail and I'll offer them a percentage or something like that or forget it. You're that moderator is going to report you faster than they can delete you, right?" Um, and I think also moderators will know their user base. They'll know, for example, if you say, "Look, uh, this person put up something and I don't like that message." Moderators will know, look, if I if I delete that, that person's going to go on a rampage and it's they're just going to make everyone's lives hell, right? So moderators are people, right? They wake up before their first coffee, they've probably got to ban 20 people and delete 10,000 spam comments. Sometimes they see the same brand name and it just gets easier just to block it forever because they're just saving themselves 10 minutes work every morning. Um so they're people they have administrative work to do and it gets boring and timeconuming and their appetite for dealing with problems is you know because then their main focus is bringing in traffic to their to their forum keeping it alive. So if you're a brand that helps that and aligns with that then you probably will go a lot further. Um, and so I think you know for like an said and that's a really good strategy is if you want to engage you know take some time to understand it and and just don't go head first and think that you know the game right your requirement to rank in Reddit isn't very high up on Reddit's list or the moderator's list right um and and that's why Reddit have Reddit advertising and that's why they they take such a negative view of spam and I think also the definition of spam is very very narrow. I get a lot of people saying, "Oh, I'm I'm an SEO with five years experience." Hey, I remember my first part-time job as well, right? Five years is nothing in to some people. So, um you know, just just because spam is seen as something posted by bots doesn't mean that your post isn't spam because you're not a bot, right? Spam is unwanted commercial content. So, it's very very broad, right? Which means any post by a branded account could be seen as spam. any link to your own research, a case study that has no data or peer review. Um, you posting about how you solved a problem could be seen as demand generation, right? Um, you posting your YouTube videos could be seen as demand generation. So, spam is a very very broad concept. Obviously, some moderators have their own interpretation and that's why some Reddits allow some stuff and some don't. And trying to arbitrate between that is pointless, right? Instead, try to find how you fit into that group naturally and uh bring value is is is way more important. And if you're having to bug the moderators, then you're doing something wrong. I think it is really scary though what is possible. I I I don't know if if either of you heard Lars Lofgrren's report on it was uh the coding boot camp subreddit, something like that. And one of the moderators, I guess I I'm gonna I might be butchering the story, so just like warning, it's not like 100% accurate, but something like one of the moderators had his own coding boot camp and was just always like every day or every other day saying bad things about his top competitor. And I think his top competitor was called Codesmith. And as a result, uh, Codesmith just lost I think it was like 80% of their revenue and they had to to let a lot of people go and they tried talking to this moderator many times and it happened over the course of like a year or two and it was so bad and Codesmith was almost going to have to shut down and Lars wrote this report. Lars Lofrin, friend of the podcast, wrote this crazy report. it went viral and the moderator had to had to step down and but it's really frightening what can happen if if there's like a lot of bad stuff going on on on Reddit about your brand. Uh and so actually this brings me to my next question. There's probably brands who have considered just hiring lawyers. Is that ever a good route to take? Is there ever a scenario where it's like look we can't like I don't know how to fight this. Let's let's try getting some lawyers involved. Oh, I'm not a lawyer. Yeah, go ahead, David. Then I will go. Um, so if if the Redditor has broken a law, right? Um, you you know, courts have to prove jurisdiction, you have to prove that the Redditor did something, um, you may you may start with like the Redditor has caused um, damage to your brand or revenue and you can prove that. But proving which moderator did something is very very difficult. Um there there's a like I I would think that in that case most moderators would just step aside and remove them. Then they have no ability to correct anything. So in that case you're really just making your making the giving yourself less of a a chance of an outcome. Um and I think Reddit also steps in and uh protects moderators in some cases. I I think where where a moderator has is doing something um out and out dangerous to your brand, you may have no choice, right? Especially if you know them like their next business partner or you you happen to be able to, you know, um be able to identify them like in Lars's case, right? Um but talk to a lawyer, right? It it's it's probably a very complex process and you you probably have to prove that they did so out, you know, over and above an opinion that it was an actual campaign against you. um not a lawyer either, so I don't know the exact criteria. Um but if you are thinking that if a moderator is unfair to you, you can start a campaign against them, that the chances of that are are are very very slim as well, right? Um I've seen a lot like in in a sub I moderated um there were a lot of people that were picking up business and fishing for business and set up a lot of accounts