Cracker Barrel Outrage Was Almost Certainly Driven by Bots, Researchers Say
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
This is a useless statistic without a comparison of what percentage of activity is bots for any culture-war news story of the day.
And it means that over half weren't bots.
People really were genuinely bothered by replacing an old-timey logo they grew up with and loved, with some bland corporate logo that looks like everything else.
Also they were pissed off about the similar redesign of the interiors from homey personality to generic bland gray.
If you think it's silly because it's not a restaurant you go to, imagine if Coca-Cola replaced their script logo with some generic sans-serif one. Don't you think the outrage would be real?
And the logo is more recognizable than you seem to think -- you see signs for it on the highway, it's part of building anticipation for the visit. It's part of childhood memories.
And all the outrage I saw was from people getting pissed about it on discord. That's a lot harder to fake than random twitter posts, where bots all parrot actual trends in order to boost their views and shill some sort of scam/product.
If Taco Bell announced they were bringing back 90s style colorful interiors and decorations, I think the outrage would be zero. People would celebrate. People have no problem with interesting change.
Not everyone is so lucky to have a 300 year old family run pub nearby.
So maybe find some more empathy for people's lives growing up? Nobody chooses the situation they're born into.
But yes, people have things they like. They like when things they consider good don't do total overhauls. There's a very good chance you have something you hold dear or would be upset if it changed, and others will happily mock your frustration.
Even though I have no good vibes for the place, I'm happy it exists, and there are clearly a bunch of other people who DO like it, and I also want them to have it. That makes for a better world to live in, if only by a micron.
Oh that is so not true for a shocking number of folks, sadly. There's a whole "political" angle these days revolving around "if the other side likes it, then it's automatically the worst thing to happen in the history of ever; we must oppose it at all costs, even if it harms us or destroys us to do so". The introduction of "AI" and "bots" has only served to multiply and magnify that behavior among those prone to it.
An awful lot of people I've talked to in real life (including me) are not happy about the encroaching minimal trend in design taking over everything. If it was just Cracker Barrel, it probably wouldn't be that big of a deal. But it is like the fall of Constantinople to the app icons. We're already cursed with hideous buildings and logos everywhere, so when the nostalgia was drained from the restaurant built on nostalgia people reacted.
And for whatever reason I saw people trying to make it a culture war issue, accusing anyone who objected of being right-wing. Thankfully a number of prominent Democrats spoke up, too, because it was never about "woke" or whatever.
That whole thing stems from a 19th century German scientist (Dr Fruedrich Goltz) who wanted to know if the impulse to jump out was from the brain or further down the nervous system. From his experiments, an intact frog freaks out when the water gets too hot. When he destroyed the brain of the frog, it sits their until it dies of exposure.
There was actually quite a lot of experimenting in the late 19th century with "reflex frogs" (i.e. brain dead but still alive). W. T. Sedgwick wrote a decent review of it in 1888 titled, "ON VARIATIONS OF REFLEX-EXCITABILITY IN THE FROG, INDUCED BY CHANGES OF TEMPERATURE."
People who said it was about woke or whatever included a Republican member of Congress, a Trump campaign adviser, a prominent right wing pundit, and a prominent right wing activist recently added to Meta's AI advisory board.[1][2][3][4] Someone speaking for a right wing college said the new logo had the same energy as vandalism of a George Washington statue.[5] This list is far from complete.
I saw several comments which observed the attention given to this issue was dominated by right wing outrage. I saw none which implied no other objection was conceivable.
[1] https://x.com/ByronDonalds/status/1958570840561275002
[2] https://x.com/alexbruesewitz/status/1958270205466952033
[3] https://x.com/realchrisrufo/status/1958629455125258479
Cracker Barrel is a mediocre chain people associate with the term “American.” That being said, this isn’t changing the Statue of Liberty. It’s a corporate logo change. People took this personally because virtually everything is part of the culture war now.
The dislike for the new logo was one of the very rare things that people on both sides in the US seemed to agree on...
