And for the majority of the large subs for a specific interest, they are astroturfed to hell and back. Much of the content you see on /r/all is likely corporate shilling with sock puppets controlling the promotion of the item and the comments within.
There should be Moore's/ Poe's law for the correlation of the size and influence of a site to the amount of corporate influence on said site. As the natural user base grows to a certain point, it becomes impossible to tell what is organic and what is advertisements or narrative pushing propaganda.
Same issue exists on Youtube and IG with product review shilling.
Sheds a whole new light on the situation when you realize the youtube vid you're watching for tool reviews is actually a disguised advertisement punctuated by auto playing obvious ads.
> And for the majority of the large subs for a specific interest, they are astroturfed to hell and back. Much of the content you see on /r/all is likely corporate shilling with sock puppets controlling the promotion of the item and the comments within.
And even more common than actual shilling is unsubstantiated accusations of shilling.
You could be right, I grant you, but anecdotally more cases of the latter stick out in my experience.
Good shilling (or "guerilla marketing") is hardly detectable, whereas people that complain about it are trying to draw attention. That could explain why cases of one are more visible (regardless of the actual frequency of either).
Good shilling is hardly detectable. Front the logo on a can of coke and leave it in frame (next to a ring maybe) while a couple kisses, post it with the title "happiest moment of my life".
It's subtle, you can use photoshop to make it, and anyone who would call you out on it can easily be framed as whiny and paranoid. They don't have the funds to buy influence on the thread anyway, so you could just slide their posts and avoid dealing with them if you wanted.
I'm not saying anything about how often this stuff actually happens (because no one will tell you they've done it so metrics aren't possible), but I will say only the most obvious plays can get caught. But enough about that, let's just talk about Rampart (joking there, I think AMAs are basically stated to be promotion, it just popped into my head)
It's true social media such as reddit attracts marketing, but that doesn't mean everything that could be marketing is. The obvious problem with claims of invisible marketing is that they're impossible to disprove. Also, if shilling were nearly as prevalent as the original commenter asserted it couldn't be kept such a secret.
There may be real shilling on occasion, but the damage to constructive discourse from unverifiable shilling accusations seems greater than whatever the benefits of constant vigilance are supposed to be.
If marketing were really so seamless and even valuable, it would remind me of xkcd 810: https://m.xkcd.com/810/
I know /r/bitcoin and /r/btc (for those who don't know, the two are on opposite ends of the Bitcoin vs. Bitcoin Cash aka small block/large block debate) toss the word around so regularly as to redefine it as a synonym for "dissent".
Posts like this seem so dishonest. The entire point of shilling would be hiding the fact that your shilling (otherwise you'd buy an ad), so of course we don't have deep documentation of exactly who is shilling when, where, how much they're paid, etc.
What we do have is the knowledge of companies/groups dedicated to "influencing online opinion" (e.g. Correct the record, Share Blue, etc.). They don't advertise what they're doing but there somewhere doing influencing. Seems reasonable that they'd be on the biggest social sites doing their work.
What I've personally seen as very obvious shilling is GMO related topics on reddit (regardless of where you stand on the issue). You can be on the most obscure sub you can find, and if anyone says something critical about GMO products there will be a rebutal post within a short time always using the exact same arguments, exact same articles, terminology, etc. When new variations of the defense are developed they are instantly deployed site wide. This is for sure an organized group of people. Are they paid for it? I'm not sure, but for the effort they put in I hope they don't do it for free.
If I had infinite time, it would be intesting to do some deep data analysis on the posts on reddit and try to figure out how many are coordinated.
People don't need to be part of a secret organization to use the same arguments, sources, and terminology. A common cause or ideology will suffice.
I'm sure shill-theorists are not puppets of a secret cabal, for example, despite them all using the same unsourced anecdotes and unfalsifiable theories in their attempts to expose the truth about shilling.
Its kind of astonishing to me how no one even seems to notice. Its not so popular now, but the /r/murica used to be a joke about overzealous patriotism, then it became something... else. pcmasterrace way back in the day did the same, now its just a pc enthusiast subreddit. I didn't pay as much attention to it, but the the_donald originally was tongue in cheek before it was overtaken by trump zealots and just strangeness...
