[HN Gopher] RevisionDojo, a YC startup, is running astroturfing ...
___________________________________________________________________
RevisionDojo, a YC startup, is running astroturfing campaigns
targeting kids
RevisionDojo is a YC-backed test prep company ($3.4M raised) that
sells International Baccalaureate (IB) test prep. Over the past
year, users on r/IBO sub-reddit have documented a pattern of
unethical marketing practices: *Astroturfing:* Coordinated
campaigns where accounts pose as students sharing "cheatsheets" and
"predicted exam leaks." Other accounts then upvote, leave
supportive comments, and ask follow-up questions--creating the
illusion of organic student excitement. Multiple threads have
exposed this pattern [1][2][3]. *Paid fake posts:* High school
students report being offered payment to write promotional Reddit
posts [4]. *Pressuring critics:* Users who post negative reviews
report being contacted directly by company representatives, told
it's "a shame" they're posting publicly [5]. Critical comments
receive coordinated mass downvotes [6]. *Soliciting copyrighted
materials:* They use TikTok influencers and fake reddit posts to
persuade students to sell them official IB exam papers, violating
IB policies [7]. The r/IBO moderators are actively investigating
[8]. These practices appear to be working great for them.
Recently, they acquired OnePrep (oneprep.xyz), a free SAT prep tool
that was already popular on r/sat. Since the acquisition, the same
manipulation tactics have been deployed at scale: 150 Trustpilot
reviews in a window of a few days [9], and widespread coordinated
Reddit manipulation--multiple accounts posting "tips" that
recommend Oneprep, coordinated upvoting, and fake enthusiasm in
comments. The most prominent example was a 2,000+ upvote post
removed by moderators for manipulation, but it's part of a
sustained campaign across the subreddit. *Sources:* [1]
https://www.reddit.com/r/IBO/comments/1p55qun/ [2]
https://www.reddit.com/r/IBO/comments/1jsb00a/ [3]
https://www.reddit.com/r/IBO/comments/1ohcohi/ [4]
https://www.reddit.com/r/IBO/comments/1p55qun/comment/nqmhal3/ [5]
https://www.reddit.com/r/IBO/comments/1my1ajx/comment/na94upv/ [6]
https://www.reddit.com/r/IBO/comments/1my1ajx/comment/na8zvs4/ [7]
https://www.reddit.com/r/IBO/comments/1mej900/ [8]
https://www.reddit.com/r/IBO/comments/1my1ajx/comment/nagdkl5/ [9]
https://www.trustpilot.com/review/oneprep.xyz
Author : red-polygon
Score : 382 points
Date : 2026-01-05 15:34 UTC (7 hours ago)
| zx0r2 wrote:
| a YC company being unethical, shocking...
| throw-12-16 wrote:
| I am shocked!
|
| I mean I am shocked that this post didn't get flagged
| immediately ofc.
| tedivm wrote:
| Honestly I've posted about some unethical YC companies before
| and those posts got a lot of attention without being removed.
| That said we'll see what happens here.
| dang wrote:
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.
| ..
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Report to your state's Attorney General and the FTC. 404media
| also would be interested in knowing (Signal info on their site).
|
| https://www.naag.org/find-my-ag/
|
| https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/
|
| https://www.404media.co/
| ipsum2 wrote:
| Pickle, another yc backed startup, is also acting really fishy.
| They claimed they developed a standalone AR device, took money
| from customers, and now they're saying it requires tethering to
| your phone. https://x.com/cixliv/status/2008129653467492631
| throw-12-16 wrote:
| Don't forget about Honey!
|
| YC is full of scams.
| colinbartlett wrote:
| They do back a lot of companies. Is there any evidence that
| they are pushing unethical or illegal business practices on
| their portfolio companies at a rate higher than non-YC start
| ups?
| uoaei wrote:
| Why do you require comparison in order to determine whether
| or not this practice is unethical?
| beatslop wrote:
| That's not at all what he said.
