Shills

Do you have some proposal for how to differentiate between a "shill" and someone who just promotes something you don't want to see? "Shill" is a dismissive term that seems more often than not to be used for dismissing people posting dissenting opinions as not legitimate.

This may be a little controversial, but I think the existence of "Hail corporate" content on reddit is overblown. Does it happen? Sure. But I think most of the paranoia comes from genuine content that happens to feature a particular brand.

The solution is for individual users to have awareness and a healthy skepticism about brands. If people actually like the post and the no rule breaking methods (i.e. vote manipulation) were used to promote it, then there's not much you can do without genuine content being caught in the crossfire.

It depends on what you mean by a 'shill' account. That's a loaded word that could mean very different things.

There are groups of people out there who pay money to have their agendas or products pushed on social networking sites. We had quite a tussle with youtube's EDM promo networks in listentothis because they were aggressively pushing this stuff. Our solution was pretty direct - ban all the promotion channels. If you can't link to them, you can't promote them - and they can't just pack up and start a new channel, or they'll lose all of their subscribers. There's been a lot of this sort of banning all over reddit - most mod teams tend to notice when one group or another is trying to artificially inflate their status.

I expect advertising-related promotion attempts to be a lot stronger on tildes, since it hasn't got advertising. Getting that stuff in as legitimate submissions is the only way they can do it here. It's funny though, it seems like even on reddit, advertisers are happier to hack in and take the viral route than they are to pay for actual advertising. That's probably because it's so easy to create new accounts on reddit. It won't be that easy here thanks to the trust systems.

It's not typically difficult to identify paid posters, because their comment histories don't read like those of real people having genuine interactions. Beyond that simple definition of 'shill' I'm not sure what else you mean.