to um harass moderators. like there's a lot of negative um Reddit strategies uh that go on as well. But um I'm diverging from your question. I let an go. Well, I did have a few clients who tried. Um it went nowhere. First of all, I don't have as much of an experience and I'm not a lawyer for sure. I just talking about a couple of cases that I had seen and they didn't go anywhere for that coding case. It's an interesting um case study for sure. First of all, and I want everyone to remember that moderators are human beings. They can be called out. And I think that the more influential the sub is, the more it is likely to happen. Every business will be offended for not being able to promote themselves on this app. and that situation first of all that uh person is still listed as a moderator and he's not just active and secondly he did announce that he's leaving uh but he's still listed from what I've seen maybe like two weeks ago why I'm why I know that situation is I have a coding uh camp client so I kind of know that subreddit a little bit from uh from that perspective and the my client never had issues that's That's what I'm saying. Even that moderator was even very supportive and when client when customers when their users were asking if this camp is legit, he would also actually go ahead and say yes, they are legit. I know these guys. Whether it's personal, I ask the client, they don't have a personal connection to that uh person. So whatever happened between uh him and that other uh business, we don't know. But I'm just saying that he wasn't that to any other competitor. Uh whether he was right or not, I will not say. I'm just saying that situation will be very hard to prove in court because he was a very good moderator and he did support a lot of business and camps. Uh so maybe he did believe in what he was saying. Maybe he knew people who had bad experience and he had his personal stance against that business. We don't know that. I'm just saying that it will be very hard from my personal view. I'm not a lawyer again, but it will be very hard to prove he was trying to benefit his own business or he had any conflict of interest or anything like that because there are more than two businesses active within that subreddit or being discussed within that subreddit and I only know the one that had problems with that specific moderator. So, it's never it's never that easy to tell. And um as for what you can do legally against credit, I cannot know. But I never saw that go go well. That's that's what my personal experience is telling me. Thank you for sharing that. I want to I want to move on to more positive things. Now we're going to talk about everything that could go wrong. And so I was wondering if there are success stories that either of you could share. Um, or it could be things about, you know, sharing good reviews, a business did this. It could be more technical SEO things, maybe like using Reddit to get different posts indexed. Uh, and or just creative ways that you could be using Reddit in search engine optimization. Um, so yeah, start with you, Ann. Uh, thank you. Yes, of course. Like I said, uh we have an average of 6 months when the official subreddit becomes making a real difference. We start ranking in Google. Even if it's not the top of the uh Reddit pack, usually it starts somewhere within one, two, you know, like this is usually they packed like three threads in one Reddit uh position. So it does take time much more time to get on top of it. And I'm pretty sure that's clickth through working there. And you cannot just rank there with brand name reviews threat. You have to be more like you have to have something real like show show me your favorite uh feature for your favorite favorite product or tell me what you like to dislike about this product. We are trying to improve something real usually ranks better on top of that pack because the clickth through definitely plays a role there. That's why by the way that uh brand name scam, brand name legit are very hard to get rid of Google because they get clicked. They get clicked and clicked and clicked. So they are very hard to replace in search results. But um back to the topic. So we do have around 6 months when people start coming to this subreddit instead of trying to uh be negative elsewhere and they get help. And uh the most recent client, the furniture client um they get they get a lot of negative reviews because obviously when you buy furniture online, you in many cases get not what you expected. Not because the product is bad but because you from pictures you imagine something and then it arrives and it's not what you expected. So they had to deal a lot with negative feedback and the for the month or so their ranking for the brand name reviews and now what is happening is people going to the subreddit they share their negative review there and we are able to manage it in a way when they become happy customers which never happened to that client before. So they are very surprised that Reddit people are not that angry actually if you are able to manage the situation well. So definitely it does take time but it definitely works. From my personal uh perspective of having my own subreddit, I've gone through all the circles I want to say from all the stages. I started with like that very naive and romantic view. I will give people a voice because they it's not very easy on Reddit with a new account to be heard. And now I'm like, okay, two two are banned today. Who else? So it is it is from the moderator's perspective, I can now tell that um it's not Reddit being an angry place. It's that moderators have to be angry almost to keep the quality of the um of your subreddit and be protective of