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This story and its retellings appear on Reddit's front page every two months like clockwork.

https://www.reddit.com/search/?q=huy+fong

Each time it gets retold, the sriracha cartoon villain's mustache grows longer and more twirled.

Somehow, Underwood Ranches' competing product never gets failed to get mentioned in a top comment, along with all the places you can buy it, how much better/hotter it tastes, and how superior its ingredients are.

I've never seen something so obviously and clumsily astroturfed, yet be so effective. Their entire growth strategy is enemy positioning on social media. You gotta hand it to the COO (who according to the story he's crafted is the loyal and virtuous hero) as he's running circles around the incompetent and out-of-touch management at sriricha who likely have no idea what's going on.

It appears sheer spite and vengeance is what brought Underwood Ranches back from the brink of bankruptcy. Now that's a genuine American success story.

View on HN

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.

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

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).

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.

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

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

> 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

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)

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

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

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.

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.

>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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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).

Nothing stopping both from being true. The court judgements[0] aren't faked. It genuinely appears Underwood really was screwed over. That said, it doesn't take much for a CMO to look at the situation and figure out how to market the product from there. Something something lemonade.

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...

Additionally, it's not like this necessarily got posted out of the blue. There's another Huy Fong sriracha shortage due to a Mexican crop failure driven by climate change. So anyone wondering why they can't buy it will naturally encounter this story.

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.

A note of caution on this line of thinking. Pretty much every story you'll ever hear about a commercial subject is going to a) be incomplete and inaccurate, and b) seem beneficial to one party in the story. That's just how stories work.

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.

To be fair, if I had a company and won a lawsuit like that... a lawsuit which makes for a good underdog story, I'd let my PR team use it as much as they desire! That lawsuit is a golden asset for them now.

Reading some the comments on this thread reveals one of the main reasons why a campaign like this is necessary if you're Underwood. Huy Fong has achieved "category king" status in this space; most people don't know what Huy Fong is, that red sauce is called "Sriracha". Huy Fong knows quite well that as long as the sauce still comes in that bottle and tastes like chilis, 99% of their customers will still buy it. Making a dent in this segment beyond foodies and hot-sauce enthusiasts requires some guerrilla marketing and and public education.

A lot of reddit does not seem to be aware that a huge amount of the content is totally fake, astroturfing, etc. Soon, the "product site:reddit.com" will be just as useless as Amazon reviews.

A lot don't care if it is. I've had friends share things and I stopped replying with "you know this isn't a true story/fact/real image, right?". Their response is always "idk i thought it was funny/interesting" which is valid. I felt like I was raining on parades so now I usually just respond with an emoji.

The problem is though that even if they "just think it's funny", over time it gets built into their worldview.

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.

> "idk i thought it was funny/interesting" which is valid

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

Reddit is the fakest social media platform out there. The amount of fabricated situations like "my marbles totally aligned like this by themselves", or "my husband eats his hotdogs with toothpaste" and it's a picture of something odd but that someone could easily fabricate and take a picture of is just crazy. That kind of posts always reach the top pages too.

They have a whole "That Happened" subreddit just for the rubbish that people post, let alone AIs.

Post an interesting true story and it will be referred to /r/thathappened.

https://www.reddit.com/r/nothingeverhappens/

How many of the credulous responses are themselves bot-generated to make the original sound more believable?

Been that way a long time, maybe always was. Bad behavior is often rewarded, compelling lies gain more upvotes than truth and there's little consequence for shitposting.

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.

gotten worse since 2015, and you can see the big drop off after LLMs get big in ~2021

It was pretty amazing in the early days. It has been bad for a while. The current era is definitely something new, though. Popular subreddits are mostly worthless, and the platform both cannot control all the bots and astroturfing, but also their attempts to do so have degraded the experience for the average user.

"You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain."

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.

