Reddit's moderators catch over 70 percent of AI-written comments. Buying aged accounts fails because most marketers can't keep them looking real. Instead, hire someone who actually knows Reddit culture, build genuine relationships with users, and contribute real value to communities.
Reddit is really, really, really, really, I know I use a lot of reallys, but they're really good at detecting content or replies or comments that are created by AI and they just remove it.
We know some people, going back to Reddit for a second, because we haven't talked about how to optimize for Reddit. On Reddit, some people are buying accounts that have a lot of authority, right? To kind of insert themselves in the conversation. That's one element. But there's also Reddit reputation management. So what are you seeing on the Reddit side when it comes to how to play the game well?
Participate in the community, network with other people who are influential on Reddit. It helps knowing people with powerful accounts and, you know, have been used, been high Reddit contributors for years is very helpful. I think buying Reddit accounts, we've seen a lot of companies do that. The issue is they don't know how to maintain them. And I think that just causes problems because they look at it as like, oh, let me just buy these accounts and then promote my own business. I think that's very short-sighted. I think the real way is to You participate in the community, you network with other Reddit users, get to know them. Just like how I was talking about earlier, how I'll go meet up with enterprise companies and just shoot the shit and not talk about business and just maintain relationships. And in the long run, yes, it helps generate revenue, but that's not always my goal. A lot of these people are just friends and I've known them for years. When I was on Digg back in the day, the reason I did well on Digg was I networked with other users and I got to know them. And at that time when Digg was really popular, I had the highest ratio for submits to homepage hits.
Yeah, Digg was the thing back then and Neil was up there all the time. You know, back in the day when people didn't take blog comments as seriously, you would hire people to take care of your blog comments. So that was like ahead of its time. So you have to— my point of saying this is you have to engage with the community, you have to be authentic. And that's like saying a lot of like buzzwords, but In my mind, if you're going to try to do Reddit well, you probably should hire someone who really understands the game and is native to Reddit and is not trying to spam because we've tried all that stuff a long time ago. You try to spam the community, they catch it very quickly. Reddit is so good at catching that.
Yeah, the biggest mistake companies we see make with Reddit and posting on there is they use AI to create a response. And I highly recommend that you're not too promotional and you focus on helping out the community and you have someone manually write your replies because if you do that, you're much more likely to succeed versus if you use AI. And I'm telling you, they have a really high hit ratio of detecting if something's AI. And me and a few buddies, we did a fun experiment where we used AI 100 times on Reddit, right? So there's 10 of us, each of us did 10 times. And we wanted to see how many times they actually detected if it was AI written. We didn't use our main accounts because we didn't want anything to get screwed. No joke, over 70% of the time they detected if it was written by like a ChatGPT and they just removed it.
Wow, that's a lot.
It was over 70. I have to get the exact number. I know it was less than 80, but I know it was over 70.
It's also hard to find these Reddit people to hire too. Oftentimes you're going to find these people on like Reddit, that's one, on Discord channels as well. You're not going to find these people oftentimes on traditional—
No, marketing events. We find a ton of them at marketing events.
Like what marketing events?
Even at HubSpot, you know how many people here are on Reddit? There's a lot of them. Really?
Uh-huh. I didn't know that.
Percentage-wise, no, but you have a ton of marketers in the room. You're going to get enough of them that have been using Reddit for years.
No, I'm just saying if we want to, like if you want to traditionally, like if you're looking to hire like an agency executive, you're going to LinkedIn, you're going to source these people, right?
Yeah.
It's harder to find these people on LinkedIn. You're finding them in like the nooks and crannies of the internet.
We don't find them on LinkedIn. We find most of them through A, relationships, or B, going to events and talking about Reddit. And a lot of people who participate will be like, oh yeah, we do this or we do that. You'll end up meeting a lot of people who are active out there.
They're very different people. Anyway, we'll catch you later, guys.
