r/gaming is shit. Bunch of sycophants all soft criticizing games like a review magazine afraid of offending the makers while talking about their playthrough. Go figure. Heaven help you if you have an actual opinion outside of the box, or don’t know some bit of terminology or lore about a game that is “common knowledge”.
The clear blend of cynicism and resignation in replies to the Reddit thread about the deleted Trap Plan post clearly illustrate how widely pervasive these practices are perceived to be.
I mean, back when professional game reviewing was more of a thing, game publishers used to do things like take said reviewers on outings and stuff to influence them, give them free copies, whatever. Marketers trying to subvert information flow isn’t something that suddenly showed up with social media.
An outright confession of what sure sounds like blatant astroturfing—a deceptive marketing campaign that’s meant to look like natural, spontaneous conversation—is probably not the sharpest move for any company that wants to attract or keep new clients.
The clients are just fine with it. This guy was off talking about it to market his company; publishers that he attracted did so because of what he was doing.
The users being astroturfed are the ones who aren’t going to like it.
What the client is going to be pissed about is that the guy mentioned their actual game while trying to promote their astroturfing company:
Still, Beresnev did what he could to put space between War Robots developer My.Games and Trap Plan, telling Kotaku the intent “was to experiment with a more organic way of promoting games on Reddit—without using bots or fake accounts—and to build a new case study we could use in the future,” and that mentioning the game and studio by name was a mistake.
“This was entirely our initiative and not commissioned or endorsed by My.Games in any way,” Beresnev said. “We understand this was a mistake and have since removed the case study. We sincerely apologize to My.Games and the War Robots: Frontiers team for the misunderstanding and any confusion it may have caused.”
If there are enough people who wait until after a game has been out for some time to play it, there will be marketers targeting that group too.
They might promote the thing based on value or something other than what the latest flashy game crowd gets, but put enough wallets together and there’s an incentive for someone to go after them. The astroturfing guy’s shtick was that he was targeting individual communities with crafted material to try to appeal to them. PatientGamers is another community.
The marketer in the article — as with anyone else trying to do surreptitious marketing of this sort — is in the business of making hype that is hard to distinguish from buzz. If it were trivial to identify hype, he wouldn’t be in business.
This confirms what I expected. I thought I was going crazy the first time I saw an ask reddit repost and I recognized all the top answers. Eventually they bots will outnumber the users and dead Internet theory will prevail
There are definitely pockets of reddit that don’t have their content flooded with bots, but they are the exception in today’s day and age. I especially enjoy the college football subreddit, as there still isn’t quite something similar on lemmy
I love how so many people on Reddit are acting like this is a complete shock. That site has been a cesspool of bots and targeted ads for years now, people still believed they were having real conversations with humans? I’d be surprised if legit content was higher than 50%.
There’s a way to look at the top Karma users on Reddit. Most of them are either bots, or corporate account. There’s a Marvel one that posts movie stuff, and some Turbo something or other for gaming. They don’t comment, they just post what their corporate overlords want you to see, and they probably have bots that push their content to the top. They just aggregate popular sites, though, driving people into the ads.
When I was on Reddit, going to that leaderboard to block people was my first stop. Though, I do think there are a few that are interesting, even bots — like the haiku one is amusing. It doesn’t always get it right, but it’s fun to see it try. Then there’s a guy — pretty sure it’s a person, at least — who turns posts into poems. Not quite the same. Got a weird name. Regular Redditors know who they are. “Something for your something”, I think. I don’t block the fun ones. Just the corporate trash.
I’d argue it is resistant. Lemmy is federated, which means smaller instances, making it easier to detect this kind of activity. Crime in a city vs crime in a town situation
Nah, it works for now because no one really tries to spam lemmy. If it gets popular enough companies will pay bot farms to post here and admins want be able to keep up with moderation. Bots will simply join the biggest instances. The only solution would be to defederate the main instances and have everyone pretty much host their own server.
I think to an extent yes, but not quite as bad as Reddit. Reddit admins will completely ignore reports about these. I think most Fediverse admins won’t ignore them.
They can literally setup an instance themselves. By the time it is identified as such, the damage is basically done. Just make a new one. Or use one of the many instances not requiring approval. Or fill out the form with ai. They don’t actually need an insane number of accounts for their subterfuge. Having just “some” and keeping them tied to conversational themes/topics seems sufficient?
As someone who never saw Instagram before yesterday, I was a little shocked at just how much crap was AI generated and just useless fake content. I kept hearing how bad AI was, but until I saw just how bad I really had no idea. I imagine reddit is getting closer to this exact model soon enough.
“I’m 39 and a single dad to three girls with special needs, but five years ago I quit my job and started pursuing my lifelong dream of being a game developer. This metroidvania styled RPG with roguelite elements is my dream come true. Here’s a short clip of the gameplay.”
Shitty 8-bit sprites jiggle on the screen
Reddit: OMG! I’m literally crying right now as I buy this. It’s so good!
Reddit be like all the play writers from South Park when Randy Marsh found out that subliminal messages were being sent to women (Episode: Broadway Bro Down)
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r/gaming is shit. Bunch of sycophants all soft criticizing games like a review magazine afraid of offending the makers while talking about their playthrough. Go figure. Heaven help you if you have an actual opinion outside of the box, or don’t know some bit of terminology or lore about a game that is “common knowledge”.
Don’t forget the lack of accountability among mods in reddit.
They can remove whatever they want, and we wouldn’t even know it was there. This alone causes people to self-censor.
That’s basically all large fandom/hobby subs now, in my experience.
And yeah, don’t forget the shallow memes or fear of arbitrary banning.
