Why is this community full of sales pitches and spam?
Most posts have turned into disguised self-promotion, AI-generated research, and cold pitches from vendors looking for pain points instead of genuine discussions. This overwhelming amount of promotional content makes people stop reading the community entirely.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
- 1reporting and downvoting posts
- 2stopping reading posts altogether
- 3unsubscribing from affected subreddits
- 4Moving vendor posts and general questions to dedicated weekly stickied threads
- 5Reporting non-aligned posts to moderators
- 6Reducing overall participation
- 7Politely telling recruiters not to call and setting boundaries
- 8Canceling contracts after realizing the association with MLMs
- 9Hanging up or refusing to entertain the calls
- 10Using Akismet anti-spam plugin
- 11Meeting prospects in person
- 12Starting a conversation and listening to problems instead of selling directly
- 13Calling them on the phone
In their words
Unedited, most upvoted first, each linked to the thread it came from.
“The vendor spam was getting out of hand”source ↗
“It feels like only one in five posts lately is from someone with a real ecommerce problem. The rest are thinly disguised dev research, AI-tool validation, agency lead-gen, or startup people fishing for merchant pain points.”source ↗
“I'm on a call right now. It is my third call this week from someone in my networking group who wants to "help" me become a life insurance agent.”source ↗
“UPDATE: No kidding, I am on the fourth call right now!”source ↗
“the sub is quieter because 90% of posts are just disguised vendor spam. It makes me not want to participate.”source ↗
“That's why I stopped reading posts. most of them are just trying to sell something.”source ↗
“There’s so much slop in this sub, it needs to be moderated better”source ↗
“It doesn't get much traffic I hoped for (200 visitors per month), but scam comments come daily. I only use Akismet not anything else.”source ↗
“I wanted to ask if those comments show my blog getting more online presence? If so, is that something I celebrate?”source ↗
“I literally got recruited, by someone I connected with on a personal level. I signed up thinking I would only get my license to get a monetary commission from referring people to her.”source ↗
“literally every single day I get five to ten emails that are one to two sentences offering a business loan. The emails themselves are laughable in how they approach sales but the volume of them is unbearable. What can I do to stop or filter these? I'm concerned about creating too broad of an email filter that will capture customer emails.”source ↗
“I get multiple emails a day about people offering their services for anything and everything, including web design, SEO, marketing, lending, buying the business, etc...”source ↗
“I send every single one of them to spam without even reading it.”source ↗
“The vast majority of business owners have become extremely numb to email sales.”source ↗
“Even though most of them were keen then, once I contact them with a follow up, they seem to not respond.”source ↗
Where this came up
People with this problem also raised
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- 13Why does visiting Egypt feel like constant scams and harassment?
- 2Why am I getting so many unsolicited acquisition and sales calls?
- 4How to automate lead follow-ups without sounding robotic