As a moderator of a major technical community on Reddit, I (and the other mods) probably spend more effort on squashing astroturfing campaigns than anything els

As a moderator of a major technical community on Reddit, I (and the other mods) probably spend more effort on squashing astroturfing campaigns than anything else related to moderation. Removing astroturf posts and banning associated accounts is a daily task. Some vendors are so aggressive about this that we've had to institute automod rules to nuke any post that includes certain brand or product names. Thankfully most vendors or their marketing agency affiliates that engage in this sort of thing aren't particularly clever about it, so identification of puppet accounts to ban isn't too difficult.