One chef's-knife brand gets 31% of its "what should I buy" mentions from 5% of the accounts, four times what chance predicts. So I pulled those accounts' full Reddit histories. I like to cook, and cooking turned into an obsession with high-end Japanese chef's knives. When I want to buy a knife, or anything else, I type the product name into Google and add the word "reddit". A lot of people do this. Mike Riggs wrote it up in Reason in 2022 as "the Reddit hack", after Dmitri Brereton's essay on Google search made the same point: a query with "reddit" on the end returns humans instead of affiliate pages. The bet behind the habit is that a stranger in r/chefknives has no reason to lie to you about a knife. That bet has an obvious weak point. If Reddit is where buyers go for unpaid opinions, Reddit is where a brand would want to plant paid ones. I wanted to know whether the knife subreddits I read, and scrape for New Knife Day, show any sign of that.…