If you’re going to open your comment with that I have no desire to read what follows.
Just a small number of fake accounts can likely stir up tensions quite a lot.
I've noticed some of the biggest outrage usually comes as reactions to screenshots of what the other side is saying. There is of course nothing preventing you from running some of those accounts as well.
I find nostalgia in general fascinating, and it was funny, I watched this Fox News / Gutfeld clip and I think maybe with one exception, none of them had been to Cracker Barrel, and it makes sense, if you’re a Fox News host, you’re probably a city person. I think even Christopher Rufo who led the culture war charge against it didn’t really go.
But it’s anger at this abstract attack on “Americana”(this is the best explanation I’ve seen for why some people have called it woke) that only some of our grandparents truly value anymore. And the weird thing is, if the brand really is dying, attempts to stop it from changing will only hasten its demise.
Anyways, fascinating.
Otherwise, what are they conserving?
They're conserving the things they like as they are, while letting things they don't like change.
This is such a ridiculous strawman view - like saying progressives think all change is good.
I'm just saying that, in general, conservatives exist in opposition to change.
EDIT: I checked the dictionary. It literally means "a person who is averse to change and holds traditional values."
It's literally in the name.
What I don't get, and what was truly excessive, is blaming it on "woke" and watching our politicians and president get involved. That was all beyond stupid.
But it’s really representative of how little of a shared vision for America there is on the modern right, like this full throated attack in an attempt to protect something they don’t want.
Leftists, having different instincts, reach for things like class conflict and social injustice to explain the doldrums, but I’m not convinced they’ve thought it through either.
I think about how there was this era of Vegas in the 80’s and 90’s where they built all those crazy theme hotels, and now the “theme” for most hotels in Vegas is just like “glam”
That doesn't mean that the left doesn't care about the corporate blandicization of everything with any personality, nor that the right was actually going to Cracker Barrel in droves. But it does mean that it's very easy for those who wish to stir up more polarization to paint the original rebrand as an attack on the right.
But if you were talking about about gay rights or trans rights or abortion you’d have a loud and vocal group on the left saying the right was absolutely morally wrong. In this case though. Where’s the attack? The attack is coming from capitalism, not from the left, so maybe I get what you’re trying to say, but this is the first culture war issue where I would say the reality, even if not the perception is that most people are either in the center(don’t care) or affected (don’t like it), I don’t think there are many serious people on the other side of it (the Cracker Barrel rebrand is good, and you’re wrong for being against it.). But ironically, you could even argue the “attack” came from the right! No longer protecting its own institutions(this is overstated for effect but I think the point still stands)
I don’t know that I’m saying I disagree with you- there’s the very real observation that about Americana that say the right brings American flags to protest and too many on the left don’t, but still, it’s funny.
I think my point is just that while you're right that there isn't really anyone on the left saying "this is a good thing that we should keep", the vast, vast majority of the people who are being animated by the perception that it is an attack are on the right.
Those people reflexively blame the left, because they have been conditioned to see anything that attacks the things they care about as coming from the left, but it is 100% a clash between the corporate wing and the rural-culture wing of the American right.
There's a grain of truth in here, but you're taking it way too far. I'd rather have that number you're asking for than not have it to be sure, but the percentage still matters in absolute terms.
I think the important thing here is to see which came first. How many people in a crowd do you need to start clapping, to end up with everyone applauding?
When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life
https://www.amazon.com/When-Everyone-Knows-That-Knowledge/dp...
I can't imagine being upset at something like that. I'm sure there would be people upset, given the nonsense that happened in the 80s, but being personally invested in corporate branding has got to be the saddest sort of parasocial relationship possible.
I think you misunderstand.
It's about growing up, going to a restaurant with your grandparents, it becomes a kind of comfort and home. It's not just branding, it's the entire experience, of which the logo serves as a central symbol. What you see from the highway, what you see when you arrive.