| financetechbro wrote:
| They don't have to say anything. The market speaks for
| itself: do illegal stuff, don't get caught, capture enough
| market share of whatever it is you are pursuing, and you
| will be rewarded handsomely by investors. The name of the
| game is capital return at whatever cost necessary. We will
| be living through the repercussions of this system for
| decades
| KomoD wrote:
| > and now they're saying it requires tethering to your phone
|
| Where are they saying that?
|
| Also what is the second "conclusion" screenshot from? (Who is
| the "Matthew" and what analysis, mentioned in that screenshot?)
| HeckFeck wrote:
| "Disruption" comes to the world of junior academia. It was
| inevitable. Nothing's sacred.
| vuggamie wrote:
| It's OK. Paul Graham is one of the good billionaires.
| didntknowyou wrote:
| no surprise considering YC's fake it till you make it and growth
| hacking culture
| joshribakoff wrote:
| Absolutely, I have worked at several.
| sroussey wrote:
| Like the founders telling employees to lie about compliance cuz
| everyone does it.
|
| There is a line between fake it till you make it and fraud.
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| Astroturfing on reddit has been a thing for over a decade and has
| really accelerated over the last few years. There's several
| companies where literally that is their business model to promote
| your product or service on reddit. I saw one for sale on
| acquire.com a while back for 7 figures
| ikamm wrote:
| Sockpuppet accounts are literally the foundation of Reddit [1]
|
| [1] https://arstechnica.com/information-
| technology/2012/06/reddi...
| CamelCaseName wrote:
| Not a "gotcha"
|
| There's obviously a massive difference between using
| sockpuppet accounts to:
|
| * Influence perception on a social media platform as a 3rd
| party
|
| vs.
|
| * Put content on a social media platform that users are
| looking for so they return to the platform
|
| It doesn't matter who shares a story with you on social media
| if the goal is to entertain, but it does matter if the goal
| is to get you to do something [spend money on their courses]
| truetraveller wrote:
| The "value" of Reddit as a platform is knowing that people
| ORGANICALLY liked content. Otherwise, just go to an
| aggregator. These sock puppet accounts were there to
| deceive, no doubt. Obviously, they are "different" in some
| ways, but deceptive nonetheless.
| Teever wrote:
| I'm shocked when I come across people who think that
| sockpuppeting doesn't happen on social media including HN.
|
| I wish there were laws that required large social media sites
| to publish data to their end users that indicate the severity
| of the problem.
| lispisok wrote:
| HN is so prime to sockpuppet on because of its fairly low
| comment rate but high concentration of users who can make
| technology decisions at companies.
| notahacker wrote:
| Sure, but I suspect also harder because it's full of
| contrarians that will point out at least five better ways
| of solving the problem and people that upon being greeted
| with anything that looks like disguised marketing copy will
| spontaneously combust. And if you do manage to sneak a URL
| into a discussion without anyone thinking it's marketing,
| the next four comments will be about whether the design of
| the landing page is unsuited for people with 2400 pixel
| wide monitors or people with noscript enabled
|
| (Also it's the kind of website where you absolutely can get
| good responses from "Show HN: A thing you might want to use
| and here's how much profit I'm making from it already"
| until a bunch of green usernames say nice things about it)
| immibis wrote:
| But also easier because those comments quickly become
| dead.
| uoaei wrote:
| Contrarianism is an effective sockpuppet tactic, then, in
| order to buy legitimacy and trust in the marketplace of
| ideas.
| fragmede wrote:
| The beauty of this system, is that an amoral attacker
| then just pretends to be the competitor and advertise
| their site and fucks up their reputation, and get
| everyone on the Internet mad at them.
| throw-12-16 wrote:
| Its a goldmine for social engineering, has come in handy
| personally a few times.
| throw-12-16 wrote:
| I got downvoted like mad for suggesting that HN is a
| marketing outlet for YC.
