What marketing strategies do you consider unethical, and which ones do you consider brilliant?
During today’s standup meeting, an idea came up about improving our presence on Reddit (for LLM search visibility and similar reasons).
One of the suggestions was to look for high-karma accounts and possibly buy them to appear more credible when posting and mentioning the product within the posts/comments. It’s a tactic, sure, but to me it already feels like it crosses an ethical line. I sometimes worry they can seriously damage a company’s reputation.
There are also other practices, such as:
– Fake purchase counters on websites
– Buying followers and likes
– Exploiting a brand’s reputation
– Spreading misinformation
– Clicking on competitors’ Google ads to drain their budget
And the list could go on.
What do you consider dishonest marketing practices? Have you ever had personal experience with them?
On the other hand, have you ever seen a marketing tactic and thought: “That’s genius!”
Replies
Jupitrr AI
minimalist phone: creating folders
@lakshya_singh These feel so basic that I totally forgot them. 😅
These tactics degrade what marketing truly stands for. Businesses chase them as "shortcuts" or "hacks" to build a brand, but they're illusions.
Worse, ad platforms themselves perpetuate the scam: plastering your ads on fake or irrelevant sites, inflating clicks as conversions, and painting a rosy picture that burns through budgets, delivering zero real business.
A team that shows up consistently with quality content even once a month, is genius. Discipline is rare and hard-won, but it's what truly sets you apart.
minimalist phone: creating folders
@shikha_pakhide yeah, but have a look at Meta, that platform was okay to charge for ads that promoted scams :D
@busmark_w_nika Yes, and google is not far behind as well. And in all this we are stuck..
I get why some of these tactics are tempting, especially early on.
But personally, I’d rather build something authentic — even if it’s slower and doesn’t monetize right away.
Things like buying accounts, fake counters, or misleading users might give short-term results, but they damage trust long-term. And once trust is gone, it’s very hard to rebuild.
What I find genuinely “brilliant” is much simpler:
• content that actually helps people
• being transparent about what you’re building
• a product that people want to share
Maybe it’s not the fastest path, but it’s one I can stand behind.
minimalist phone: creating folders
@raquel_alves1 people want to have fast results and I totally get your point (which is what I am standing for too)... but lately noticed that after building my personal brand for more than several years, my account can be taken within seconds, it is not encouraging.
For me, the line is crossed when marketing tries to fake trust instead of earning it. Buying high-karma accounts, fake counters, fake reviews, fake followers — they may create short-term social proof, but they destroy long-term credibility if exposed.
minimalist phone: creating folders
@alpertayfurr Unfortunatelly, thisis how today's world works.
I considered buying accounts myself. New account, no karma, and most subreddits just silently ate our posts. never pulled the trigger because it felt like the kind of shortcut that poisons everything downstream.
unethical: astroturfing, fake reviews, engagement pods. anything where you're performing popularity instead of earning it.
brilliant: genuinely answering questions in communities where your product is relevant. not dropping links, just being useful. slow , and boring, but it actually works.
minimalist phone: creating folders
@maliikb is it more likely to get approved post when the product is not pre-linked?
@busmark_w_nika yeah, massively. most subreddits have AutoMod rules that flag or silently remove posts with links, especially from newer or low-karma accounts. some subs have multiple filter layers that you'll never even know about because the post just disappears instantly, with the notification sometimes not coming up or showing mintues later.
what worked better for me was posting the insight or the story without any link. if people find it useful, I'm hoping they check my profile or ask. a comment reply with a link after someone asks feels earned. a post that opens with one feels like an ad, and the mods agree.
The irony is the posts where we tried hardest to share our product got zero reach, and the ones where we just answered someone's question honestly got the most profile clicks.
Asa.team
Buying Reddit karma accounts is just bad strategy on top of being shady. Those communities smell inauthenticity fast and the backlash is way worse than whatever you gained.
Best "marketing" I've seen is just being genuinely useful in spaces where your users already are. Boring but it actually compounds.
minimalist phone: creating folders
@ng_junsheng I know that the best thing is to invest the time, unfortunately, not many people have it :D
For MapleBridge, I am trying to avoid exactly this kind of shortcut.
Buying accounts, fake engagement, or spammy backlinks may create a temporary surface signal, but it destroys the trust layer that B2B products actually need.
The slower but better path for us is to turn real sourcing briefs, missing-field checklists, supplier risk notes, and anonymized buyer cases into long-term content assets. It is less flashy, but it compounds because it helps people understand the problem more clearly before they ever talk to us.
So for me, brilliant marketing is not manufacturing trust. It is making real work visible in a way that keeps being useful.
Honestly, anything that relies on fake credibility eventually backfires. You can’t really shortcut trust.
In the long run, consistency + real user value always wins over tactics like buying accounts or engagement.
If anything, building something people actually want to talk about naturally creates the kind of visibility everyone is trying to force.