Unfortunately, advertisers are getting smarter and using bots to praise their own products on Reddit. Thanks to training on genuine comments, some models are very good at sounding like a human commenter, and can easily generate a comment history with diverse interests to appear human, making them basically undetectable. So it seems like this method will, at some point, not identify the company with the best knife, but the one with the most ad spend on bot comments.

An analysis of 51,129 comments across six knife subreddits finds that the top 5% of accounts write 11.3% of buying-thread recommendations, when chance would predict 7.9%. For one specific brand, 31.2% of its buying-thread mentions come from those accounts. But when you pull their full Reddit histories, they're 4.5 years old, post across 66 different subreddits, and name seven different brands. They don't look like paid accounts: they look like fans with strong opinions. The author's own summary: if you see a recommendation from an account you don't recognize, check whether it has ever named a different brand.