[SamBam]

And yet I suspect it's super effective, because of the powerful illusion of it being real people.

There's the classic search "hack" of adding site:reddit.com to any product recommendation search, to find "real" recommendations.

Most of the time this is going to find 5-10 posts, each with only a dozen comments and a dozen up-votes. And yet it feels do much more real than whatever at the top of Google that many people will trust these reviews.

[tclancy]

And the new feature to hide your post and comment history makes it impossible to even guess at whether someone is a "real" person or not.