it. So I kind of have both of those sides uh now explored and it is it is not easy for sure. I think that's an interesting part of of um the difference between a moderator and a user I think you know and and there's a subreddit called ask moderators and whenever people get banned for the first time they go there go like I got banned how do I peel this and I don't think people realize that the very first icon that appears when you're a moderator versus a regular user is the ban hammer it's not it's not like um mod node or uh modmail it's ban bans happen at like right now most of them are robots but I probably ban like 30 accounts a day But bans are bans happen quick and fast. Um and now you can even mute mod mail permanently which is like uh I think 4 weeks old and that's very useful. Um but coming back to your question I think uh moderators love um data and and and um databased case studies. The very worst thing you can do is come back with a how we did X for a client. That just that's just demand gen. Um there's so many and the geo industry and I hate painting a whole industry with the tar brush but the geo industry has this habit of um we analyzed 120,645 brands and they're all missing Reddit and YouTube links. You know it's like you need a lot of tools to analyze that data and I looked at your website and say Russian you're not even able to rank for your own brand name. I sincerely doubt you ran that. But if you can come back with like um data from your SAS application and you can have it verified and you can have the data verified by a well-standing peer that that information is very valuable to mods just like it is to the news and PR. So um you know that's a really good way to do it. And then like I said being a positive member so if you're going to do par you know um mods actually like parasitic SEO if it's going to bring traffic into their sub. So, if you know how to do keyword research and land a query that's going to be create a good conversation, creating a good conversation on its own is not a reason, right? But creating a good conversation that helps the sub look good is also a good idea. Um, but again, that takes experience. Um, there's a fine line between, you know, um, popular and spam, right? How easy is it for mods to discern vote manipulation? very difficult. Um so one easy way is um if you see someone has got 17 or 35 up votes and someone has eight up votes and it ranks higher you know that that's been bought. Um and moderators also have alternate have a back channel for reporting as well. Um so you could essentially leak huristics to the Reddit admin. So, Reddit admins control the federated um part of it and then and they do also remove a lot of they also are using AI to study what moderators remove and they'll also start um removing posts on behalf of the moderators as well um in but I think in terms of like where they see um single accounts so there's a very new concept in Reddit called CQS right which is about uh and there's a a a sub that you can go to what's my CQS And if you ask, it'll give you either low, medium, or high. So if it's low, it means that you have a very low ratio of people upvoting your comments and posts. Um, and that normally signals a bot or someone who's very spammy or someone who's not engaging very well. And instead of trying to um guess if somebody's a good poster based on overall karma, um, CQS is a better way of doing it. It does however negatively influence brand new accounts. So brand new accounts will struggle where there's a CQS filter. But the CQS filter does um remove a lot of spam and it's not a permanent suspens. It's not a permanent removal. It just rem just un it kind of hides the the comment or post until a moderator can manually approve it. Um, but most of most people are being blocked by CQS and that allows the more active members to automatically pass through and it also avoids like hard blocks like blocking a brand or blocking a link, right? Which is sometimes is obviously detrimental because it's a it's a broad stroke, right? Does does Reddit still use vote velocity where you can see like if somebody bought for example you know 50 up votes you can just see that they shoot up pretty fast in terms of up votes very most platforms are also very smart about that. So if you try to buy 10 up votes they will space them out. So they are they are learning as well just so you know it's it's it is not easy sometimes to tell but usually what I'm uh looking at and my sub is different because it's SEO people are more likely to come in there than to like and say nothing usually it's a discussion not more like voting happening there so if I see someone posting a thread and then there is a comment and then out of nowhere. There are no comments but just likes to that comment and I can see there is nothing to like there. It's usually that at that point okay and now I see what's going on there. There's an old concept called brigading. And so what would happen is you'd have um and this is like more back in the day type thing, but you'd have a lot of subs that were competing with each other, right? So they were covering the same topic and um moderators would eventually have ego battles with other mods and they would get their sub to go and downvote something and that's called brigading. So wherever uh Reddit sees upward and downward um voting especially in a short space of time it actually starts to hide the real votes. Um and that's a filter that moderators can turn on. So, for people who don't have a Reddit account yet and they want to get started on Reddit, it can be very difficult with a new account. So, how should somebody create an account? Can they use a VPN? When can they start posting? When can they start