So hear me out, I've been thinking about this for a while.

Why would anyone pay a person an actual wage to post on reddit? It just seems economically foolish.

The reason is, bots are just far more cost effective, in every way. Cheaper to deploy, cheaper to replace, cheaper to develop, etc. etc.

Bots are faster, can respond to real-time events FAR more quickly and efficiently.

And why have someone posting comments from a script or talking points, when bots can just crawl through looking for similar talking points that are organically posted by real humans, and then manipulate the votes in order to control the conversation?

Ok, so that's my general reasoning for believing that bot swarms do all the "heavy lifting" in terms of shilling, which leads me to my next point...

If paid posters aren't real or, at least, are actually pretty rare, then is it a stretch to imagine that all the talk of shills, all the fear mongering, the outrage, etc., are part just the general disinfo campaigns designed to sow discord in our community?

I'm interested to hear your thoughts and opinions.

TL;DR - "shills" aren't paid posters, just botswarms. the idea of paid posters is just disinfo to divide communities