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.
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
I think you are underestimating the love of the original Sriracha.
Only reason I mention that is that is you're not really faking the grassroots part if you really do have a good origin story--you just got... lucky?
[0] https://cases.justia.com/california/court-of-appeal/2021-b30...
https://lacabaarodriguez.shop/news/127/2026-03-06-huy-fong-f...
And as you mentioned, that lawsuit has pretty convincing evidence of a multi-year plan to really screw the supplier in order to get even more fantastically wealthy. Amazing greed combined with profound stupidity about the difficulty of reliably sourcing 2 _thousand_ acres of ripe chilies. There's been a decade of rolling shortages.
You can spend your entire online life seeing ghosts of astroturfing in everything you read. Like, how do we know that Huy Fong didn't pay you to come here on HN to neg the Reddit story that makes them look bad? You're stuck trying to prove a negative: impossible.
There is a reason accusations of astroturfing are against the HN guidelines, and it's this: in the absence of evidence, anything opinionated could be astroturfing... or it could not. Which makes it completely useless as a heuristic. It feels like smart skepticism, but it does not actually add any substance to the conversation.
I think it's gotten a bit worse as the platform has grown since there's more reward, astroturfing gets more eyes and is more effective, posts in general can get more karma so more fake internet points.
Was active on Reddit a long time ago, there's a liminal band of popularity in which a service tends to offer the best experience. Enough interest to be good, not enough interest to make it shitty or incentivize abuse.
It's difficult to remain in that band particularly because at some point you have to actively fight growth, not sure HN is all that immune either. I think HN tries to stay in that band via it's archaic UI and somewhat intimidating culture.
Ha, I don't know your friends but in my experience that's like a textbook phrase people use to try to play off being duped when they're clued in
It's like people who only consume TV shows and movies, they know it's all fiction, but if you talk to them about how the world works, you realize that all their mental structures are based on Hollywood tropes.
This even tracks to reddit, where everyone knows it's bullshit and reddit is dumb, but their entire perception of the world is still reddit's dumb views anyway.
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.
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...
Conversely if Reddit astroturfing was actually valuable, "upvotes cost nothing" could not be true. Like, we know that Meta and Google ads are effective, and those cost something. Not because they're hard to do, but because everyone is trying to do them at once.
will it? who is occupying and competing in that space, in a business sense? and are they using reddit? if so, which subs and who are they targeted at?
the various build-a-PC subs are a great example -- they have ones for high end GPUs -- literally, r/gpu -- and others for more generic uses. you can shill all-day on r/buildapcsales and do well without having to battle on the more general buildapc
in a broader sense, building consensus is critical, and plenty of businesses or political entities are willing to take huge losses to completely corral public perception -- most notably the purchase of Paramount by everyone's least favorite villian Larry E
It's also likely that many businesses are simply too risk averse to engage in things like purchasing farmed reddit accounts and upvotes.
I’m sure it’s possible to make small amounts of money with Reddit bots, just like it’s possible to make small amounts of money with email spam, and posting AI slop to Facebook and X, and SMS scams.
The idea that major brands do this habitually, is what I’m objecting to.
I'm getting clients who are each spending a minimum of 500k USD pa on services.
There's a very wide variety of eyeballs you can reach on reddit. It's everything from people inserting impressively large items in their body to people trading eye-wateringly expensive jewelry from cult brands like Chrome Hearts and nerds discussing enterprise telco equipment and EDR platforms.
But sure, I don't think it scales.
>The idea that major brands do this habitually, is what I’m objecting to.
I doubt major brands do this habitually. There are countless smaller players who do.
People should probably be more aware that the social media they use is astroturfed to hell and back but marketing and advertising is far too demonized.
I don't get paid to sell bottles of sriracha, but the fundamentals of doing so on reddit are basically the same whether you're selling expensive services or sriracha. The only difference is the content.
In another sense? Not really, because the one thing I've learned is that if the content couldn't work without the botted upvotes, it's not good worth posting.
The marketing posts I make are easily in top 1% of reddit content. That's not a hard bar to meet when you have more than an hour or two to spend on a single comment!
I take some supplements for health reasons and its pretty obvious in that space too. I remember one day one brand of a certain something (which came from a no-name company and over-priced compared to competitors) was near everywhere in comments. In fact, people just referred to the product by the brand name, not the actual chemical. Eventually people got wise to it, and you'd see a "hey this is astroturfing," but the comments remain and if you google or reddit search this supplement, the top results are people raving about this one specific brand still. This stuff works and I imagine it works very well because it keeps happening.
