I don't condone it but the best marketing I've ever seen and which gets to the top of Reddit every week is a company that runs a paid IQ test website. They post some type of outrage bait and it always gets traction. Practically nobody in the comments can tell; they're all focused on how some imaginary character in an image is boasting about an IQ score of 99.
I see about 50 posts a week which look like theyre raising an interesting point for discussion and about 3/4 of the way through it is a link to a blog or tool.
That said, what form of marketing actually works and is honest? I cant think of much.
One good example would be PGs essays. They are honest, I suppose, and they are very successful marketing.
You have an example in the wild?
Looking around on Reddit I see a lot of them have started to get banned, I was able to find the name of it though; Aptilink. An Aptilink viral marketing search yields posts like these; https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/18iyl5v/linkedin_... and people discovering it's marketing: https://www.reddit.com/r/HailCorporate/comments/1e9t44j/aita...
Maybe the solution is to ban editing. Or let moderators review + approve edits at least.
The gambling site “Stake” was doing the same thing recently, they’d make posts on financial advice or gaming subreddits and edit in a link (as to be “oh btw I need advice because I made money betting”). Were even using Greek Unicode “a”s and “e”s to hide from the automod filters. Scumbags among scumbags