Yep, I think that's right. Even if reddit, its company, and its moderators were all perfect, it might still crumble and become awful under the weight of its popularity. Too many bad actors, too many companies astroturfing, not enough monetization to solve these problems. And of course the site, the company, and the moderators are far from perfect.

Hackernews is even worse

That's unquestionably incorrect, although I would agree that HN is declining in quality as its user base balloons in size (this would be the bigger contributor) and as general disenfranchisement with tech companies rises. (this would be a smaller, but still-noticeable contributor)

'Everything is astroturf' is such a boring and cynical worldview. Its good to be suspicious, but not at the cost of joy. Underwood sauce is good. They got screwed over. Sometimes a story is just a story.

I do this kind of marketing on reddit. It's so incredibly easy.

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.

You should be ashamed of manipulating people for profit, not proud of it.

I'm largely indifferent, but the products I promote are good and the customers spending 500k+ pa on the services I sell are not unsophisticated.

Well of course the people buying your services approve of your antisocial behavior, they are encouraging it. They also suck.

The "customers" I speak of here are the people finding my antisocial content on reddit and deciding to enter into long term business relationships.

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.

Fake endorsements of a product is not what most people mean by "selling".

Like I get it, you are fine with what you are doing. Whatever. But you are being dishonest with people, maybe in a way that you see as small, and that sucks.

If someone reads the reddit post and decides to buy the Sriracha competitor then who has been ripped off? It's a win-win, competitor has gotten business and the customer has bought a product they now perceive to be superior.

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.

Advertising without disclosing to sponsorship is literally illegal because we as a society have decided that it's a social ill.

People on HN won't like that you do this but at least you're honest, and showing that this does actually happen, it's just that others are not so loud (at least sometimes, see the link below). This sort of thing is very common on reddit, there are even articles and studies about said astroturfing.

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...

Personally I don't like that they do that, not that they are pointing out that they do that.

Yes I should've said, people on HN don't like that they do that, or that it happens at all, but the reality is that it does and especially for people on a forum run by a startup accelerator in particular (with tons of Ask HN questions on how to grow their product via marketing), posting on social media is one of the most effective ways to grow, whether people like it or not.

So you're one of the reasons everything is shit. Got it.

GP is from a long line of enshittificators: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47218815

In a sense? Yes, and I don't care because other people are posting AI garbage everywhere and genuinely ruining things.

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!

It's called Tragedy of the Commons, and it is just how things are unfortunately. I don't like it either, but if it wasn't this guy it would be someone else.

Well, it wouldn't be me, and it wouldn't be a lot of other people, so maybe it's not "just how it is", maybe some people are more willing to abuse the commons than others and we should be quicker to identify and condemn antisocial behavior instead of just shrugging and saying "Oh well, it's society's fault for failing to plug every possible profit motive for bad behavior"

I mod a couple subs on reddit, and one that is fairly famous. I see this stuff all the time, even if this person is lying. Its a real phenomenon. Usually its messy like "haha, my husband just loves these cookies" and with a link to the site and its obvious its spam, but stuff like this happens too.

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.

And then it's picked up by LLMs as a fairly trusted organic source. It slightly peeves me how often LLM cites random reddit post as an authoritative trust worthy data point :-/

If this is true, it implies that such marketing on Reddit is not worth much. Because if a marketing tactic is easy and effective, intense competition will drive up the price of doing so.

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.

I've thought about this same thing a lot, and the only explanation for the current state of affairs I can come up with is that marketers that have a good enough understanding of these communities are hard to come by.

It's also likely that many businesses are simply too risk averse to engage in things like purchasing farmed reddit accounts and upvotes.

Oh, there’s risk? Somehow you forgot to mention that in your post about how incredibly easy it is.

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 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.

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.

> Because if a marketing tactic is easy and effective, intense competition will drive up the price of doing so.

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

You think GPU manufacturers are paying people to post fake positive comments all day in /r/buildapcsales in the hopes of materially increasing their revenue?

