> There are people paid full time to manipulate Reddit (and other networks.) The people and states employing them must be fools to waste so much money for no ec

> There are people paid full time to manipulate Reddit (and other networks.) The people and states employing them must be fools to waste so much money for no economic reward. This is a strawman. Of course there are people paid to influence every single public opinion website from Twitter to Hacker News. That is a completely separate question as to what the economic incentives of moderators are. The only way that makes sense is if you are making the claim that the plurality of moderators, or at least some exceptionally high percentage, are paid or otherwise compensated by somebody else to manipulate their subreddits. There is no data to indicate that this is a widespread coordinated or otherwise repeatable business practice such that we could say that it is an economic system, comparable to other economic systems.