Its also especially bad in women's spaces because there's so many competing brands of fashion or makeup or whatever. Much of it using stealth advertising, relationships with influencers who won't disclose its a paid partnership, etc. A lot of makeup brands get big almost soley because of internet engagement, so there's a strong incentive to try.
You can see this happening in realtime almost. Suddenly this face cream or this mascara is big on reddit, with new-ish accounts raving about them. I've noticed lately that they've been buying old accounts and repurposing them. I've dug into people's posting histories (a mod can see this if youre on their sub even if private) and the account is 5 years old that went silent 3 years ago and now is suddenly back but this time its someone purporting to be a woman, when the previous posting history is very male-coded and even may call himself a man in comments. I don't think we fully appreciate how fake this all is and how little will there is to fight it. This is also done politically too, especially around election season, but is generally happening all the time.
I remember tracking this stuff for a while when Stellar Blade came out, which had some fair accusations of male gaze-y marketing and graphics. There was no shortage of "I'm a woman gamer/developer, and Stellar Blade is actually not sexist, its empowering," posts and comments on a popular women's gaming sub. It was really incredible to see this and again, a lot of these accounts were recently awakened accounts from someone who did not fit the profile. There is so much bot PR. I won't even go into the Depp-Heard case because its a huge topic, but wow, that was a great example of bots controlling the narrative almost entirely.
This is totally accessible for even the smallest businesses. If you already understand how sites like reddit work, literally all you need to do is google "buy reddit upvotes" to get started.
I might as well lie about being a uber driver, the barrier to entry is higher.
First, I want to be absolutely clear that I am in no way, shape or form affiliated with Underwood. I have no relationship whatsoever with them or any other hot sauce company, for that matter. I do not work in marketing at all - I am actually a disputes lawyer. I knew about this whole fiasco because I had read about/summarized this particular issue for my brother (a Sriracha fan) years ago when it first came to light, as he wanted to know what happened. The reason why I posted that writeup is because there was a viral post on the KitchenConfidential subreddit the day before about Huy Fong using green chili peppers due to supply issues, and I saw a bunch of comments that were all over the place with approx a dozen different narratives regarding what happened that weren't based in anything tangible. I wanted to write something to set the record straight.
Second, the details are drawn from the court case itself. They were not cut from whole cloth. Underwood had a unanimous jury verdict in their favor that decided that the facts I listed were what actually happened. What that means is that a group of (I believe 12, in this case) people sat down, heard testimony from both sides, looked at all the evidence, and found, to a man, that that was what happened. You can try to wriggle out of this as much as you want and deny it, which you appear to be doing by expressing some pretty strong skepticism about the whole thing, but we have court processes for a reason. Juries tend to be pretty good at fact-finding. Also, I would highlight that the jury awarded punitive damages - you do NOT get those unless the conduct on behalf of one side has been truly reprehensible, reprehensibility literally being a criterion for awarding punitive damages. The fact is, Huy Fong was held liable for fraud/breach of contract and had to pay damages accordingly. They appealed and got publicly eviscerated by the Court of Appeal. Those are the facts. I repackaged them into a more user-friendly, non-legalese story. You are entitled to have an opinion on those facts, but you are not entitled to just handwave them away.
Third, it is patently obvious why Underwood sriracha gets mentioned every time this is brought up. Huy Fong screwed Underwood - Underwood suffered quite a bit, but came back and launched a competing product. People generally want to support the underdog. It's that simple. People don't mention Flying Goose or whatever because Huy Fong didn't screw over Flying Goose. If they did, then they would.
That's basically what I wanted to communicate.
That's probably happening here too. If you use reddit a lot, you can probably tell why this thread looks suspicious as hell for example https://www.reddit.com/r/mightyinteresting/comments/1p6aq33/...
I like to think most reasonably minded readers here don't share the infinitely cynical, evidentially empty, doom-pilled perspective that u/textembedding is conveying. Astroturfing is very real, but to declare everything is astroturf regardless of literally documented legal history is just to give astroturfers free license to take over the internet unhindered.
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.
Edit: at least on the web variant, it looks like they finally blocked that ability.
Isn't this what you're doing with the idea that the Sri Racha story is obviously meant to sell?
Because people have made posts on social media sites like HN in the past in an effort to change public perception of companies, right?