I mean, back when professional game reviewing was more of a thing, game publishers used to do things like take said reviewers on outings and stuff to influence them, give them free copies, whatever. Marketers trying to subvert information flow isn’t something that suddenly showed up with social media.
The clients are just fine with it. This guy was off talking about it to market his company; publishers that he attracted did so because of what he was doing.
The users being astroturfed are the ones who aren’t going to like it.
What the client is going to be pissed about is that the guy mentioned their actual game while trying to promote their astroturfing company:
https://www.trapplan.com/about-us
How do you do this without having “fake accounts”? How do they define “fake accounts” here?
This is a major reason why I never follow hype.
Patient gamers always win
If there are enough people who wait until after a game has been out for some time to play it, there will be marketers targeting that group too.
They might promote the thing based on value or something other than what the latest flashy game crowd gets, but put enough wallets together and there’s an incentive for someone to go after them. The astroturfing guy’s shtick was that he was targeting individual communities with crafted material to try to appeal to them. PatientGamers is another community.
The marketer in the article — as with anyone else trying to do surreptitious marketing of this sort — is in the business of making hype that is hard to distinguish from buzz. If it were trivial to identify hype, he wouldn’t be in business.
Oh no WHICH marketing company so I can’t avoid them?
Edit: marketing firm is TRAP PLAN and the game that used is services was War Robots: Frontiers
This confirms what I expected. I thought I was going crazy the first time I saw an ask reddit repost and I recognized all the top answers. Eventually they bots will outnumber the users and dead Internet theory will prevail
There are definitely pockets of reddit that don’t have their content flooded with bots, but they are the exception in today’s day and age. I especially enjoy the college football subreddit, as there still isn’t quite something similar on lemmy
Lemmy has those communities, they’re just small and not very active comparatively
Reddit be like
User A: i made this
Reddit: fuck off with the self marketing!
User B: my friend(definitely not me) quit their job and made this
Reddit: ohh my god this is brilliant!
I love how so many people on Reddit are acting like this is a complete shock. That site has been a cesspool of bots and targeted ads for years now, people still believed they were having real conversations with humans? I’d be surprised if legit content was higher than 50%.
It’s so bad, basically every post there is pushed by bots. The entire purpose of reddit is to shape opinion by forced consensus.
It’s a propaganda machine inside the bloated husk of a forum aggregator.
Lemmy isn’t impervious but it’s much better than reddit.
There’s a way to look at the top Karma users on Reddit. Most of them are either bots, or corporate account. There’s a Marvel one that posts movie stuff, and some Turbo something or other for gaming. They don’t comment, they just post what their corporate overlords want you to see, and they probably have bots that push their content to the top. They just aggregate popular sites, though, driving people into the ads.
When I was on Reddit, going to that leaderboard to block people was my first stop. Though, I do think there are a few that are interesting, even bots — like the haiku one is amusing. It doesn’t always get it right, but it’s fun to see it try. Then there’s a guy — pretty sure it’s a person, at least — who turns posts into poems. Not quite the same. Got a weird name. Regular Redditors know who they are. “Something for your something”, I think. I don’t block the fun ones. Just the corporate trash.
Oh, Poem for your Sprog. I remember that one. Users like that are one of the few things I miss about Reddit.
Poem_for_your_sprog
There are some things i miss about that site.
https://old.reddit.com/user/Poem_for_your_sprog/
That account appears to have been inactive for the past seven months.
Poem for your sprog, right? Not been on reddit for a while, but encountering a post from that guy was generally a fun moment.
That’s just the consequence of being popular. Lemmy isn’t impervious or even resistant to this
Oh, absolutely. Which is why I avoid popular social media: you just end up drowning in AI/botted content.
I’d argue it is resistant. Lemmy is federated, which means smaller instances, making it easier to detect this kind of activity. Crime in a city vs crime in a town situation
Nah, it works for now because no one really tries to spam lemmy. If it gets popular enough companies will pay bot farms to post here and admins want be able to keep up with moderation. Bots will simply join the biggest instances. The only solution would be to defederate the main instances and have everyone pretty much host their own server.
I think to an extent yes, but not quite as bad as Reddit. Reddit admins will completely ignore reports about these. I think most Fediverse admins won’t ignore them.
And of insanely easy account creation. You didn’t even need an email.
Reddit doesn’t require email either.
I was talking about reddit. Lemmy, at least the instances i was on, needs manual approval
They can literally setup an instance themselves. By the time it is identified as such, the damage is basically done. Just make a new one. Or use one of the many instances not requiring approval. Or fill out the form with ai. They don’t actually need an insane number of accounts for their subterfuge. Having just “some” and keeping them tied to conversational themes/topics seems sufficient?
As someone who never saw Instagram before yesterday, I was a little shocked at just how much crap was AI generated and just useless fake content. I kept hearing how bad AI was, but until I saw just how bad I really had no idea. I imagine reddit is getting closer to this exact model soon enough.
Most people are unable to tell the difference between human and bot and, to be honest, a significant percentage of humans are dumber than modern LLMs.
“I’m 39 and a single dad to three girls with special needs, but five years ago I quit my job and started pursuing my lifelong dream of being a game developer. This metroidvania styled RPG with roguelite elements is my dream come true. Here’s a short clip of the gameplay.”
Shitty 8-bit sprites jiggle on the screen
Reddit: OMG! I’m literally crying right now as I buy this. It’s so good!
I see you too are familiar with Heart Forth Alicia.
Reddit is like, dude you can’t just come out and SAY it.
Reddit be like all the play writers from South Park when Randy Marsh found out that subliminal messages were being sent to women (Episode: Broadway Bro Down)
I think about that episode a lot.