{"data":{"items":[{"id":"8601a6c7-e34e-416b-956f-1fdc5d90f63a","excerpt":"Marketing head said they could “counter with infrastructure” when I refused to create 50–100 Reddit accounts for spam — On Friday, I was talking with the founder of a B2B infrastructure tool.He asked me where they could buy 50 to 100 Reddit accounts to push their brand across different threads.I told him I don’t do tha","url":"https://www.reddit.com/r/StartupsHelpStartups/comments/1vuzuvd/marketing_head_said_they_could_counter_with/","role":"pain","weight":0.9105386,"occurredAt":"2026-08-22T02:18:38.000Z","sourceKey":"reddit","sourceName":"Reddit","credibility":0.62,"venue":"StartupsHelpStartups","intent":"problem_report","painScore":0.58,"sentiment":-0.25,"confidence":0.57629025,"matchedPatterns":["frustrating"],"statement":"Reddit, especially, isn’t a place where you can fake authenticity forever.But the marketing head basically said they were still open to creating 50–100 accounts—and that if any issues came up, they could “counter them with infrastructure.”…","title":"Marketing head said they could “counter with infrastructure” when I refused to create 50–100 Reddit accounts for spam","body":"On Friday, I was talking with the founder of a B2B infrastructure tool.He asked me where they could buy 50 to 100 Reddit accounts to push their brand across different threads.I told him I don’t do that kind of work.Not because I don’t understand growth, but because the risk is obvious. If you spam communities using fake accounts, people will call it astroturfing, moderators will catch on, and it can create serious trust and compliance problems for the brand.The founder then created a group chat with me, him, and their marketing head.I explained again that this approach isn’t worth it in the long run. Reddit, especially, isn’t a place where you can fake authenticity forever.But the marketing head basically said they were still open to creating 50–100 accounts—and that if any issues came up, they could “counter them with infrastructure.”That line honestly bothered me.Because this is exactly how platforms get ruined.People stop trying to understand the community.They stop trying to create useful posts.They stop trying to have real conversations.Instead, everything becomes fake accounts, fake engagement, fake comments, and fake authority.Every day, it feels like we’re moving closer to the dead internet theory.The frustrating part is that I’m not against automation. I use tools like Accio Work to help with research, organize ideas, and reduce some of the repetitive work around content. But I still prefer working with real teammates and subject-matter experts when it comes to forming the actual point of view.Because authenticity matters on Reddit.AI can help organize or communicate an idea, but no AI, account farm, or “infrastructure” can replace human experience, genuine opinions, and actual participation in a community.And I think this kind of spam is one reason engagement is dropping across B2B, business, and marketing subreddits.Before, a useful post could reach the right audience fairly naturally. Now, everything feels more suspicious. Even good posts get buried because people assume there’s an agenda behind every comment.Automation should make real contributions easier. It shouldn’t be used to manufacture the appearance of trust.How are you all dealing with this?","offTopic":false},{"id":"998b206f-5e17-4703-9fc6-e88d2062a4d8","excerpt":"Finally landed an OP as a client last week. I’m amazed it worked :) — I use Reddit to get clients.\n\nI also use it like a normal human with varied interests, cough, the pit bull sub, but yes, firstly, I am here to get clients.\n\nAnd Reddit already works really well for me. It generates about 80% of my website traffic and","url":"https://www.reddit.com/r/EntrepreneurRideAlong/comments/1vs3ps1/finally_landed_an_op_as_a_client_last_week_im/","role":"demand","weight":0.867157,"occurredAt":"2026-08-18T22:12:00.000Z","sourceKey":"reddit","sourceName":"Reddit","credibility":0.62,"venue":"EntrepreneurRideAlong","intent":"alternative_search","painScore":0.33,"sentiment":1,"confidence":0.65199775,"matchedPatterns":["switching_from"],"statement":"We moved from Reddit DMs to email pretty quickly, scheduled a Zoom for the next day and he paid the deposit invoice before lunch.","title":"Finally landed an OP as a client last week. I’m amazed it worked :)","body":"I use Reddit to get clients.\n\nI also use it like a normal human with varied interests, cough, the pit bull sub, but yes, firstly, I am here to get clients.