|
| The people who frequent this forum think they are immune to
| astroturfing because they all work in ad tech.
| immibis wrote:
| Same here. I pointed out HN is the marketing arm of a
| capitalist investment fund and got flagged to oblivion.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| HN gets a lot less sockpuppeting/astroturfing than reddit or
| twitter, as far as I can tell. There is some of it, but if it
| gets too big dang et al seem to generally put a stop to it.
| gosub100 wrote:
| It's so painfully obvious too. On my local subreddit: "what's
| the best ice cream shop in $CITY?" Check their post history,
| one "lol" on a cat pic on /r/aww 8 months ago.
|
| 4 lines of code could catch this.
| SamBam wrote:
| And yet I suspect it's super effective, because of the
| powerful illusion of it being real people.
|
| There's the classic search "hack" of adding site:reddit.com
| to any product recommendation search, to find "real"
| recommendations.
|
| Most of the time this is going to find 5-10 posts, each with
| only a dozen comments and a dozen up-votes. And yet it
| _feels_ do much more real than whatever at the top of Google
| that many people will trust these reviews.
| tclancy wrote:
| And the new feature to hide your post and comment history
| makes it impossible to even guess at whether someone is a
| "real" person or not.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > Check their post history, one "lol" on a cat pic on /r/aww
| 8 months ago.
|
| And now Reddit has made it possible to hide your post
| history.
|
| Probably because of this exact issue.
| ZoneZealot wrote:
| The funny thing about that is it's extremely simple to
| bypass. On old or new reddit, search 'author:example' to
| find posts by /u/example. Or to see both comments and
| posts, on new reddit go to the user profile and do blank
| search like a single space character.
|
| That's using reddit's own site, of course there are other
| methods like Google dorks.
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| Well that and some moderators of large subreddits like to
| ban people based on participation in other subreddits that
| "disagree" with whatever flavor echo chamber the moderator
| happens to live in.
| baxtr wrote:
| For those like me who didn't know:
|
| _Astroturfing is the practice of creating a fake "grassroots"
| movement to make it look like a cause, product, or candidate
| has widespread public support when they actually do not._
| echelon wrote:
| You should see Higgsfield right now.
|
| They're buying stolen Reddit accounts and spamming over 500
| videos a day to various subreddits.
|
| They're also advertising fake "unlimited" plans. Their
| reseller pricing (they're a reseller) is 1/10th the upstream
| API pricing, so they're metering and throttling and banning
| users that cost them money.
|
| They're getting thousands of people to subscribe to $1800 "18
| month" plans.
|
| Their unofficial subreddit is full of complaints. Probably a
| dozen complaint threads a day now.
|
| Highly unethical company.
| tedivm wrote:
| Also for people who don't know, if you pay someone to post
| something (including just giving them a free product) it has
| to be disclosed. Astroturfing is (in simple terms) a form of
| fraud and the FTC does go over companies for it.
| mapmeld wrote:
| I'm seeing a much less sophisticated campaign for this on my
| city's subreddits recently... Someone will ask a weird or
| generic question, and either poster or the top comment is a
| throwaway account with a spiel about checking $site_name.
|
| It's exhausting, especially since people will write out real
| advice and corrections about how to deal with rats, bedbugs,
| neighborhoods, etc. and it all goes into the ether in hopes
| someone will get scammed. Or maybe it's an SEO thing because
| the site name is so generic it's un-googleable. I hope it
| doesn't work.
| rchaud wrote:
| This is the same kind of spam that overwhelmed blog comment
| sections and sent everyone scurrying to Reddit and Facebook
| 15 years ago. The spam was always had a generic comment
| praising the post and a line below shilling dick pills and
| Prada bags, but spelled like _v_1_@_g_r_@_ and the URL was
| simiarly obfuscated so they didn 't trip a spam filter.
| m1sta__ wrote:
| The conservative subreddits go from hundreds of active users to
| tens of thousands of active users depending on the talking
| points of the GOP at any moment. It's very very obvious.
