Eric Siu explains why marketers flood Reddit with spam, especially around AI and content scraping opportunities. Short-term profits tempt them, but it's shortsighted. He warns new marketers based on hard-won experience.
The problem with Reddit is marketers started spamming the crap out of Reddit because like, oh, ChatGPT, you want to end up pulling from this? No problem, we'll just spam the crap. And Tim Soulo from Ahrefs had a funny LinkedIn thread because I think Reddit made some announcements like, hey, you know, marketers have been putting messages, self-promoting, spamming. And I think Tim Soulo said something that was cheeky. To me, it was funny, I loved it. And he's just like, actually, it's just getting started, which is spot on, right? If there's an easy way to make money, people are going to go hard on that, right? Yes. Eric and I are not in this phase of our careers, so we don't believe in spamming. It's just too short-sighted. And 20+ years ago, we tried the spamming approaches. We just know it's not long-term. Marketers will just spam the crap out of something because you can make not just some money, you can make millions and millions of dollars in profit. It may only last 2, 3 years, but your cost was very little. I would encourage you all, if you're just getting started in this in your career, spam away, because then you'll realize you get the repercussions from it, and then you get punched in the face a couple times, and then you stop doing it. That's how we learned over time.