\n\nAnd Reddit already works really well for me. It generates about 80% of my website traffic and, currently, 100% of my clients. I usually get somewhere between 20 and 30 DMs a week, and some of those conversations turn into paid work.\n\nUp until last week though my clients were exclusively lurkers.\n\nThey see an answer I wrote, poke around my profile, visit my website and then send me a DM. Last week was the first time I landed the actual OP as a client.\n\nHe asked a pretty basic question. It was the sort of thing I’ve probably answered 20 times over the past nine months. I left a useful answer and went on with my day.\n\nThis time, he reached out.\n\nWe moved from Reddit DMs to email pretty quickly, scheduled a Zoom for the next day and he paid the deposit invoice before lunch.\n\nLess than 24 hours from Reddit post to paid project.\n\nSo that’s fun. And honestly, I’m still amazed it worked :)\n\nThere was no magical sales comment involved. I answered basically the same question I’ve answered many times before, repetition is a massive part of the Reddit game. This time the right person happened to ask.\n\nBased on what has worked for me, I think there are two important lessons for anyone trying to find clients on Reddit.\n\n# 1. The biggest lesson to know to succeed on Reddit, IMHO: Know the sub\n\nYou need to spend actual time in a subreddit before you post.\n\nReading the rules is not enough. The rules are one thing. The culture is something else entirely.\n\nI was reminded of this in fairly spectacular fashion last week when I made a genuinely emotional and vulnerable post in one of the Severance TV show subs.\n\nThe written rules said no low-effort or AI-generated content. Fair enough.\n\nWhat the culture apparently meant was, “If you have AI in your username, approximately 30 people will angrily threaten you within 30 minutes.”\n\nWhich was honestly kind of amazing because the post also got five thoughtful, human responses within the first 20 minutes. It clearly wasn’t spam or a low-effort AI post.\n\nI had just completely failed to read the room.\n\nThe written rules tell you what the moderators might remove. Spending time in the community tells you what people value, what they’re suspicious of, what jokes land and what will cause a spontaneous mob to form before you’ve finished making coffee.\n\nThis matters even more if you’re trying to get clients because people can smell a drive-by sales pitch immediately. You are participating in a community. You aren’t publishing to an audience you own.\n\n# 2. Be a human someone can actually hire\n\nThis sounds silly, but I see so many accounts trying to find clients while giving potential clients no way to investigate or hire them.\n\nNo real profile. No quick “hire me” link. Nothing explaining what they do. Sometimes the profile is private, so nobody can even see how they interact outside the one conveniently professional comment they just wrote.\n\nMaybe this is unfair, but when I see a private profile, my immediate thought is that this person writes things they don’t want potential clients connecting to them.\n\nNobody likes trolls. Nobody wants to accidentally hire one.\n\nIf I’m thinking about giving an internet stranger money, I want to see what they’re like when they aren’t actively trying to sell me something.\n\nMy Reddit history is absolutely not one long advertisement. People can see me talking about business and software, but they can also see me talking about my kid, my dog, church, food, TV and whatever else has my attention that day.\n\nI don’t think that hurts my client strategy. I think it’s part of why it works.\n\nPeople aren’t just hiring a list of skills. They’re trying to decide whether they trust this particular internet stranger enough to send a DM, move to email, get on Zoom and eventually pay an invoice.\n\nSo make it easy for people to figure out who you are. Fill out your profile. Include a simple link. Let them see that you actually use Reddit like a person instead of appearing five minutes ago because you smelled a sales opportunity.\n\nThen answer questions without demanding anything in return.\n\nMost answers won’t produce an immediate result. That doesn’t mean nobody noticed. When Reddit sends 80% of my website traffic, I know people are clicking even when they never reply or upvote.\n\nWrite for the quiet people. Answer the repetitive questions. Give people enough information to investigate you without having to take your word for it.\n\nMost of the time, the person who eventually hires you will be quietly reading from the sidelines.