Botnado Is Coming for Your Platform : Honey Vig Web Developer Ajax,Jquery, ASP, PHP, dotNET

Matt Dunphy, a Lead Solutions Engineer at commercetools, posted a story on LinkedIn that reminded me that Reddit has been a dumping ground for ChatGPT content and is turning into a spam ground for everything, and he inspired this Botnado edition of my newsletter, or maybe the approaching Boticane, or maybe we are in the eye of the storm. (Note to self: explain to the readers the movie Sharknado)

The story he posted, a team "currently paused on a commercetools implementation as the complexity came in higher than scoped," reads as if a merchant halfway through a commercetools build were asking strangers what to do next, and Dunphy says the story is fiction. I have not seen the thread, so I am leaving the question of who wrote the story to him.

I spent four days writing, rewriting, analyzing, and scrutinizing this issue. I removed 95% of the Claude content and left the analysis. (I am fully transparent in the article and you can skip the Claude shit if you want)

A bot that posts on Reddit does not deserve the credit ChatGPT gives it, and the evidence is below.

Why Reddit Threads Land in AI Answers About Platforms

Note to the reader: This is lots of research done by Claude. I wouldn't blame you if you just skipped this section.

In the next section, Claude will tell you a ton of stats and lots of bloated info that you may or may not want to read about ChatGPT and Reddit. I have so many sources to reference at the end, it is quite impressive. I will bold the sections I wrote. You can read the bold bits and get most of this section.

Take it away Claude! yippeee

Reddit is one of the sources AI engines cite most. Profound, an AI visibility company, counted 680 million citations between August 2024 and June 2025 and found Reddit at 21.0 percent of Google AI Overviews' top ten sources, 11.3 percent of ChatGPT's, and 46.7 percent of Perplexity's.

Semrush watched ChatGPT cite Reddit in about 60 percent of prompt responses in early August 2025 and about 10 percent by mid-September, which tells you the engines are still deciding how much weight a thread deserves.

People who watch Reddit know what is coming. MediaPost reported in July that AI-generated fake posts are being written to land in ChatGPT and Google AI results, and MediaPost cited Reddit's own figures of 23 million spam views blocked per day and nearly 2 million inauthentic votes revoked per day.

Researchers at the University of Zurich posted more than 1,700 AI-written comments under invented personas to a Reddit forum in 2025, and Reddit's chief legal officer called the experiment "deeply wrong on both a moral and legal level." That was a university experiment with no vendor involved, and I cite the experiment because AI-written posts under invented personas on Reddit are not hypothetical.

Planted text does not need to be large to matter. Anthropic, the UK AI Security Institute, and the Alan Turing Institute found that 250 malicious documents were enough to backdoor language models from 600 million to 13 billion parameters, which is 0.00016 percent of the training tokens, and the researchers say it is unclear whether the result holds for behaviors more complex than the gibberish they tested.

That study covers training data, which differs from the live retrieval an AI does when you ask about platforms, so it shows how little planted text can move a model and stops short of explaining any one thread.

AI slop is producing reviews, updates, and messages about all sorts of platforms all over the internet, especially on Reddit.

Now back to our regularly scheduled program

What I Tell People to Do About It

I would encourage people to filter down and do the research you need to do. If you see someone saying I was about to close on platform X, and I decided on Y then do your due diligence.

I also believe that the AI Slop-Shit that is happening, especially on Reddit, is going to get downgraded. It has to for our own sanity.

Until the Reddit slop gets downgraded, here are ten questions to ask your SI, the system integrator who will build the store, and this list is not comprehensive, only a place to start.

I wrote the questions for the SI and not for the platform because the platform answers most of what you need in public, in its documentation, its release notes, and its customer list, while the SI holds the answers that only come out in a conversation, who will do the work, what the work costs, who carries the overrun, and what happens when the scope changes, and the story that started this issue was a build paused because the complexity came in higher than scoped.

Which projects like mine have you delivered on this platform, and will the clients take a reference call?
Who will work on my project, at what seniority, and how long has each person worked on this platform?
Is the pricing outcome based or time and materials, and who carries the overrun if complexity comes in higher than scoped?
Which parts of the build come out of the box, and which parts are custom code I will maintain?
Which features in the plan are generally available, and which does the vendor's own documentation call beta or experimental?
What does year two cost, including maintenance, upgrades, and licenses?
Which other platforms in my vertical did you consider for me, and why did you rule out the other platforms?
How do you handle change management when the scope changes, including who approves the change and how the change is priced?
Who owns the code, the data, and the accounts when the project ends, and how does my data get used if the platform is SaaS?
Can I run a proof of concept on my own catalog and one checkout path before I sign?

Footnote. Claude helped me come up with these ten questions, and I encourage you to comment with better questions.

You don't want to check just one platform. You want to check other platforms that are in the same vertical as the platform you are interested in. For example, if it's commercetools, you want to look at other headless, API-first platforms that make sense for you to consider. There will always be four to five platforms that fit your vertical.

Examples of Checking Your Platform

I did the slow version on two platforms I like. On the Shopware side, the press release promised "100% MCP coverage," while the developer docs say the MCP server is experimental and still in beta. A merchant reading only the press release would come away with a different picture than a merchant reading the docs. The open issues tell a good story too. A bug that broke the extension's install was fixed within two days, with an apology.

On the commercetools side, the MosAIc page describes a preview and asks visitors to express interest, and the AI Hub page lists customer logos without saying which of them run on agentic channels. Which of those customers run on agentic channels is a question for a reference call, and a fake thread has no reference to call.

The list of platforms is much larger, but I chose these five, and I think all five are winners, commercetools, Shopware, SCAYLE, BigCommerce, and of course the elephant in the room, Shopify. A thread that nobody can trace to a person helps none of them. (I don't believe Shopify is the best solution for B2B, but I'd love to hear why others think it is.)

Three of these platforms, commercetools, Shopware, and SCAYLE, are German, and SCAYLE is just getting its footing in the US. Shopware is primarily B2B. So I have a question for you, are these Reddit posts geared to the German market?

Platforms I Have Already Written About

I chose Shopware and SCAYLE because Dunphy's post mentioned them, and I added BigCommerce and Shopify because I wanted a few more. I can only name a few platforms in one issue, and I apologize to the ones I leave out. Here are a few I have already written about, so you have my research to start from.

commercetools, When the Agent Shows Up Ready to Buy and my composable look at commercetools and VTEX
SCAYLE, Forever in SCAYLE Jeans
Shopware, The B2B App Addon Tax and The Problem is Your Business Not the Platform
BigCommerce, Experience AI in Commerce
Shopify, Four Numbers Cooling Inside Shopify's Best Quarter and When Shopify Is Not Easy

To restate my premise, when an AI names a platform to buy, what do you check before you trust the answer? Do you look at the citations? Or do you read what people are saying on Reddit?

Claude did the research and drafted the first pass of this issue, and I edited before anything went out. Shopware presented issue 63 of this newsletter and has no part in this issue.

More than 95 percent of this issue is in my words, and the remaining 4 percent is sourced facts and links. Claude gathered the Reddit research, and I left the Reddit section as written.