commenting? What what are what are the rules there? Well, we we provide this service. So, I definitely see new accounts at least every week. We kind of help clients with that. Definitely do not use VPNs. We've had a lot of problems with them. Reddit hate them. And it's also a recent thing. Um it's probably like even two, three years ago, even a year ago, you could easily use all these uh things. Now, Reddit is getting very suspicious. Well, try to use a mobile app. Reddit is much less suspicious when you are accessing Reddit from a mobile app because they also encouraging that a lot and they want you to have the app. Um, don't start commenting anything right away. We take at least a week of just scrolling. Reddit does look how much you scrolled and read. Take your time this week. Take this week to understand your specific environment, what the discussions are, what people frown upon. I've been in SEO uh for many many years but even I sometimes surprise some some subs do not like this term some some hate and attack you if you say this even if you like ask a question so take this time to better understand the style environment how people talk what they dislike what you should stay away from start tracking something on Reddit so that you get notifications on your topics and see what people like, dislike and all of that. So just start slow and be very very authentic. One thing we always tell clients, we can manage your subreddit. Yes, we can add entertain entertaining comments or content without you. We need someone inside that client's team that has firsthand experience and expertise on the topic so that they provide content because whatever we find online and repurpose that in a thread that's going to be just that recycling and Reddit does not like that. You need to talk from your personal expertise and experience. And that is why like every client we have, we always say we can do that for you, but we need a point of contact. Maas comment expert-driven comments when people ask something inside this app. Provide commentary on like news that is happening in your industry that not just announcing something that has happened with the lore. For example, a new lore something like that. We do not have the required expertise on all those topics to make your subreddit a success or your account a success. We need that expertise and expert experience from you. And I guess this is the biggest point. Don't just post anything generic. I started removing repeated generic questions from my subreddit because it's just noise and people trying to to build karma. Talk from your experience. If you want to share something, don't be generic about that. Take a screenshot before, after, whatever. Any details that we can learn from that will be will stay in the sub and we will do our best to engage with it. If it's just the same question or the same comment, generic one that you can find online easily by just googling and finding AI overview for that, that is a not good not good content for Reddit. How about for the people who are like, "Oh, I got a solution. I'm going to go to Google and I'm going to type in by aged Reddit account." Is that a viable path? Hey, everyone to does that. I I wouldn't for sure, but that's the same. Everyone can be sold. It's against every Reddit terms of service for sure. You cannot buy accounts or sell accounts or you cannot buy or sell subreddits. So those are both against Reddit terms of service and uh we are SEO first company. We never ever have uh legal or any other right or ethical right to recommend doing anything that is against the rules of the platform that you are trying to market in. So we've never done that but I'm sure those exist those marketplaces exist. I see that all the time. It's easy for us to tell um when you're moderating your screen is split in three. Uh so you see all of the your inbox basically you see whatever you're looking at and then Reddit automatically loads the person's history and they load all of their history even if you're even if you block the moderator they can see your history. And I think a lot of people think oh you know don't go back and look at my history even if it's um even if you mark it as as hidden it Reddit shares it. And so a moderator can see that four years ago your account was talking about ramen noodles in um packets, right? And now you're suddenly talking about uh SAS CRM products. We we know and we can tell and it looks very very dodgy and it takes this and it's just the easiest thing is just to ban you, right? It's it's it's so much easier than sort of like starting a conversation. Um, so I think if you're a brand and just coming back to like brand strategy as a whole, I don't know if you saw Gary Vee recently said that the brand strategy has become commoditized. Everyone's doing it. Um, there's a lot of brands that believe like, oh, we can't we have to pretend like we're Apple and we have to just lecture people and we can't have real conversations. That is so old school. It's so sad to see. Um, if you're going to come to Reddit, come as a person. Come as a peer. There's nothing wrong with it. people will admire and respect you. I I don't understand CMOs who have that strategy. It's not it it doesn't make you look good. It makes you look pretentious and and and cold. Um your your competitors are going to do it and they're going to do it very well. You may as well lead the way. Um in terms of like buying accounts, you don't do it. It it's so risky. Um once Reddit suspends an account, all that information is gone. It's just gone. Um, so the more time you invest in it, the worse it's going to get. Yeah. Yeah. People buy from people, not for brands. Oh, sorry. That's a good point, by the way, and I didn't