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Comment by vatueil | Hacker News Reader

> And for the majority of the large subs for a specific interest, they are astroturfed to hell and back. Much of the content you see on /r/all is likely corporate shilling with sock puppets controlling the promotion of the item and the comments within.

And even more common than actual shilling is unsubstantiated accusations of shilling.

You could be right, I grant you, but anecdotally more cases of the latter stick out in my experience.

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Good shilling (or "guerilla marketing") is hardly detectable, whereas people that complain about it are trying to draw attention. That could explain why cases of one are more visible (regardless of the actual frequency of either).

Good shilling is hardly detectable. Front the logo on a can of coke and leave it in frame (next to a ring maybe) while a couple kisses, post it with the title "happiest moment of my life".

It's subtle, you can use photoshop to make it, and anyone who would call you out on it can easily be framed as whiny and paranoid. They don't have the funds to buy influence on the thread anyway, so you could just slide their posts and avoid dealing with them if you wanted.

I'm not saying anything about how often this stuff actually happens (because no one will tell you they've done it so metrics aren't possible), but I will say only the most obvious plays can get caught. But enough about that, let's just talk about Rampart (joking there, I think AMAs are basically stated to be promotion, it just popped into my head)

It's true social media such as reddit attracts marketing, but that doesn't mean everything that could be marketing is. The obvious problem with claims of invisible marketing is that they're impossible to disprove. Also, if shilling were nearly as prevalent as the original commenter asserted it couldn't be kept such a secret.

There may be real shilling on occasion, but the damage to constructive discourse from unverifiable shilling accusations seems greater than whatever the benefits of constant vigilance are supposed to be.

If marketing were really so seamless and even valuable, it would remind me of xkcd 810: https://m.xkcd.com/810/

I know /r/bitcoin and /r/btc (for those who don't know, the two are on opposite ends of the Bitcoin vs. Bitcoin Cash aka small block/large block debate) toss the word around so regularly as to redefine it as a synonym for "dissent".

Posts like this seem so dishonest. The entire point of shilling would be hiding the fact that your shilling (otherwise you'd buy an ad), so of course we don't have deep documentation of exactly who is shilling when, where, how much they're paid, etc.

What we do have is the knowledge of companies/groups dedicated to "influencing online opinion" (e.g. Correct the record, Share Blue, etc.). They don't advertise what they're doing but there somewhere doing influencing. Seems reasonable that they'd be on the biggest social sites doing their work.

What I've personally seen as very obvious shilling is GMO related topics on reddit (regardless of where you stand on the issue). You can be on the most obscure sub you can find, and if anyone says something critical about GMO products there will be a rebutal post within a short time always using the exact same arguments, exact same articles, terminology, etc. When new variations of the defense are developed they are instantly deployed site wide. This is for sure an organized group of people. Are they paid for it? I'm not sure, but for the effort they put in I hope they don't do it for free.

If I had infinite time, it would be intesting to do some deep data analysis on the posts on reddit and try to figure out how many are coordinated.

People don't need to be part of a secret organization to use the same arguments, sources, and terminology. A common cause or ideology will suffice.

I'm sure shill-theorists are not puppets of a secret cabal, for example, despite them all using the same unsourced anecdotes and unfalsifiable theories in their attempts to expose the truth about shilling.

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