[3rodents]

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.

[reitzensteinm]

The keen cynics of Hacker News have unmasked seven of the last three major astroturfing campaigns.

[brookst]

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).

[jareklupinski]

> 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

[grandmczeb]

Actually people recommend products they like to friends all the time. For example, here's you recommending a random windows feature[1].

[1] https://x.com/JarekLupinski/status/1303766512541589504

[jareklupinski]

that was more of a signal to youtube creators to normalize their volume since windows doesnt let you do that anymore :(

[thaumasiotes]

What a strange thing to say. Not only do people frequently recommend carbonated beverages to each other, the upstream meme is even more off. People recommend operating systems to each other so much that there's an entire subculture known for that exact behavior.

[xtracto]

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)

[red-iron-pine]

a sizable portion of the HN geek demographic are in the online change-what-people's-behavior-is line of work -- google, bing, etc.

when you are in the business of making money off of this, and you know how it works, it's not hard to see it.

[mrguyorama]

It's about the "Um Acktually"

It's a dopamine hit. It's addicting. The medium of the internet seems to add to this where most interactions are conversationally broken, because a thread is a bunch of people airdropping thoughts and never really coming back to back up their arguments or admit something was wrong.

The brain wants things to be simple so rewards you for simple solutions that are "better" and totally ignores complexity and nuance and reality because those are energetically expensive things to pay attention to.

This comment is self demonstrating.

[zoeysmithe]

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.

[red-iron-pine]

like half of HN exists to stealthily market startup stuff -- its a link site run by a tech incubator.

[IAmGraydon]

That's easy. A geek's superpower is his brain, and his identity is being the smartest guy in the room. Belief in conspiracies means you know something that the masses do not, and you were too smart for the man to get one over on you. These beliefs, like all beliefs, are simple acts of ego preservation.

[archagon]

Same as any other conspiratorial thinking: they hold themselves in too high a regard and want to think they’re privy to some secret knowledge that the rubes have missed.

[r_lee]

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

[alsetmusic]

> Don’t know what it is about geek culture that leans so conspiratorial.

It’s much wider. This is why QAnon and contemporary fascism spread. People love a story.

The QAA podcast deep-dives explaining conspiratorial thinking. They started with QAnon and then expanded. The episodes on the Queen of Canada (Romana Didulo) were especially interesting. She’s a dangerous person and so are her followers. Sovereign citizens, too (though they’ve abandoned that term). Think Freemen in Montana in the 90s.

[salawat]

>Don’t know what it is about geek culture that leans so conspiratorial.

The #1 goal one needs to accomplish to render an environment safe for the execution of conspiratorial activity, is to inure the occupants of said environment to the possibility of conspiratorial action taking place. Apriori dismissal shuts down game theoretic behavioral modeling in the operational loop, rendering concerted acts of manipulation near invisible. It's why Hanlon's Razor is both a heuristic for organizational productivity and alignment, and one of the greatest foundational psyops of all time. Assuming benevolent intent of other actors makes it easier to get things done, but makes it nigh impossible to defend oneself against actual malicious intent. Geekdom is one of the few niches where most participants routinely value depth first vs. breadth first knowledge. Deep understanding of behavior, and the nature of motivated reasoning and modelling asymmetry of information with regards to intent quickly makes assumption of benevolent intent a realistically untenable posture to maintain unconditionally. In big business or contexts that tend toward near zero-sum anyway. Is it exhausting? Absolutely. Does it keep you safe from people? Hell yes. Does it make life fun? That depends on the general character of the people you're generally surrounded by I suppose.

[vasco]

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.

[KingMob]

> 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.

When Coke changed their formula in the 80's, people discussed it endlessly at the time. It made news and watercooler discussions. In Coke's case, it was self-inflicted, and they soon brought back the original (rebranded as "Coca-Cola Classic", which is what we have now).

[sltkr]

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.

[dfxm12]

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.

There are a few competing products on my supermarket's shelf (FWIW, Underwood's is not among them), but only Underwood's gets mentioned in the post. Where there's smoke, there's fire.

[randallsquared]

You can't buy it through Amazon or Costco or HEB (their main outlets, apparently) at the moment, and there's a rumor that they've gone out of business.

They started making the hot sauce years after the main events referred to in the lawsuit.

Their socials are silent and the website is a godaddy landing page with just their logo.

I don't think these people are savvy submarine astroturfers.

[idiotsecant]

If they did go out of business it's a shame, I buy their sauce by the boxful every year or so. It is legitimately better quality. Chili garlic sauce and sambal are also great.

[0cf8612b2e1e]

I promise you I am not on the Underwood payroll, but it is definitely one of the better Sriracha alternatives. That it gives you a feel-good of supporting a sort-of-underdog, of course people are going to be drawn to it.

I think you are underestimating the love of the original Sriracha.