And then the company is taking away something you love. When you go back, it's not the same. They were completely changing the interiors too. It wasn't where you went with grandma and grandpa anymore. They did a total 180° on it's atmosphere and personality.
From that perspective, can you find more empathy for people's emotional connections to a place and its symbols?
What the company took away from you was never yours to begin with.
What a strange thing to say. You think there's something "parasocial" about memories of a place with your family? I think you may need to examine whether you're using that term correctly.
And, well, nothing was "ever yours to begin with". That doesn't stop people from acting collectively to try to preserve the things they like. Nor should it.
Your worldview seems strangely sterile and passive, like you don't seem to understand the very basic idea of emotional connection with shared places, or of trying to influence things you don't "own".
Why do you feel that was “nonsense”? Norm Macdonald had a joke about Coke and Pepsi—Basically he said it’s a misconception for restaurants to assume that if Coke is your favorite beverage, that Pepsi is your second favorite beverage and an acceptable alternative. In fact, if Coke is your favorite beverage Pepsi is probably your least favorite beverage. You end up opting for something else…that’s not a cola at all.
People rejected New Coke because Coca Cola turned their favorite beverage into their least favorite. Of course someone would complain about that.
It's corporate min-maxxing for attention economy and the hope you don't offend anyone's taste. If you're bland, then it's hard for anyone to sincerely dislike you. Bland logos are more instantly recognizable than complex ones, so we must ensure that we save a few milliseconds of cognition before the consumer makes a choice.
We're surrounded by company logos all the time. At least make them interesting.
It's not hard to start a bar fight if you don't care who wins or what it's over. The angriest people are easily manipulated to point their anger in whatever direction the manipulator wants.
When working on security and integrity issues, we found 10-20% of all traffic would be inorganic. The more course the metric, the more likely it was to be exactly 20%
To me, knowing nothing about this specfic domain, and just abuse/integrity in general, 45% means it's well over double what I'd expect from an unmanaged source. Well over double, because true double wouldn't be 40% (20/100) + 20 = 40/120 = 33%
This heuristic tells me it's specific, targeted, and well above the background noise youms might ignore for higher priorities. In other words, it's a problem that's actionable.
Here, I assume stoking anger and outrage is the goal. That's why it not being 20% is significant.
Then your comment isn't actually contributing anything.
And the 80/20 rule doesn't have anything to do with this.
The idea that the baseline value for any statistic at all in the world is 20% is not how anything works.
The 80/20 rule is an informal observation that you get 80% of profits from 20% of customers, or can draw 80% of conclusions from 20% of data. It doesn't say anything about the baseline rate of any arbitrary statistic.
Well, you thought that the 45% was meaningless on it's own too, perhaps the problem is more your context window is too small?
But, I'll try again. The behavior of bots translates well across domains, the domain of rage fueling bots has additional nuance that I haven't spent significant time studying. i.e. The generalized heuristic is useful, but this comment is lacking in the domain expertise of rage fueling bots. Perhaps the 45% has more meaning with more experience in rage bait?
> The idea that the baseline value for any statistic at all in the world is 20% is not how anything works.
That's not what I said.
> The 80/20 rule is an informal observation that you get 80% of profits from 20% of customers, or can draw 80% of conclusions from 20% of data. It doesn't say anything about the baseline rate of any arbitrary statistic.
The 80/20 rule is a simplification of the power curve. I mentioned it not to imply that 80/20 is somehow magic here, but to reference it as a useful heuristic many people will already be familiar. The power curve does show up seemingly everywhere. The more common example where it shows up in understanding social media, is in the behavior of real users. Roughly 1% will generate content, 20% will interact with content, and 79% will scroll/lurk. This also applies to users on the individual level too. The near exclusive majority will spend 79% of their time reading, 20% clicking like/ignore, and 1% of their time submitting or commenting. I mention the power law, because when working with inauthentic behavior, it becomes anomalous when it diverges from that 20% ish expectation. (This is basically the example you mentioned that you're already familiar, it's the same 80/20 from your examples)
Say you have a spam botnet, only about 20% of it will interact with any given post. If it's more or less, that's weird. The reverse works too, you'll never see more than 20% of real organic users interacting with spam/bot content. If you see more, or less, that's weird (that cohort is probably not real users)
or in other words: If the thing having something to do with how humans interact with social media doesn't follow the power law, it's weird.
