This story and its retellings appear on Reddit's front page every two months like clockwork.
https://www.reddit.com/search/?q=huy+fong
Each time it gets retold, the sriracha cartoon villain's mustache grows longer and more twirled.
Somehow, Underwood Ranches' competing product never gets failed to get mentioned in a top comment, along with all the places you can buy it, how much better/hotter it tastes, and how superior its ingredients are.
I've never seen something so obviously and clumsily astroturfed, yet be so effective. Their entire growth strategy is enemy positioning on social media. You gotta hand it to the COO (who according to the story he's crafted is the loyal and virtuous hero) as he's running circles around the incompetent and out-of-touch management at sriricha who likely have no idea what's going on.
It appears sheer spite and vengeance is what brought Underwood Ranches back from the brink of bankruptcy. Now that's a genuine American success story.
The shortage caused by the dispute between Underwood and Huy Fong was huge news at the time, there are millions of customers loyal to the brand and millions of customers saddened by the fall in quality. I don’t know if Underwood are astroturfing, maybe they are, but this is one of the few stories where this coverage could be entirely organic. If Coca Cola had a similar dispute that led to the flavor of Coke changing, you’d see even more posts like this from real people.
There’s also the slopification of the internet to consider. The human centipede style pass through of a story across platform after platform means the same story appears again and again and again. And that’s happening more and more as time goes on. One YouTube video that generates a few hundred thousand views can spawn hundreds of other videos, posts, tweets, podcasts… all across the internet.
The keen cynics of Hacker News have unmasked seven of the last three major astroturfing campaigns.
Don’t know what it is about geek culture that leans so conspiratorial.
Sometimes I play a game; before clicking to read comments I try to come up with what the conspiracies will be. This one was obvious (since I’m familiar with the story).
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It would be interesting if google or some agent with enough frequent crawls of most social media could make visualizations over the years of certain viral stories and how they propagate in waves across the internet over time and how those waves interact. Would be a cool research project. Similar to Google Trends but internet-wide with some graph visualizations.
Paul Graham wrote about the entanglement of news and PR companies over 20 years ago: https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
It wouldn't surprise me if something similar is happening with social media and indeed a lot of the news is astroturfed to some extent, though I agree we shouldn't discount the extent to which people are willing to participate in this by reposting popular content for a quick ego/karma boost. And increasingly that reposting is done by bots.
A lot of reddit does not seem to be aware that a huge amount of the content is totally fake, astroturfing, etc. Soon, the "product site:reddit.com" will be just as useless as Amazon reviews.
To be fair, if I had a company and won a lawsuit like that... a lawsuit which makes for a good underdog story, I'd let my PR team use it as much as they desire! That lawsuit is a golden asset for them now.
I do this kind of marketing on reddit. It's so incredibly easy.
Upvotes cost nothing, and even if someone figures out the astroturfing, you just spend a dollar or two and bury them in downvotes.
One of my favorite tactics is just to use throwaway accounts to keep repeatedly asking variations of the same question "What x should I get for y?" and then consistently replying from my main shilling account with variations of "Hey, this gets posted ALL THE TIME but here is what I suggested previously and people seemed to like it ...". This way I can just keep recycling the same high-effort copy endlessly.
The reddit shills you spot are either lazy or idiots. There's no chance you'd ever suspect any of my biggest earning posts, simply because they're entirely consistent with the other content in the community and could have naturally achieved similar levels of upvotes had I just been lucky. But with bots I don't have to be lucky.
People on HN won't like that you're pointing out that you do this but at least you're honest, and showing that this does actually happen, it's just that others are not so loud (at least sometimes, see the link below). This sort of thing is very common on reddit, there are even articles and studies about said astroturfing.
Due to the cyclical nature of posts and the exhausted moderators trying to mod all of them, it's quite effective for "organic" growth. Many companies use these methods to grow, because it's way cheaper than paying for ads and users online are simply too gullible to catch on. And even if they did, you can just delete the thread and make a new one later on.
It's the same strategy used in TikTok where the influencer subtly hints at the product rather than overtly talking about it (perhaps as one slide in a slideshow), and then when a commenter asks what they used, the influencer replies with the name of the product.
For example [0], there have been large scale astroturfing campaigns for things like games, posting large numbers of comments to influence users.
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1ot0nvg/game_dev_adm...
You should be ashamed of manipulating people for profit, not proud of it.
So you're one of the reasons everything is shit. Got it.
lmao. This reads like the biggest LARP i've seen on this board in quite some time
Me in 2090 BC, “Seems like people keep retelling this Gilgamesh tale and embellishing it each time! I’m really smart so it must people trying to convince me to buy something.”
Why would the Epic of Gilgamesh want to sell you something? In contrast this Sriracha story clearly does want to sell you something. If you want to use an analogy at least use one that makes sense.
The point of heroic tales such as Gilgamesh was to draw tribute and sacrifices to the temple of Ishtar. The analogy makes perfect sense.
You think this Sriracha story wants to sell you something.
Yes, the fact that I can even think so makes a case that it's possible to astroturf it. The same cannot be said of a folk tale, unless somehow it had its own interstitial ads between every chapter.
Uhm. What are you suggesting exactly? That Underwood somehow manipulated Huy Fong into screwing them over and then suing them, just so that they could get a good story out of it?
Do you think it's fabricated? You can read the exact same thing in the court judgement. It's barely any longer than the reddit comment.
They are clearly suggesting that the story recurring every two months is Astro-turfed, not that the story itself is false?
It is a shame reddit lets people hide their post and comment history now so there can be no identifying signals about astro-turfing or bots. I'm sure this is ostensibly about preventing harassment, and in actuality about disguising bot behavior driving engagement. Or maybe I'm just extra cynical this morning.
Here I was foolishly thinking AstroTurf meant false grass
Well, it implies that the "grassroots" element of it is fake, the message itself being false is optional.