Astroturfing on Reddit and the dead internet

Reddit used to be a good source to find real recommendations. Well, not anymore. Years ago, I used to append "reddit" to my search queries to find real discussions about products.

If you search for managed Postgres on Reddit, you may stumble on posts like this:

If you look at the profile of the person who created it, their posting history is usually private:

u/xxx likes to keep their posts hidden, but check out their stats to learn more about them.

But when you do some research and look at their other posts from Reddit dumps to find their real identity, you see this:

By diving deeper, you notice that there are around 10 accounts that constantly ask about managed Postgres or recommend a specific provider. They are all connected to the same company. And they are engineers! It's now part of their job to do astroturfing for their company!

Their job is to create posts on Reddit asking for recommendations, upvote them using multiple accounts and make replies. If you create a new post asking for a managed Postgres provider, they will also come and reply with their recommendation.

Asking LLMs

Asking LLMs such questions does not help either. They are trained on the same Reddit posts and numerous "Top 10 providers" garbage articles generated by the same LLMs.

To be on this list, you have to either be very big or do black SEO style marketing to poison answers. The database recommendations are not based on quality, stability, features or engineering tradeoffs.

How I search for services now

The dead internet theory is starting to feel real.

For me, the only reliable way to pick a good technology is to read corporate blogs and ask for recommendations from people I know and trust. If I see deep technical posts when picking a technology, I feel more confident in the product. Especially when they are honest about tradeoffs and failures. When all I see are marketing-type posts, that does not tell me anything.

The managed database space is so crowded that people are willing to do anything to get more customers, as if there is no tomorrow.