> but the /r/murica used to be a joke about overzealous patriotism, then it became something... else
Maybe people did notice, and just decided to take this subreddit for something else than laughing at over-patriotism. It's a very successful strategy against shaming, if you can pull it off - just not being ashamed and not being afraid to demonstrate it. Reddit provides excellent venue for that, subreddits being good Schelling points.
Reminds me of a quote that goes something to the effect of "If you make company pretending to be idiots, than you'll eventually be in company of idiots."
Right that's basically Poe's law. Paraphrasing here but: "When a subject becomes sufficiently extreme, it becomes nearly impossible to differentiate serious discussion from satire".
I was thinking a combination of Poe's approach to subject matter with Moore's approach to the increase of transistors (users/ traffic in this analogue) over a period of time.
It was more of an offshoot of the gamer gate crowd. There were a few different pro Trump subs; TD just so happened to be the one that took off.
It is a pretty honest sub though; It's supposed to be a non stop Trump rally - clearly subversive content and discourse will be banned and removed.
Source: was there when the original mod drama was kicking off at around 30k subs. Can't remember the guys username but he got booted once the sub took off (around 100k subs) and its almost certainly run by mods on the campaign dole currently.
I wouldn't assume it's not happening on HN too. Think of the value of a prominent HN user's, or several users', positive comments about a product - in our industry, that's probably worth a lot more than the same on any subreddit (or on any blog or on Facebook). If advertisers have reached out to users on those platforms, why wouldn't they reach out to users here? If I were unscrupulous and had a product that HN users buy or influence, I'd definitely try it.
Being humans, we'd rather close our eyes to it unless we are compelled to face it - such things complicate every discussion and disrupt our happy community. And now you know why propaganda and advertising persist on Facebook and Reddit, and in society.
>they are astroturfed to hell and back. Much of the content you see on /r/all is likely corporate shilling with sock puppets controlling the promotion of the item and the comments within.
Is there any actual evidence of this as a widespread phenomenon? The /r/hailcorporate people are among the most annoying on Reddit.
If you are successful at astroturfing and have good stats to prove it, what would be your motivation to hide that? Of course you would not want to reveal specific campaigns, usernames & subreddits you used, but what would be your motivation to hide the stats that are not identifiable? Your corporate identity would not be linkable to astroturfing usernames anyway - that's kinda the point of whole enterprise - so why not make it publicly available?
OTOH, if you know or suspect that astroturfing has a very low ROI, you have lots of motivation to not publish anything, but instead tell the clients: "our ROI is spectacular, but unfortunately we can't show any data or stats because you know, we have to do it in secret, so just trust us and pay us $TONS_OF_MONEY, and it'll all be awesome!"
I can't provide any evidence but I will say any company not utilising the opportunity are missing out big time and it's actually extremely easy to do.
Try this yourself - use imgur and upload some reaction gifs to an account so you can go back and see the view count later.
Don't spam the images but work your way through some comments sections from /all, find some comments you can use your reaction gif on and head back to imgur a few hours later. I expect you may be surprised just how many views that one link you posted got.
Comments get way more views than a picture because people will read a comment more often as they scroll past than people who click a link.
Now imagine you're someone who wants to promote an idea or a product. The amount of eyes that go over what you type into that comment box has the power to drive big traffic. Even just a few thousand views from one comment looking at or even just thinking about that product or idea on a large scale with barely any effort.
I can't prove it happens but I'm more than confident it does.
There should be Moore's/ Poe's law for the correlation of the size and influence of a site to the amount of corporate influence on said site. As the natural user base grows to a certain point, it becomes impossible to tell what is organic and what is advertisements or narrative pushing propaganda.
Same issue exists on Youtube and IG with product review shilling.
Sheds a whole new light on the situation when you realize the youtube vid you're watching for tool reviews is actually a disguised advertisement punctuated by auto playing obvious ads.