realize that before, but you can hide your feed from public view. That is what most spam accounts are doing now so that no one can track down what you were doing. If you join a sub or you post there, moderators can still see it can still see the history even if you hide it from public view. So they can tell like if you go go around uh talking about the same product or you go around promoting different products all the time that's mean that means you are part of the platform that pays you for that. It's easy to tell and moderators can still see that. You can also take that user account and do a site on Reddit search uh because Google will show you. Um so basically even if someone's blocked you and you want to see if they are spamming, you can put in their username and then site reddit.com without any spaces and Google return all of the posts and comments that it's indexed with that user's name. And that that's an instant x-ray. And so okay, someone wants to create an account. Can you can you comment with a VPN turned on if you have an existing account or is that now not not okay? I stopped using we lost a few accounts back maybe a year ago. Uh we were using VPNs when we were trying to like on trying to save the business accounts because not to use them from the same IP because we do manage them. Um and we lost a couple so I just stopped. I'm just using uh my regular IP and I don't see I let's so far no problems accessing a few accounts from the same IP let's put it like this maybe it will become a problem but we do manage a few of them quite a few of them uh from between our like different members of our team and we just stopped using uh VPNs I mean we using that transparently and our clients uh officially accounts on Reddit. So, I hope that is going to be okay down the road, but we definitely had a lot of problems with VPN, so we just stopped using them. David, is there anything that people should any like weird rules that people wouldn't suspect if they want to like for people who don't even have a Reddit account, they want to create an account and just get started? They want to they they're going to be open. They're going to be themselves, but in case anything bad happens, they want to be there to defend their reputation. Yeah, absolutely. I think so. Nearly every there there's so many SAS tools happening right now, right? A lot of developers are building tools, especially in the SEO space, and I think they all think that an SEO sub or digital marketing sub is the starting place, and they all think that they're doing um you know, SEO's favors by building these tools. You're not. You're self-promoting. Let's just get this clear cuz there this is a massive problem, right? There's like 10 a day. Um going to a community that you've not engaged in and telling them about your tool and nine times out of 10 your tool is not, you know, people have jobs to do. They're not there to beta test your product for you. They're not interested in a 10day free trial. That's not adding value to the community. So you I I really think you should um and this is something a director from Dell taught me years ago is pick a brand that's doing it really really well and go and follow them. I I think for example Patrick Starks from AFS does a phenomenal job at this because he never mentions ARS. He he goes and sees that people are having a problem with something and he gives the technical here's how it works. Here's the mechanics. Here's where we're making a mistake. Here's what we're trying to do better. That's something people can't get on other platforms and that adds huge value, brand attraction and loyalty and it's a great example. So find a brand that's doing it really well and develop a rule that you can ask well would would they do this? And if they wouldn't, then don't do it yourself. So just because you've got a tool or because you think you've solved some magic problem, you can go and talk about it and say like this is how I did it. And if you're not prepared to give that up, then don't do it. Right? If you're but don't go in thinking you're you're suddenly solving problems that people have never thought about. Um and and take a take a minute to read and and if you don't see other tools being promoted in that sub, then there's a reason for that, right? We have uh I have two last questions and uh this next one is a pretty interesting one. So the first time that Barry Schwarz came on this podcast, we were talking about parasite SEO and we were talking about Reddit and you know Barry Schwarz very also very founder of search engine roundt and he's like yeah different parasite SEO platforms have come and go. You know it used to be Yahoo Answers Quora had a lot more priority in the past. Now it's Reddit. Something will probably be probably be next. And so my question for both of you is will Reddit last. I hope so. I I love Reddit. Um I really do. I think it's there's so and also I think we've got to remember that it's people, right? So there's no point in saying, "Oh, it's it's Reddit. It's just like, you know, we're all active on X." It's not it's not just X as a platform. Although definitely um there are ideological issues with founders of companies all the time but um Reddit is a very broad you know it it's people talking about recipes people talking about photographs in New York City people talking about travel it's a it's a whole big community and you have all of humankind's personalities on show right um I think this that the spam that's happening and and and I we um Ed you were talking to me about when when digs started up and Dig, Reddit's co-founder came on and and the SEO subs on or SEO threads on on Dig were ultimately it's undoing, right? They they've had to tear