[sametmax]

Well, sometime you see a personality or a topic getting traction out of the blue. Any critic get quickly downvoted. No debate seems to take place.

I noticed that with Bill Gates. Before 2015, nothing different. In 2017, business as usual. But in 2016, Reddit, HN, Imgur suddenly had a surge of Gate support : success stories, interviews, praising using comments...

It's just a supposition of course, I have nothing to back it up.

But it makes sense to me that the PR experts have learned now that it can be very efficient to target online communities instead of spamming mass media. If they can influence them, then the PR will develop itself in an organic way, feel more honest and natural, and the community will spread the message outside of itself, giving the impression it's genuine.

The best communication is the one that doesn't look like it.

Controlling the big medias has been the challenge of the last century, but the intellectuals grew defiant of them. They rely more and more on cross referencing various sources and debating with communities made of their peers or people experts in one niche.

This is the logical next move. Although it seems harder to pull out, in the long run the cost/benefit ration seems better because it relies on a intimate feeling of trust we develop with the communities.

I know I do: I always read the comments before the articles on HN, because I trust the community to give me a better insight on the matter than the article itself. It's often the case. People are brilliant here, having a lot of accumulated knowledge, offering pieces of analysis, missing information, stories and counter points or even just summary that are the real added value of the site.

So if the community now hosts subtle communication experts, they will (and probably already have) influence my point of view.

[duncanawoods]

> I noticed that with Bill Gates

I suspect that one is probably just natural trend/popularity/fashion at work with the hive mind flocking in the same direction. Gates rebounded from the tech nadir to philanthropist, humanitarian and intelligent sayer of sensible things. A lot easier to like than when he had a foot on all our throats.

Similar effect with GWB. He is rebounding from pariah status and people can't help but warm to the guy's personality now that his crimes are being overshadowed by much larger bogeymen.

[bshimmin]

JWB as in John Wilkes Booth, the guy who assassinated Lincoln? I can't really imagine him having a resurgence in popularity, but I've never fully understood the American psyche, I will admit.

[duncanawoods]

Ah, unfortunate typo corrected :) You've made me worried that might be true too.

[everybodyknows]

GWB boycotted the Republican nominating convention.

[sametmax]

It's possible of course.

Still, he was a hated personality nobody in the IT community would come close to and then suddenly everybody is loving the guy.

Some stuff really don't feel right. My first "oh-oh" moment was when this arrived on the imgur front page (apparently 2015, not 2016 so my timing is off):

http://imgur.com/gallery/YDuoHdr

Everything, form the title to the content and the firsts comment is really weird. After this, I started seeing the Gate foundation work popping everywhere, and supports in comments of major social medias where only suspicion was before.

I did a mission for the Gate foundation 8 years ago in Africa, and at that time nobody speaker about this entity. I had to explain it every time I talked to someone new.

I have a hard time to believe the medias suddenly took a (very one-sided) interest for something that have been here for such a long time for no reason.

Yes, yes, I can be totally wrong. Still I can't help but wonder.

[AQuantized]

I've noticed some occurrences like this as well. For instance, the week before Bill Gates' recent AMA on Reddit, there were a a large number of frontpage posts about him from accounts with little to no karma.

It's probably not the primary factor in opinion on him being drastically reversed, and I doubt he has any personal involvement, but it's possibly one of the tools utilized by his PR team.