Comment by iypx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by iypx | Hacker News Reader

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I'd rather encourage people to post useful things on their own sites. Maybe, hopefully, one day, both google and other search engines might start penalizing content farms and have personal blogs and websites surface again.

> Reddit is almost the only useful site left to find actual things written by humans.

The one, most important thing (the way I see it), is never actually mentioned. I'm gonna call it: "organic advertising". I will never, consciously, take any advice I see on reddit/hn.

Last time It was obvious for me, I was browsing/procrastinating throgh r/all, and somebody, a "real human" with an actual "real" account (I checked his history) posted a drawing made by his kid. Second-most upvoted comment is blatant Crayola advert (checked that guys history, every 10-15th comment he was praising $random_top_us_brand). Rest of the thread, at least another dozen Crayola mentions, by real people, who religiously believe in Crayola...

Take a lot of top threads, there's always a swarm of seemingly "real" accounts religiously promoting most American top brands. Funnily enough, usually 1 brand per thread. Somehow fans of X never see the Y threads, and vice-versa...

I refuse to believe actual people will go out of their way to defend/promote/etc their $favorite_brand. Only on reddit/hn.

I remember a comment linked in bestof where someone who works in advertising explained how he would build up a bunch of Reddit accounts, each with a different profile so when an opportunity to tell a fabricated story came up, he could place a product plug in an AskReddit thread or similar.

He wouldn't even directly name the product. As an example, if he were selling a particular brand of boots, he would mention how great his boots performed but not mention the brand. Naturally someone will ask for the brand as a recommendation and voilà he plugs the product in the most natural fashion. It doesn't seem like an ad because he was just directly answering another user's question. But the entire build-up to that moment was manufactured to sell the product.

I'm starting to accept that maybe our current social media sites and aggregators are inherently vulnerable to manipulation. IRL social structures without broadcasting capabilities has fewer of these problems, since the reward is less.

Maybe there's some way to have the best of both worlds, but I don't know how.

This is not new to social media, but it has made it pervasive.

This is how it happens in meatspace: http://web.archive.org/web/20210831185116/https://www.wdsu.c...

Broadcasting capabilities is fine, but not when broadcasting is the only choice we get. Narrowcasting to a select audience is just as important, and this is what smaller sites (even including HN itself) can excel at.

There is a similar scheme going rampant in youtube comment sections, where a comment starts off with a couple of relevant sentences, then goes on shilling something, and there is a fake discussion going on under the comment, and everything has a lot of thumbs ups.

This is especially prevalent under videos discussing financial topics.

> I refuse to believe actual people will go out of their way to defend/promote/etc their $favorite_brand. Only on reddit/hn.

You might, but people have been getting in stupid arguments defending largely irrelevant preferences for as long as human history has been recorded. Now, various brand-PR agents certainly do fan these flames, but there are really people who think your cheap beer preferences says important things about you and will happily spend shockingly large amounts of time telling how that is wrong. A lot of people.

If their in-group likes brand A, and the out-group likes product B or C, staggeringly wasteful displays of such preference basically define fashion.

> I refuse to believe actual people will go out of their way to defend/promote/etc their $favorite_brand. Only on reddit/hn.

Those "Calvin peeing on Ford logo" decals predate social media

It's true. Those originated as bootleg sales at county fair booths in the 90s, along with the concrete geese. The writer of Calvin and Hobbes was actually quite against them and merchandising in general, having seen the saturation of Garfield merchandise in the 80s.

> I refuse to believe actual people will go out of their way to defend/promote/etc their $favorite_brand. Only on reddit/hn.

I will. It takes such an amount of effort these days to find a product that's both: a) privacy respecting, b) of sufficiently high technical quality, c) decently priced, and d) meeting all or most of my use cases, that when I find one, I will promote it to people similar to me until I'm blue in the face. Because it might save them literal years of searching, depending on the product.

Finding a product worth recommending is an exception. Some people will promote them just based on that, without expecting any compensation.

That's pretty counter to my experience, particularly on HN. I don't see a lot of brand evangelism on either site, really, but, maybe that's because I tend to stay away from subreddits on r/all. I'd think the amount you'd expect to see happening "organically" is small enough that it could be overlooked.

I knew Reddit was compromised when I kept reading positive comments about Old Spice, then I bought Old Spice, then I smelt Old Spice.

I like Old Spice. I actually go out of my way to import it. Am I a shill by virtue of my preferences?

Unnecessary comment. Marked for deletion.

Microsoft was very obviously paying for such "organic" advertising on reddit when windows10 came around.

Microsoft got to turn a blind eye to their dependence on Reddit and their own sanctioned spammy behavior by farming it out to an ad agency.

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