it down and go back to scratch. And it was the same they they reset all of Dig. Yeah. Because the and the spam was the same spam that brought it down at the end. It was like people putting up the most ridiculously stupid spammy obvious courses and agency ads and things like that. I I I think Reddit is at a turning point where if they if they get this wrong, they're going to fall out of favor, right? Um Demos was big on Google, then Demos fell away. It wasn't being moderated properly. Wikipedia became big. Now we can see that you can buy links and buy editorial on Wikipedia. It's dropped in its rankings. Um, so I think you know Reddit has to realize that their ranking in Google is a special relationship and they need to maintain that and they need to the type of communications they do with their mods are way too lowkey. There's they they need some better feedback and they've got a few months to get it I think. So, I think unless they handle it, I see people finding less and less value because people don't want to people don't like AI content if they know it's AI content. And so, it's um it's going to be a problem for them if they don't get on top of it. One thing that I always say and I don't know why people suddenly think Reddit is new. It it has been trending yes for a year or two but it has been huge for many many years. It's nothing new. And I've been talking about reputation management since I don't know 2014 at least. And at that point, Reddit was already ranking. That's why we were doing Reddit marketing for so long. It's not it's not something that is definitely new and it's just now it's just now being talked about because all the PR they got from LLM from a open AI partnership and stuff like that. But it has been a very influential pro platform for many many years. So that's why I I do have trust that they have enough experience uh managing the platform that they will do survive this AI um spam. The that is the only thing the only the only platform that can kill Reddit is Reddit. Uh if if they fail to manage this problem which I think they are doing they they are handling it. um they need to pay more attention to subreddits that are not being taken care of by human people by people that is I think something they really need to pay attention to they need to demand a high level of moderation from everyone even if it's not done archive the subreddit hide it whatever but they need to make sure that everything is being moderated well there are people human beings because that is the power of Reddit that is something that no one else has all those dedicated, passionate moderators who take care of their subreddits. No one else, no other social media network has that level of human moderation. It has always been like that, but it has always been very unique in that way. Dig didn't have it. No one no one did have it. Like maybe little Facebook groups have th those passionate moderators as well or someone like that. But Reddit has always been that is its unique selling value proposition. It's people for people by people. And if they keep that, if they force moderators to take care of everything that's not human and if they force moderators to be on top of that because only people can make that human like can add that human touch to the platform ensuring it's mostly human then that will be solved and it will be unre irrespon irreplaceable. I think that is the the power of Reddit at this point. There is nothing to replace it. Everyone, every other social media network is drowning in AI uh spam, AI videos, AI images. LinkedIn automation, LinkedIn almost encourages that with its native f features, which I don't get. It's already flooding. It's already flooded with AI spam and they have their own native features encouraging it. uh Reddit is the only one that has that human level that can fight and keep it uh very very high quality and there is no now no other platform to replace that anyways. But Reddit has a very tremendous bot problem like any other social media network. They need to solve it for sure. At least they are doing better. At least they're doing better than other social media platforms because if not Reddit that then who? There is no other platform like that with humans talking about human problems. Maybe it won't be maybe maybe it won't be an anonymous platform. Maybe it'll be something like Facebook. Then no one has no one no one wants to share real feedback unless they are anonymous. Uh that's the problem. That's why Facebook cannot solve it. That's true. Facebook has this real name policy. Um I don't know if I need to say that but I I I'm not able to verify my name on LinkedIn or Facebook because that's my not real name. My real name is Russian. But 20 years ago when I started it was too difficult for Americans. So I came up with an Smarty. Uh so guess what? both LinkedIn and uh Facebook previously kora also they had real name policies and that's why people cannot be open sharing their actual experiences and opinions so I don't think that could be a solution I think um I I think I know Reddit CEO is talking about bringing in biometrics um I don't think that necessarily has to um get rid of the anonymity part I think it just means that every one person has one account, right? And so, yes, maybe Reddit knows who you are, but it doesn't mean that you have to use a real name. I I don't see that the two are mutually exclusive. But I think one of the big things that Reddit does have in its favor is the federation level, right? Where moderators have vast amounts of power over their subreddit, same as like Facebook groups, unlike something like Tik Tok, right, where it's, you know, a single country system. Um, but it is a case I think that they have to