[spaghettiToy]

I saw the astroturfing as early as 2016. It blows my mind that people aren't more outspoken about the threat.

I even see people defend it "you really think a trillion dollar company is going to be advertising here?"

Yes duh? They are called reputation management companies, and they are contracted for plausible deniability.

I've seen it play out like this- a few well placed top level comments that defend a companies actions. Those are upvoted, anything contrary are downvoted.

You can see this when a thread is massively upvoted to a front page, that's something that a company can't really control. They don't have enough voting power. However inside the thread, people won't spend as much time upvoting and downvoting comments. This is where voting rings make the difference, controlling the narrative in the comments.

The companies with rabid fanbases are those that benefit most. If they can control the narrative, the fans will take the bait and run with it.

[throw10920]

Even worse, this same kind of thing is bound to happen to HN (in fact, I bet you that it's been happening for a few years already - HN has a remarkably large audience) unless something changes.

The obvious solutions are (1) implementing a web of trust and (2) changing the site guidelines to forbid product recommendations. Both of these approaches are super disruptive, but ultimately we need something to either (a) reduce the economic incentive for marketers on HN or (b) make it more difficult for them to conduct their influence campaigns.

[dntrkv]

How do you know it’s astroturfing? I see this claim about comments on Reddit all the time. Most of the time it is just fan boys in my experience.

Shit, I’ve been called a troll for X-cause or a corporate shill for company-Y.

If I disagree with this person, they most be a troll.

If this person is defending a COMPANY they must be a shill.

Not saying it doesn’t happen ever, but I think people are a lot worse at identifying that stuff than they think they are.

[yunohn]

No, you see Reddit is a magical place! The moderator cabal is great at their job, and the users are all angels. Why would anything be fake on Reddit? /s