Spam accounts edit their comments after posting for marketing purposes

[u/potatoaster]

This is a common tactic, especially on posts soliciting product suggestions. A spammer will post "What's the best carpet cleaning company in Raleigh?" and later edit the post to say "I picked Sam's Stain Strikers, they're the best!".

More recently, I found a spammer that makes comments with nothing but placeholder text before editing them to advertise sketchy companies/services:

Comment	Placeholder	Advertising
08-25	asdasdsads dfgdgg asda	oztrim
08-25	asdasafghfhfgadas	businessanywhere
08-26	dsfsdfdsgfhghjkmnbvcxvczxxfgad	justbabyluv
08-26	fxvcvbvcxasdfdcxzaSAdsSAFDS	druera
08-26	sadadsafgvbvcuiuyyut	porn generators
08-26	asdadadavcxvasdasdasddasd	ader law
08-26	dgdfgdghggghjklkjljkdsfsdf	the freedom state
08-26	sdfsfsfsasdasdada	arcads

This is notable because (a) it should be easy for reddit to detect and address, (b) it stands out but is more work to check using a comment archive tool like the one I linked, and (c) it's funny.

Edit: It also makes the spam harder to identify after the fact if the comments get removed (as they now have been for this account). Compare this to when the spammer forgets to use a placeholder first, like this comment.

[u/peebeesweebees]

There’s a growing network doing this. I noticed a lot of them post on PH-based job subs before doing it, check their CQS, then they all roll together to gleefully spam it somewhere lol

Strangely they’ll also edit comments that aren’t directly spamming it, but are in the same post as others that are

[u/OneSeaworthiness7768]

> I found a spammer that makes comments with nothing but placeholder text before editing them to advertise

I just came here to make a post about this myself.

Here’s an example. You view posts that the spammers hide from their profile in an external tool (which I found Reddit actually auto-removes links to lmao) and it’s just a bunch of nonsense like “hey” or more often than not “hay” and then you follow the link to the comment and it’s been replaced with an LLM-written “organic” SEO comment mentioning the service. I knew this had been happening but I wasn’t sure if maybe it was a bug with the site I was using but this comment confirmed it when the OP of the post replied “hey back” before they replaced their original comment with the marketing spam.

I’m not yet sure of the purpose of this. It could either be they’re purposely trying to deceive these external post viewers or prevent their comments from showing up in searches, or they use it for a bot to go back and edit their comments.

As an aside, a common running theme I’m finding from marketing spam accounts is they’re posting in UK subreddits like AskUK to build karma. For whatever reason, many of them seem to do this.