How does that apply here? If the number was 20% instead of 45%, it would actually be meaningless (you could just say there are bots). What does that extra 15 points mean? That I can't tell you. But it's not in the range of "boring inorganic behavior", which I say as someone who's spent a lot of time trying to find, classify, and remove inauthentic accounts/behavior.
It would be fine if Cracker Barrel was just an isolated example - I would guess then it would be just a curiosity, not an "outrage". But it's not isolated - it's a broad aesthetic trend in everything from architecture [0] to art to graphic design [1].
It's that trend people object to. Cracker Barrel is just the latest slice of the salami.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/architecture/comments/199sjmn/thoug...
[1] https://medium.com/@zuktechnologies/why-modern-logos-all-loo...
(Just teasin')
But in seriousness, yes people may have been feeling genuinely nostalgic, the point is that bots were used to play up peoples' nostalgia, to turn it into fear, moral outrage and finally "victory against a woke enemy", a deep sense of oxytocin and loyalty.
This misses that virality is driven by amplification. Further, that bots were aiming to drive a specific take/narrative/vibe. This is abuse and manipulation of our common spaces.
Deciding that this is unacceptable, understanding the mechanisms, is how we develop approaches that deal with the situation to the best of our ability.
It may be that we don’t hamper speech when its happening, but we can decide that post analysis and evidence, to hold manipulators accountable.
Or figure out some other path forward. Either way, reading the report before dismissing it out of habit and a desire to return to the olde days, doesn’t result in much of a discussion.
Cracker Barrel had some of the same qualities that Coca Cola did. Loyal customer base, distinctiveness—I don’t think it’s unreasonable to conclude that even without bots and social media that this brand change wouldn’t have made news especially east of the Mississippi and ultimately stalled the conversion. May have happened quicker with the amplification, but would have happened all the same with out it.
I assume this fact is obvious to you, because not too many people pull out 1985 marketing history/trivia in 2025.
I suggest going through these analyses oneself. Typically they aren’t that complex, and it’s worth getting familiar with the tools available for people to analyze network manipulation.
Also, I lived through the 1985 New Coke debacle and was one of the people that were pissed off at the change. I know why I reacted how I did and quite a few others around me. It wasn’t because we felt “America” change, it’s because the new product tasted like shit compared to the old one.
I didn’t want a “generic” tasting cola. Cracker Barrel fans didn’t want a generic feeling restaurant. Whatever bots did for the great Cracker Barrel crisis of 2025, they didn’t cause my 88 year old mother who goes to CB once a week to be pissed off that they changed “her restaurant to look like those stupid damned First Watch places”.
The Coca Cola comparison is apt, but it’s beyond the logo. In the 80s formulation of the product changed to taste more like the competitor, it came with a logo change as well. Basically they took an iconic brand with a distinctive iconic flavor and made it a bland and generic cola. It was a disaster.
Cracker Barrel literally did the same thing. They set off changed the things that made them distinct from every other generic bland southern food restaurant. Their food isn’t distinctive, but their ambience and lore is. I wonder if someone would have brought up New Coke when they were having the product and marketing meets around the design change. I suspect CEO excitement around the idea probably caused folks to sit silent.
And then after being exposed to the controversy for a bit, I saw an article quoting the _female_ CEO, and suddenly the line of thinking made sense.
I wonder if the botnets are primarily driven by legit grassroots-ish political actors, moneyed interests, or something else. Could be generic foreign influence/destabilization groups. Could also be effectively be a convenient bot/LLM training ground.
