I found black-hat content marketers: sockpuppet bloggers, fake Reddit/HN accts
The Twitter thread has a lot more. There's a person or firm who is doing black-hat content marketing at scale. They either approach freelance bloggers to write articles about their clients (to be submitted to Medium-hosted and similar blogs as if written by unaffiliated users), or create Medium profiles for fake names and write the posts themselves. Posts have appeared in Better Programming, DEV.to, FAUN, freeCodeCamp, HackerNoon, ITNEXT, JS in Plain English, Level Up, Towards Data Science, and other aggregators.From there, they use dozens of fake Reddit and HN accounts to submit, comment on, and artificially boost their own posts. They also submit some unrelated cover posts. You can see some of these on HN here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...They have sockpuppet Reddit accounts doing the same thing across 10s of subreddits.Here's the set of clients I know of (https://twitter.com/troyd/status/1316020415995674624):AccessiBeClimaCellImpervaLoadmillRookout LabsWhiteSource (AKA SecureCoding dot com)TestcraftI have no idea what they thought they were buying, but what they were receiving was black-hat content marketing at large scale. There may be other clients I don't know of.Here's some Medium profiles of authors, where you'll see those companies get plugged over and over. I expect some of these will be removed by the authors soon:https://medium.com/@AntonLawrencehttps://medium.com/@Justin_Parsonshttps://medium.com/@geeostan8https://medium.com/@Dickson_Mwendiahttps://medium.com/@arinomanhttps://medium.com/@oyetoketoby80https://medium.com/@mrsaeeddevhttps://medium.com/@ginomessmerhttps://medium.com/@diptokmk47https://medium.com/@sajjadheydari74https://medium.com/@ngwaifoong92https://medium.com/@SeanHighttps://medium.com/@henson.casperhttps://hackernoon.com/u/ari-nomanhttps://hackernoon.com/u/diptokmk47There's probably others I'm missing. If you run a blog and one of these companies is mentioned in a post that doesn't disclose an affiliation, it may well be fake. I contacted many of the publishers above. To quote Quincy of freeCodeCamp in https://twitter.com/ossia/status/1316216151802667008 after he researched this: "Stay vigilant, friends."