Wow, that seems really small scale to me. First of all, just like HN, it's possible for a young/karma-less account to hit the front page, in that there are no inherent barriers. The main difference -- besides interestingness of the content, of course -- is whether or not that post gets enough valid upvotes to get noticed on the subreddit's top links...after which it continues to snowball up the karma points.

So why would marketers need to buy accounts that looked real? I know that Reddit has some ability to detect karma-rings and suspiciously upvoting patterns...but I can't recall many past instances where Reddit itself uses heuristics and an automated system to tell if a given upvote came from a geniune users, based on the user's quality of past posting.

While the history of a user who posts something will be visible to all other users...it's rare that people take the time to comb through someone's history...it happens occasionally in partisan forums (i.e. if you post in r/sandersforpresident in a concern-trolling way)...but so many Reddit users are pretty casual that most reddit posting histories consist of quick quips and comments...just generate 50 of those posts, not all in one day or in one subreddit, and that would throw off most scrutinizers.

But that's besides the point. Users who upvote can't be seen by the public, and neither can their histories. So why bother paying a premium price for a single, established account, when it's easy enough to create new accounts and divvy up the upvoting?

In contrast, such a system wouldn't work on Twitter, where the identity of the account and the followers it has is critical to making something stick...i.e. paying for 10 minutes of write access to Ashton Kutcher's account is going to be a better ROI than having 10,000 twitter bots to retweet your astroturf.

I wonder, if those folks are so bad at marketing, where is the $120 coming from? Is this a new venture for them that's doomed to failure unless they get better at it?

I wonder how much established HN accounts sell for - another reason to opt for a real name policy.