While there's a powerful inclination to take Reddit recommendations, it's also increasingly dangerous. Just from normal usage, it's increasingly apparent that a

While there's a powerful inclination to take Reddit recommendations, it's also increasingly dangerous. Just from normal usage, it's increasingly apparent that a disturbing proportion of comments are astroturf. There's a flood of accounts that have generic names in the form of word-word-number or word_word_number, usually are only a few days or weeks old with little karma, and run around threads responding to everything until they're banned or cycled out for a new account. This happens not just on political topics, but things related to brands. It's very clear that paid actors are out there attempting to manage public opinion about brands or advertise products. IIRC, part of the original supposition was that produce related search results were flooded with spam sites promoting products...but the bar is far lower to do the same with Reddit accounts. You don't even need an email to create one, let alone a domain name or hosting. There's a very real spam problem, but spam-fighting is stuck in the past.