\n\nBut occasionally, the OP is the one who follows up and that feels extra awesome :)","offTopic":true},{"id":"ea2d3f3a-4a41-44c0-b649-bef7a0d04b40","excerpt":"Show HN: TrafficScout – Discover high-intent Reddit threads with AI agents — I’ve used Reddit as a customer acquisition channel for years. The challenge was always the same: finding high-intent threads every day and writing replies that were useful, compliant with subreddit rules, and didn’t trigger account issues.<p>D","url":"https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46236797","role":"request","weight":0.8143548,"occurredAt":"2025-12-11T20:37:26.000Z","sourceKey":"hackernews","sourceName":"Hacker News","credibility":0.7,"venue":"news","intent":"problem_report","painScore":0.36,"sentiment":0.71428573,"confidence":0.5987903,"matchedPatterns":["manual_process"],"statement":"Doing it manually worked well, but it didn’t scale and introduced risk when rushed.","title":"Show HN: TrafficScout – Discover high-intent Reddit threads with AI agents","body":"I’ve used Reddit as a customer acquisition channel for years. The challenge was always the same: finding high-intent threads every day and writing replies that were useful, compliant with subreddit rules, and didn’t trigger account issues.<p>Doing it manually worked well, but it didn’t scale and introduced risk when rushed.<p>So I built TrafficScout, a small tool that monitors Reddit in real time, surfaces conversations where people are actively asking for tool recommendations or alternatives, and generates draft replies based on thread context and subreddit rules.<p>I originally made it for my own products, then for a few friends, and now I’m opening it up.<p>What it does:\n• Watches Reddit for decision-making conversations (e.g., “Best CRM for small teams?”)\n• Scores each thread for buying intent\n• Generates reply drafts based on the conversation and rules\n• Checks account age, posting patterns, and shadowban risk\n• Tracks which replies continue generating traffic over time<p>Why I built it:\nA single helpful Reddit reply often sends traffic for months and sometimes ranks on Google.<p>But manually finding and responding to threads took hours a week. I wanted a workflow that reduced the repetitive work while keeping everything within Reddit’s guidelines.<p>What makes it different:\nIt doesn’t try to mass-post or automate your account. It acts more like a research and writing helper: find the right threads, reduce the manual steps, and keep your account safe.<p>The demo video shows live thread discovery and reply drafts.\n<a href=\"https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.trafficscout.app&#x2F;\" rel=\"nofollow\">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.trafficscout.app&#x2F;</a><p>I’d love feedback on:\n• The workflow\n• Whether the thread scoring makes sense\n• How useful the reply drafts feel\n• Safety considerations or edge cases I may not have covered<p>Happy to answer questions or share more technical details.","offTopic":false},{"id":"e67cb68b-c41a-4773-be92-a634d0af58dd","excerpt":"Why Reddit is the best social network for developers - and maybe for other people too — I’ve been a developer for five years, and AI has significantly increased how much I can build.\n\nIt can help me explore an unfamiliar API, generate boilerplate, debug code, write tests, and turn an idea into a working project much fa","url":"https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1vsxmig/why_reddit_is_the_best_social_network_for/","role":"request","weight":0.86258966,"occurredAt":"2026-08-19T20:09:48.000Z","sourceKey":"reddit","sourceName":"Reddit","credibility":0.62,"venue":"webdev","intent":"problem_report","painScore":0.36,"sentiment":0.6666667,"confidence":0.6342571,"matchedPatterns":["manual_process"],"statement":"I’m stopping the automated audience experiment, but keeping the useful lesson: every serious project should be shared manually with the community most closely connected to its problem.","title":"Why Reddit is the best social network for developers - and maybe for other people too","body":"I’ve been a developer for five years, and AI has significantly increased how much I can build.\n\nIt can help me explore an unfamiliar API, generate boilerplate, debug code, write tests, and turn an idea into a working project much faster.\n\nBut this creates a strange problem.\n\nWe can build more software than ever, while remaining just as bad at helping people discover it.\n\nFor many independent developers, the bottleneck is no longer implementation. It’s distribution.\n\nI tried to address that by building a system in which an AI agent would attempt to attract an audience from zero.