recognize that some of the moderate they they're going to have to do a look at some of the subs as an said that are platforms for spam essentially. Um, so I don't know if that's moderator education or if it's a manual investigation and and just sweeping all of those um subs. Um, but something like that. What do you think um this is my my last question. What do you think Dig should have done? Why do you think DIG failed so hard and had to reset everything and what do you think they will do now? I think that's Dig's problem is that they let anyone create the SEA subreddit and um it's a failing of moderation, right? That the people that were most um affiliated to DIG were the people that probably bought it down in the first place, so they just rushed straight back, right? Um, so I think that they will need to have to create some of the of the the sort of like areas that are susceptible to to spamming. They'll may have to handpick some moderators. Um, which sounds really like a heavy-handed approach, but they may have to do that in in in order to relaunch instead of just using AI. I'm I'm actually surprised they didn't see that coming. I don't know what they were thinking to be honest like everyone everyone could see that coming but the founders of the Reddit of the dig launch but uh this is uh I agree with David this is something they could do and I think Facebook is trying to do that now they are actually trying to handpick influencers real human and pay them to be on Facebook so something like that the Dig needs to start with the team of trusted voices in different industries who will manage even if those are paid positions but who will manage the team of additional moderators their own rules and they will value their personal brands uh enough not to sell advertising spots in those subreddits. So that could be something they are cons they they can consider because I see that trend everywhere. Publications are using for are looking for real voices and real experiences and real expertise. At this point Facebook is drowning in AI. So they're trying to attract actual human beings that can make their platform because it it it is the lack of quality that everyone is now struggling with and they need more human beings and that if I were big that's what I would have launched to relaunched uh because it was obviously coming. I don't know why why they didn't see that coming for sure. Do you think DIG will just not allow their content to be indexed to stop parasite SEO at the beginning? I don't know. I don't think that'll change it. I I don't think that'll change the outcome cuz I the same type of spam that we saw in Dig is being sent to Reddit. It's automated. There's no feedback loop. They just keep creating brand new accounts to do it. Um I I don't think it's just a no index issue. Um I think with with um dig the potential for it to rank and for for it to be visible and therefore its connectivity to LLMs where links matter lives. Uh I don't think that's strong enough. I also don't think it's a sustainable um because Reddit can allow can afford this. They have huge enough community to sustain them even without Google. But for launching and not allowing that huge growth channel to be driving additional new members, I don't think they will survive uh by relaunching without letting Google send them users. I was thinking maybe they would start with just a select few communities. So like Reddit, when Reddit started, it was like the most popular communities. it was like pics videos maybe it was maybe ask Reddit was one of them and so Dig could just say okay what were the most popular comm community what were the most popular subreddits on Reddit let's start with those and then slowly open up topics and they could use AI so if somebody tries to create a a community in a topic that isn't open yet they say no no no we you're we can't do that just yet and then it could be very manageable the moderation could be very manageable like that I was thinking they need to start to work with people. They they need they need that passion that that it has because those moderators and it was a learning curve for me because it is easy to blame moderators and get angry with them when you are banned when you have problems with the subreddit. When you actually see what it is to be a moderator and when you think how long of a path of a Reddit user to the moderator is, you have to be very passionate about the topic and protective of yourself and all of that. it it I feel much more respect to Reddit moderators team at this point when I tried managing my own space on Reddit and um that is that is something that Reddit dig could work with from yes from a bunch of people that could make it happen for them and I'm sure there will be many many experts in any in mostly any topic that would be yes I can handle this I can dedicate my time to build the space for you. It's a land grab. So, I don't know if um I don't know if they can really put themselves in such a small circle because they've got so many people. They're they're probably targeting people who are disenfranchised by Reddit and Kora. And so, they probably aren't going to know which groups are going to take off. And so because they're not the first cuz they're doing a rerun, um they could alienate the subs that actually want are are where they're best suited to take off again, right? So it's not I don't it's probably easy difficult for them to tell which of those um topics are going to take off for them. And so that might that might be just too narrow a launch. I I I would suspect. Yeah. Who knows? We'll see. I'm going to I'm going to end uh with I I should have shared this story earlier…

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