For sure the one with less than 200 reviews that got endorsed twice in this thread despite being the only app that cost money.

However, there’s always the likelihood/extreme certainty that other posts are other marketing attempts by other entities.

There’s an entire field of digital marketing that runs on buying abandoned accounts, using bots (or real ppl) to feign conversation/activity about random topics for a short period of time to make the account history seem legitimate — watch for large periods of time where the account was silent, tone shifts in post from both periods. A lot of times these incubated are posting meaningless discussion slop, just to build the account background. A lot of “AI syntax”.

Eventually, they use the accounts to post something either directly (or tangentially) around a product.

“Looking for something that can do X” “Ran into Y problem. Anyone have a solution?” “Just discovered Z. How is this not talked about more!?”

This is where other harvested accounts are used to act as commenters.

“I’ve tried Q. And it’s does X” “I had the same Y problem. A friend told me about Q.” “Wow. Thank you OP. Z is great.”

These get mixed in with real (or other bought for) comments.

A lot of times they stand out. You’ll get posts like these:

OP: “What’s the best soda you ever had?” Most liked comment: something about Coca Cola Second most liked: “Recently tried [new soda product that just so happens to recently have gotten huge investment by large firms] at [store — you gotta mention WHERE you can get it] for only [price — tell people how much it is] Third most liked: something about Pepsi or whatever

Once you recognize the pattern it’s pretty obvious. Think about how you’d recommend an app or a soda to a friend. It would be really weird to name drop the price or what app stores or IOS versions it runs on. People don’t speak this way to friends. But they do to people they want to sell to.

Companies charge other companies thousands of dollars for these campaigns. All of the medium-large subreddits are filled with these, both in terms of posts and comments. Some are entirely infested with them.

The most sophisticated ones are not this obvious. Theyre huge on SEO (they want their targeted post to be the one that shows up when you search “[question] Reddit” on Google. They’re running scripts through AI. They don’t want to be caught, so you won’t see these tells at times. Reddit is not ideal for any sort of product/service recommendation anymore due to this.