The outrage was started by Chris Rufo. He has spoken publicly and clearly about his strategy of ginning up DEI controversies and rallying far right online people to harass targeted businesses as a mechanism of making every business be extremely cautious about doing anything at all that could be considered DEI by right wing weirdos. In the past he amplified things like the Bud Light and Target harassment campaigns. By choosing something so incredibly anodyne as this logo update he signals to businesses that they need to not just refuse to acquiesce to left wing demands but that they need to a right wing movement that (like you mention) can fly into a rage whenever they see a woman in a position of power.
Why is that?
The large proportion of early bot posts suggests the outrage was largely manufactured, which is pretty interesting to me.
Now, if culture war news stories are typically artificially manufactured, that would be even more interesting. So I agree that context would be good. But this info still stands on its own.
(And, of course there are sincere objections to this logo/branding change. But that doesn't appear to explain why this blew up.)
This is true even when the activity is from actual humans. Very very little in the culture wars is genuine offense, its nearly all performative outrage.
It bothered me because it was yet another instance of our built world becoming increasingly sterile and lifeless, like a rejection of humanity itself.
It would be real but only because people’s priorities tend to be incredibly silly. Like, giving children free school lunch is an original sin to probably a lot of the subset that gave a care about the Cracker Barrel logo… and for some reason there was a whole internet movement to remake a movie because a group didn’t like what was released (Justice League).
One can also think it's silly because... It's silly. The assumption that everyone who doesn't care must not be a customer is incorrect.
> imagine if Coca-Cola replaced their script logo with some generic sans-serif one.
I'm imagining it and find myself indifferent. Why would I have an emotional connection to the Coke logo?
Decades of Coca-Cola advertising creating an emotional connection? Maybe it's your favorite drink? Maybe it was a special treat on your birthday? Maybe Warren Buffett gave you a Coke and some investment advice that took you from near bankruptcy to comfortably retired, when you met him randomly in downtown Omaha?
I'm guessing HN is not the hangout place for people with attachment to brands...
Sure maybe, doesn't sound like something that should be celebrated, more like brainwashing.
> Maybe it's your favorite drink? Maybe it was a special treat on your birthday?
Coke is still around in this scenario no? I know people got upset about the reformulation, and that tracks. But it's not like I can't have a coke on my birthday because it's got a different logo.
Some people just like to be mad about things.
Pennies, Daylight Savings Time, bike lanes, all kinds of inconsequential things get anger-seekers angry.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10129173/
Anecdotally, either and both could be true: what "normal" person actually cares very much about the logo of a chain restaurant? Most people care about whether they can afford fun things, who they're sleeping with, and what they're having for dinner.
Ahhh, I see most of us are swimming around the bottom of Maslow's heirarchy of needs.
To some extent we all have fragile egos. Speaking personally, if I upset someone then I will be devastated for days, even if it was just a misunderstanding rather than me deliberately trying to hurt. Yet in social media world, it is a world of pain, with people getting brutal comments every day, for them still to post the next day and the day after that.
To some extent, negative attention is still attention, and, presumably for some, if you can't get positive attention, any attention will do. Cue 'rage-baiting', where the goal is to incite lots of negative comments.
Anyway, I am of the opinion that in the last century 'the camera never lied' but in today's world, the camera is always lying. On social media everything needs to be considered a lie first until proven otherwise. Add to that, the posters are likely to have psychiatric disorders, and I think I am now outta there!
If you do buy such a rack, how do people in practice get a rack full of devices to look like they're coming from valid ips that aren't in a VPN or cloud provider's ip range?
I think the sad truth is the bots are good for business.
:)
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f8/Internet_dog....
One I learned about on HN. Prior to this I would have thought this was a real tinfoil hat idea, but groups like this are actively online every day sowing unrest and it is working so well at destroying America. How can we combat it?
