Reddit knife forums show concentrated brand mentions—5% of accounts write 31% of one brand's recommendations in buying threads, four times chance prediction; but account histories span 4.5 years across 66 subreddits, making astroturfing unclear.

Does Reddit have an astroturfing problem? What the data suggests

One chef's-knife brand gets 31% of its "what should I buy" mentions from 5% of the accounts, four times what chance predicts. So I pulled those accounts' full Reddit histories.I like to cook, and cooking turned into an obsession with high-end Japanese chef's knives. When I want to buy a knife, or anything else, I type the product name into Google and add the word "reddit". A lot of people do this. Mike Riggs wrote it up in Reason in 2022 as "the Reddit hack", after Dmitri Brereton's essay on Goo...