| arm32 wrote:
| This thread will be hidden soon.
| throw-12-16 wrote:
| hello dang!
| minimaxir wrote:
| Hacker News doesn't memoryhole anti-YC threads.
| throw-12-16 wrote:
| lol it absolute does
|
| you ever notice how most YC announcements have comments
| disabled?
| minimaxir wrote:
| Those are job ads (a special type of post), not normal user
| discussions.
|
| Actual YC announcements do not have comments disabled.
| jascha_eng wrote:
| They do however often ask friends and family to upvote
| and leave comments. Like "we have been very happy using
| XYZ" which is against HN rules but not that strictly
| enforced. I feel like it is extra-lax towards YC
| companies but maybe I'm imagining things.
| dang wrote:
| On the contrary, we particularly tell YC founders not to
| do this--mostly privately, but there's a public version
| of it at https://news.ycombinator.com/yli.html (scroll
| down to "Comments" and see the part in bold. That's me
| trying to scare them.)
|
| We do tend to be more lenient when there's no evidence of
| organized manipulation, just friends/fans/users trying to
| be helpful and not realizing that it's actually
| unhelpful. What dedicated HN users tend not to realize is
| that such casual commenters usually have no idea how HN
| is supposed to work.
|
| But this leniency isn't YC-specific. We're actually
| _less_ lax when it comes to YC startups, for several
| reasons.
| uoaei wrote:
| Can you make a case why you'd be an authority on the matter?
| minimaxir wrote:
| I know a bit how HN works:
| https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
|
| But as noted by freehorse, dang has stated it multiple
| times and I personally have not seen any threads
| memoryholed and would call out YC if they were.
| freehorse wrote:
| To be fair, a moderator has stated this many times https://
| hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
| onetimeusename wrote:
| What is this cheatsheets and predicted exam leaks stuff? I don't
| mean to sound naive but is cheating a significant part of the
| test prep space?
| stuartjohnson12 wrote:
| I looked into founding a company in this space and steered
| straight back out of it because yes, by far and away the VAST
| majority of demand in the market of study tools for high/middle
| schoolers is cheating. Below that, parents are involved and
| there's a market there (but a bad one, because of double sales
| where you have to sell through the parent to the child even
| though those two actors have misaligned incentives).
|
| https://www.gauthmath.com/
|
| This AI cheating app is currently #8 for "education" in the iOS
| app store.
| onetimeusename wrote:
| That is interesting and kind of what I suspected anecdotally.
| I think it's unfortunate for people who aren't aware of all
| this. That is what I will say.
| cinntaile wrote:
| A cheat sheet could be a piece of paper you're allowed to bring
| to an exam. To make a proper cheat sheet you have to understand
| the material you're working with anyway so it usually doesn't
| help you.
| 1718627440 wrote:
| I usually does help you by having written it.
| opengrass wrote:
| Welcome to Reddit. That, and the code camp thing. Reddit is a
| terrible anyway.
| throw-12-16 wrote:
| Reddit is the garbage bin of the internet.
| qwerpy wrote:
| Better to have the garbage collected somewhere than to have
| it strewn about everywhere.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| Coincidentally, I just observed that the USAA subreddit is very
| likely to be astroturfed.
| bigbadfeline wrote:
| > _Astroturfing:_ Coordinated campaigns... [to post,] upvote,
| leave supportive comments, and ask follow-up questions--creating
| the illusion of organic excitement... Critical comments receive
| coordinated mass downvotes.
|
| I thought that was the dictionary definition of social media? If
| it isn't yet, it should be, Reddit is just the tip of the
| iceberg.
| tedivm wrote:
| There are laws in the US, and if you're advertising you have to
| disclose it.
| TZubiri wrote:
| Proposal to change title from "kids" to "teens"?
| SpaceNoodled wrote:
| Teens are kids.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-01-05 23:01 UTC)