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).
> 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.
similar to https://x.com/JenMsft/status/1381640311357628420/photo/1 : corporations need to understand that people don't have conversations where they randomly recommend carbonated beverages to each other
No? I have recommended Freestyle sugar free soda as a way to replace heavy CocaCola consumption. Here in Mexico it's a big problem, and I helped me get out of the addiction. ( add Allulose to the soda to add the sweet)
probably because the most obvious "it's exactly as described" is the most boring and uninteresting conclusion, thus you make it more interesting by proposing that it's a big conspiracy
I think its naive to think capitalism doesnt lead to dirty tricks. There's tons of PR and stealth marketing out there. The idea that our system is all "honest good guys" doesn't fit in with the facts.
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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.