I think one possible technical solution would be inherent bandwidth, range and commercial exploitation limitations. E.g. I think in a LoRa mesh network, you find those naturally. RNodes and Reticulum come to mind: https://unsigned.io/
Basically, through these hardware/physics restrictions abuse and enshittification doesn't scale, but genuine information does, and social communication patterns and scope resembles human nature/biological legacy better than the global web. Artificial software limitations can be cheated always, like with GPS spoofing, VPNs and so on. I presume, you could build communities around people, whose fates are actually connected significantly. A "killer app" to start off, could be dating, or blackboards, get the cool kidz aboard by using it to exclusively advertise the next rave, etc.. It is hard to censor and will be used for illegal activities, too, but it won't enable anything that's not happening on messengers anyway.
It’s almost as if there are companies out there now selling outrage-as-a-service because outrage drives engagement and thus, attention market share, ideally translating into sales. Who knows if that last assumption has any merit though.
Idk, I read about them and I'm super curious now - but it's not like you can go to the store, grab a cauldron of rosin, and do them at home.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41991352
The only reason we recognize it on the highway is because we’ve seen it a million times. But it’s actually a low-contrast yellow-brown blob.
On mobile, it’s bad. It doesn’t feel right on social media. It doesn’t fit in a website header. It’s hard to make black-and-white.
I’m sure the team who put together the new mark were attempting to be faithful to the classic sense of Cracker Barrel while making a mark that’s a lot more flexible - and it was.
I couldn't find any real sources for it besides [2] but its not even mentioning bots, did Gizmodo make it up? Why don't they link their sources ffs!
Like people constantly allege botting or brigarding for things they don't like, and even if it wasn't a machine it can still be inauthentic. The methodology seems really important to explain in detail otherwise this is all just vibes and junk science.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/BotBouncer/ Github: https://github.com/fsvreddit/bot-bouncer
[2] https://www.peakmetrics.com/insights/the-politics-of-the-cra...
All that aside: What would really be helpful: some recommendations as to bloggers or other sources in this field whom people here find reliable and credible.
You can absolutely derail a democracy you are not fond of by stoking the flames on both extremes on the political spectrum.
Oh come on
Quite frankly, I think too many cooks are benefiting from outrage and disarray. Look at the Charlie Kirk case, where "respectable" reports of "transgender ideology" inscribed on bullet casings spread immediately, although that's been a complete fabrication, which was later redacted. How vile a thing to do, for any supposedly journalistic platform. That's not bots, it's people who are to blame. I don't even think, it's much instructed, but rather sociopathic individuals/groups seeing opportunity for a minuscule gain, even if it's destroying the social fabric in the process.
I think it's fairly disingenuous to characterize that as "fanning the flames on both sides of the political spectrum."
Take a look at France. That's what has been happening since political interests took over the gilets jaunes protest (which didn't really end in 2020, mind you), and continues to this day in one way or another.
(Edit: clarify, and add context)
Figures like Macron or Blair may be or have been extreme in some regards, but not in this one.
But let's be honest, if you are hinting at that time Macron used anti-obstruction of parliament measures to combat the stupid high number of ammendements the opposition proposed [1], I don't know what to say. Seemed like the only case where one _should_ use such measures.
Either way, point stands that by fuelling appeasement to both extremes via bots in social networks, a state actor can destabilize a country much more effectively.
[1] https://www.lemonde.fr/blog/cuisines-assemblee/2020/02/19/re...
But that's not the first time he did away with either the spirit of the law, or with returning on his words.
The CCC: 'i'll propose all your suggestions as laws if they're correctly written, without filters', then later 'except 3 jokers', then he proposed a small part as is, a bigger part modified, and 19, not at all. That's legal, he can go back on his words as he wants, a president words don't mean anything. Usually, a candidate words didn't mean anything, but politics exercising power words used to be believed. But that's only convention, not law.
The 49-3 for the retirement reform. Waiting for the parliamentary discussions to happen, at least a month or two, would have been a lot less brutal. Even for those who agreed with the idea, the way it was done was authoritarian.
And the recent 'motion de rejet' against the law Duplomb they wanted to pass, to prevent _any_ discussion in the parliament, that's was the chef kiss imho. That has to be the most illegitimate legal thing they did. Totally against the spirit of the law. Classic. Hindenburg and Bruning then Von Papen used similar tactics for almost 5 years.
