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MS PR astroturfing HN is one potential cause. Another possibility is that HN members are responding favorably to MS's recent moves. Be careful not to dismiss
by ethbro 8y ago
MS PR astroturfing HN is one potential cause.
Another possibility is that HN members are responding favorably to MS's recent moves.
Be careful not to dismiss anything that runs counter to your own narrative as fake. Like you said, we'll see!
- dorfcakeling 8y agoIt doesn't have to be astroturfing. Repeatedly exposing HN readers to the same news would be a good way to gradually increase positive opinion until a desirable threshold is reached ("the first positive top comment").
- ethbro 8y agoYou'll have to walk me through your logic on that again. How is repeated exposure more likely to increase positive opinion?
- misterhtmlcss 8y agoRead up on psychology and his comment will be totally self evident. This is a completely normal phenomenon.
- superkuh 8y agoIt is more likely to be perceived as a common opinion and then people tend to go with what they think the crowd thinks. (PDF) http://erewhon.superkuh.com/library/Neuroscience/Psychology/Inferring%20the%20Popularity%20of%20an%20Opinion%20From%20Its%20Familiarity_%20A%20Repetitive%20Voice%20Can%20Sound%20Like%20a%20Chorus_%20psp-925821.pdf http://erewhon.superkuh.com/library/Neuroscience/Psychology/...
- ethbro 8y agoThat would work through repeatedly exposing people to positive or favorable news. Aka astroturfing. Aka what I asked about. Parent comment specified the same news, which makes less sense. If I hear 100x that MS is buying GitHub, that doesn't make me more likely to respond favorably.
- saint_fiasco 8y agoSuppose it isn't more likely, that it is just random. All Microsoft has to do is pick the one article that has a positive opinion at the top and promote that one.
- ethbro 8y agoThat's astroturfing. Which is what my original comment was about.
- HeyLaughingBoy 8y agoThat's one of the basic premises of advertising!
- sametmax 8y agoI had this debate for the last 10 years, and everytime there are persons to say "maybe this time they changed", and everytime use something like "Be careful not to dismiss anything that runs counter to your own narrative as fake". The problem with a PR machine is that it never get tired of repeating the same story, while we do. And people eventually listen to the PR machine anyway. That's why it works. Not because it's clever, but because of human nature. It works with politician, CEO, singers... But yeah, we'll see.
- ethbro 8y agoI've been watching MS for the last 23 years. So I'm not oblivious to history. ;) And granted that's how PR works, but the problem with carrying distrust to defend against it is that is eventually makes one paranoid. Personally, I aspire to objective reevaluation at the current point in time. In 2018? Microsoft historically did terrible things to open source, Balmer was an asshole about casting it as us vs them, and they still have substantial legacy OS and Office revenue streams to protect. At the same time, their cloud business is rapidly growing, they've realized the only way to compete there is to embrace open source, and that's beginning to permeate the rest of the company. Largely via promoting someone from the dev / server / cloud business as CEO.
- 8u23u0893290u 8y agoA couple years ago, when they had that bug in Win10 that broke webcams, folks here were all "Oh the downfall of software quality at MS! They used to be great!" Those of us who had to admin their products pre-Win7 era were all "What?" To the average user at home, perhaps the experience seemed smooth most of the time. But they've been peddling half-assed efforts and relying on a "walled garden" approach to computing since before the iPhone. They failed to notice the "lifestyle" changes taking place in IT until recently, is all. They're still Evil Corp, and want you to dedicate yourself to building out their empire for them.
- ghostbrainalpha 8y agoI won't ever really forgive MicroSoft until they give us back "Clippy". In a marketing atmosphere dominated by Siri, Alexa, Cortana, Watson.... how can MicroSoft continue to ignore the original and much beloved assistant A.I?