\n\nI developed the website, analytics, public activity ledger, automation, and an MCP integration. The agent could analyze results, generate content, and execute parts of the process.\n\nBut it didn’t remove the need for human judgment.\n\nThe important decisions still came from me: defining the real objective, rejecting weak strategies, choosing alternative channels, and deciding when the experiment no longer made sense.\n\nThe AI initially pushed Hacker News as the main channel. I asked it to look elsewhere, which led to Reddit.\n\nThe feedback was mixed and sometimes critical. But people actually examined the idea and explained what they thought was wrong.\n\nThat almost never happens when I post on X or LinkedIn without already having an audience.\n\nThose platforms depend heavily on who follows you. Reddit can expose a post through a community organized around the subject itself.\n\nFor developers, that difference matters.\n\nGitHub can demonstrate that the code exists. A personal website can explain the project. LinkedIn can let someone verify who you are. But none of those automatically gives a developer a relevant group of people willing to discuss an unknown project.\n\nReddit can.\n\nI’m stopping the automated audience experiment, but keeping the useful lesson: every serious project should be shared manually with the community most closely connected to its problem.\n\nNot as a generic launch announcement. The useful post is the engineering story: what was attempted, which decisions failed, what the system actually did, and what remains uncertain.\n\nHow do you get useful feedback on a project when you don’t already have an audience?","offTopic":true},{"id":"4d332e3c-a168-49ec-a441-e8e2e10d0fab","excerpt":"40 hours of manual Reddit posting last month. 3 signups. Here's the breakdown. — Reddit kept embarrassing me.\n\nI'd spend a Sunday afternoon finding subreddits, writing something that felt genuinely useful, post it, and watch it get removed within two hours. Or worse, it'd stay up and get completely ignored. No comments","url":"https://www.reddit.com/r/SideProject/comments/1vtkbuc/40_hours_of_manual_reddit_posting_last_month_3/","role":"pain","weight":0.6128315,"occurredAt":"2026-08-20T14:00:21.000Z","sourceKey":"reddit","sourceName":"Reddit","credibility":0.62,"venue":"SideProject","intent":"other","painScore":0.33333334,"sentiment":-0.8333333,"confidence":0.4596236,"matchedPatterns":[],"statement":"40 hours of manual Reddit posting last month.","title":"40 hours of manual Reddit posting last month. 3 signups. Here's the breakdown.","body":"Reddit kept embarrassing me.\n\nI'd spend a Sunday afternoon finding subreddits, writing something that felt genuinely useful, post it, and watch it get removed within two hours. Or worse, it'd stay up and get completely ignored. No comments, no upvotes, just silence. I did this cycle for about six weeks across maybe 30 different communities before I started actually tracking what was happening instead of just feeling bad about it.\n\nThe pattern that emerged was honestly kind of obvious in retrospect but I missed it every time in the moment: the posts that survived weren't better written, they were better placed. Subreddits have these invisible thresholds, account age requirements, karma floors, topic restrictions that aren't in the sidebar, and I was hitting them blind. The communities that converted weren't the big obvious ones either. A 9,000-member sub in a specific niche drove more actual signups than a 400k sub where my post briefly lived before disappearing.\n\nSo I built something to solve the research problem, not the writing problem. It crawls a site, figures out what the business actually does, and maps it to communities that are likely to survive moderation and have the right audience density. That's [Reoogle](https://reoogle.com/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=community&utm_campaign=reoogle&utm_content=e6539adf-98f0-4dd1-b4bd-c5072d8c5eca&utm_term=sideproject), full disclosure, I built it, so take that with appropriate skepticism.\n\nStill figuring out how to explain what it does without it sounding like every other 'post to Reddit automatically' pitch that I'd immediately distrust. The automation angle isn't the interesting part to me, the interesting part was realizing I was fishing in the wrong ponds entirely, and that no amount of better copy was going to fix that.\n\nCurious if anyone else found that community fit mattered more than post quality, or if I just happened to be really bad at writing for Reddit.","offTopic":false}],"breakdown":[{"sourceKey":"reddit","sourceName":"Reddit","count":4},{"sourceKey":"hackernews","sourceName":"Hacker News","count":1}],"total":5}}