Bruning is also a perfect example of the extreme center by the way, even if less well-known.
Almost all supposed outrage marketing is just marketing teams making terrible decisions because they’re people and people make terrible decisions.
I think people in general value identity of the brands more than many brands themselves do. And the change is in some ways attack to them, not to the brand.
But, I stumbled onto a different rabbit hole. On their website, PeakMetrics has an article about the Cracker Barrel logo debacle and in it, they don't use the term 'bot' once.
So, is Gizmodo framing this completely wrong? Did the article PeakMetrics put up change after Gizmodo put up their article? What's going on here?
https://www.peakmetrics.com/insights/the-politics-of-the-cra...
Personally, I find most of the crap on the news to be utterly meaningless and I have no idea why they talk about it and just assume its because all content creators need content to fill their 24 hour news channel, huge newspaper, consistent YouTube or social media posting schedule, etc.
That’s why the original daily show was so great, because it made fun of the lengths that the media goes to to fill their schedule.
I try to avoid the news as much as possible but a little about this slopped over my barriers. What I saw was pushback against the pushback, but none of the actual "oh no new logo is woke".
I assume there must have been some, since Cracker Barrel did change course. Still, I can't tell how upset anyone actually was, and how much was just outrage about outrage.
If you have ever been in a Cracker Barrel, it has a very distinct feel of soulful agrarian Americana. I suspect most people used the fight as a proxy for preserving that part of our culture, which is getting more rare/unknown in modern America.
But I have to say, it is getting harder to tell. If you think the AI slop is the only AI content, you are missing all the AI content that is good and nobody is noticing.
Its just that AI tools have become so wide spread that a lot of people are generating low quality slop. That is hiding the realistic slop.
I could buy that the politicizing was bot and troll driven.
As they say, the internet makes you stupid.
Fifty percent of people were already of below average intelligence, and the average has been decreasing for years.
Based on the invalid premise that the most commonly held belief is the correct one the internet has now given those idiots super charged megaphones.
However, as relates to the business, I believe it’s meant to invoke a literal barrel of crackers an old timey good Ol’ fashioned country store?
This was also a feature in some bars in the Midwest and South. I doubt the idea of a communal cheese block has survived into modern times, certainly not post pandemic, but I remember stopping into a pub as a kid in Ohio and seeing one and yes I did help myself and am still alive. That block of cheese had to have been one foot by one foot at least.
Perhaps it was literally the result of an algorithm, pattern matching the word "cracker"? Like there was a idiotic controversy of Hasan saying the word awhile back, so the algorithms may have learned that. Perhaps a bunch of right-wing people all of a sudden got the name change announcement recommended in their feeds because of the keyword and it just spread from there. I think that is the most likely actually.
The logo is very corporate, some might say soulless now, but I get it; it's a first step to modernize the brand.
I think we can unanimously agree that serif fonts are an existential threat to civilization.
I really hope it was bots that drove the outrage. If it wasn’t, I don’t know what to say.
It’s a logo.
Interesting. I do remember encountering these types of shitstorms and being confused why on earth it's being turned into a debate about capitalism or immigrants or whatever.
It’s now a trained knee-jerk response.
I can't find any of that discussion online, because it has been totally overshadowed by the more recent logo drama, but you can see a bloodless summary of the event here from the time: https://www.nrn.com/family-dining/cracker-barrel-unveils-str...
So there already was a pre-existing history here for people who are sympathetic to this point of view, particularly coming as it did shortly after some similar Bud Light and Target controversies.
No real-life person thought the logo was offensive before or that the logo became woke. It never passed the smell test.
>PeakMetrics didn’t attribute the bot megaphone to any specific organization or state actor. Rather, it found, “The initiators are ideological activist accounts with prior culture-war posting histories, supported by botnets.”
"the bots" is the new false consciousness, it is a deliberate attempt to avoid engaging