Companies definitely astroturf on Reddit, but, they do it through third or even fourth parties. There is a whole micro industry of vote buying and comment spamming, ad firms or companies will pay such groups to add certain messaging to their comment spam. You can actually make a quick buck by selling any old Reddit accounts to such groups.
Because they’re playing a role, an actor so to speak, they’re not presenting their own personal opinions. They’re vocalizing and embodying the output of a series of complex internal mechanism, it’s a slow moving self optimizing system beyond the comprehension of any individual working with in the system.
Much like AI’s it often outputs stupid shit.
Which is to say, the average person is in fact not stupid, they are average. By definition.
Look up a bell curve, most measurements of intelligence that have been conceived end up making a bell curve distribution. That’s your answer, most people pool up around the middle with smaller tails on either end.
oh yah, I remember the absolute torrent of crypto shills that started spamming the place when crypto shill posts from other subs started getting posted there.
They were proper angry that they got called out.