That's Reddit for you. I wonder how few topics you could condense the most posts into?

Uhm. What are you suggesting exactly? That Underwood somehow manipulated Huy Fong into screwing them over and then suing them, just so that they could get a good story out of it?

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.

They are clearly suggesting that the story recurring every two months is Astro-turfed, not that the story itself is false?

Here I was foolishly thinking AstroTurf meant false grass

Well, it implies that the "grassroots" element of it is fake, the message itself being false is optional.

Huh, I didn't realise it was that specific, I thought it just meant/came from 'covering everything with crap'.

It is a shame reddit lets people hide their post and comment history now so there can be no identifying signals about astro-turfing or bots. I'm sure this is ostensibly about preventing harassment, and in actuality about disguising bot behavior driving engagement. Or maybe I'm just extra cynical this morning.

Just go to the profile in question and search their profile with an empty query; that'll show all the hidden comments and posts.

Edit: at least on the web variant, it looks like they finally blocked that ability.

IIRC you just have to use an asterisk or something now, and I think the search is broken on OldReddit…

Hello - it's me, the OP from the Reddit post. I saw the discussion here and felt I had to respond, because you've gone after my integrity and honesty - you have basically accused me of being a shill for Underwood, a clumsy astroturfer who makes things up. So, I would like to say a few things in reply.

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.

Good on you, man. I'm sad to see no one else thanking you for speaking up with the voice of reason. Probably you're just too late to the punch.

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.

Any vaguely good shilling eventually gets reposted by real people.

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/...

Me in 2090 BC, “Seems like people keep retelling this Gilgamesh tale and embellishing it each time! I’m really smart so it must people trying to convince me to buy something.”

Why would the Epic of Gilgamesh want to sell you something? In contrast this Sriracha story clearly does want to sell you something. If you want to use an analogy at least use one that makes sense.

You think this Sriracha story wants to sell you something.

Yes, the fact that I can even think so makes a case that it's possible to astroturf it. The same cannot be said of a folk tale, unless somehow it had its own interstitial ads between every chapter.

People sell things by telling stories. Sometimes those stories are interstitial ads and sometimes they are not.

If you can't tell the difference between an ancient poem and an astroturfing reddit post then I'm not sure how to convince you there is one.

It was all about Shamhat's OnlyFans clay tablet.

The point of heroic tales such as Gilgamesh was to draw tribute and sacrifices to the temple of Ishtar. The analogy makes perfect sense.

Maybe that's a post facto rationalized reason, as I'm sure it did draw in more tributes, but that's like saying folk tales across the world's sole purpose is to have sacrifices when in reality people just like making up and telling stories. It's like saying the apostles of Christ only spread his message to raise money for the Catholic Church, no doubt that was a side effect but it wasn't the "point" by any means, especially early on where there was no church.

> Maybe that's a post facto rationalized reason

Isn't this what you're doing with the idea that the Sri Racha story is obviously meant to sell?

One is plausible as the primary reason, with documented instances of it happening, as I had linked before, while the other is mere conjecture.

Because astroturfing on reddit exists doesn't mean that this is plausibly astroturfing. Any post on reddit about any business could be plausibly astroturfing by that logic.

Correct, that is what plausible means in this case, especially as we have evidence of them doing so, even in this very thread.

So it's plausible to think that you're astroturfing here to hurt the reputation of Reddit?

Because people have made posts on social media sites like HN in the past in an effort to change public perception of companies, right?

Sure, you can think that. Why do you think I'd deny my own chain of logic, just because it doesn't suit my current purpose? That's philosophical inconsistency which is not good for sound argumentation.

Surely you wouldnt disagree with it since you’re known for sound argumentation and philosophical consistency.

I see, looks like you aren't interested in actually debating, being sarcastic and calling positions ridiculous when you cannot justify your own. Have a good day.

Yes I can see why that POV is appealing when you’ve backed yourself into a corner.

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