Been here since 06 or whatever. I frequent other normal forums like Gear Page for music stuff and other older gaming forums. Tried and true for companies are the social media platforms. Easy to target and easy to play the algorithms. A bit harder are old school message boards. Reddit for sure is a hotbed for astroturfing (propaganda masquerading as discourse). But old school forums still prevalent and at times I've noticed certain accounts trying to sway discourse one way or another with repeated posts, links to Twitter, etc. Anyone else feel this or am I crazy?
I would imagine any board with a certain membership and activity level would be targeted. If you look at like the D&D forum, there's a lot more gunk that could be astroturfing, but at some level, the origin of posts containing only links and tweets doesn't matter. It could be a human acting unintentionally like a dumb bot, or it could be a dumb bot intentionally acting like a partisan human. Either way, it just underlines where the culture is going (or has gone).
I've been a longtime user of slickdeals. Their boards have become a ratsnest of cheap boomers who spam unsolicited con hot takes and women's underwar deals. It's tough to filter out useful information of the deal when lame jokes or personal baggage are 80% of the thread. Rather than being paid bots, many of those types are lonely bastards who have an important opinion but with no one to share it with.
I've been on Slickdeals forever, but I think some of the worst changes on there are their own admins/mods etc seemingly promoting deals that aren't really deals or just crap products. I still see great deals on there, though - just have to weed through the "IFOOZMLA 24-pack of koozies for $1.99" deals. One of the reasons I still like it is because you can gauge product quality and/or pricing on legit deals based on feedback from the comments.
I think this is just the age of the influencer, trying to get clicks, getting revenue, promoting your brand, etc. As a byproduct of that, there are people who knowingly or unknowningly start promoting sites and accounts they follow, find interesting, In other cases, they'll post some random tweet Twitter account that they seem to agree with, but, for some reason, don't have the ability to type it themselves. I'm always like "are you trying to tell me you couldn't have just typed that sentence if that's what you believe?"
Also, why does everything "Houston" have to be so negative. "Houston, we have a problem" (even if it's not an accurate quote) "Astroturfed" (the Astros should be ticked)
"I was going to paint you a mural of Houston but I have no idea how to draw swamp humidity." -- 30 Rock
there's no saying or phrase or term for this, but we're entering the "nothing is real" phase of the internet. basically any vulnerability to exploit the lack of identity verification can and will be abused to the point you should not think anything is authentic at face value. we'll eventually have a distributed cryptographic solution to this, but until then it's going to be a real shitshow out there.
that's mostly all humans...but twitter/facebook/message boards give these people a platform to shout their opinions. look at the trolls in the D&D like OS trig or commodore who post random twitter crap all day.
I agree with you, but the "distributed cryptographic solution" may be shortlived before the real s show arrives: quantum computers married to HPC and AI. That will be the true memes-only-please era. And we can just crawl into our mud caves and toast the last 500 years as pretty darned good.
everytime I hear quantum brought up I hear "the heat death of the universe" because the time table for both of those things happening are about the same
