7 ms·

I get the feeling this is much more prevalent than any of us realize. Would explain why most comments seem ridiculous.

by kaolti 7y ago

tboyd47 7y ago
You mean how there are somehow always commenters in every topic ready to leap to the defense of China and major US tech companies?
- dpkonofa 7y ago
  Meh. I would probably be considered (and have been called) a shill for Apple because I tend to defend them way more than most and it's very popular in tech communities to host anti-Apple circlejerks. I have yet to be paid by them for any of my pro-Apple posts.
- derefr 7y ago
  I would guess that those are, more often than not, not paid shills but rather just people who like taking devil’s-advocate sides in arguments “for fun”, i.e. just for the challenge of seeing if they can construct a valid rebuttal to a comment. (I say this because I believe I’ve done this myself more than once, and I know my personality-type isn’t uncommon on HN.)
  - mannykannot 7y ago
    A simpler explanation is that they are individuals defending against what they perceive as a personal attack via 'tribal' affiliations.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      How about people who simply are commenting against what they consider to be bullshit? I've commented here defending China on some issue a few times in the past. I have no ties with the country (except being on a business trip in Shenzhen for two months), nobody paid or even offered to pay me to do it. It's just I hate bullshit, especially when it becomes popular opinion. Just because China has serious issues doesn't mean it's the Devil and everything it does is evil. It's a country, not unlike Russia or the US. (Particular things I've been addressing in the past are a) treating a billion+ population as if it was a small country, and b) blaming China for all cheap mass produced crap and its environmental impact, conveniently forgetting that they aren't doing it for fun, but to fulfill orders from Western companies.)
      - mannykannot 7y ago
        Yeah - I can recognize a little bit of me in that (the bugged by bad arguments part). The answer is probably e) all of the above.
      - riversflow 7y ago
        Really confused about b) as I see it, a nation must be its own steward and we must all be stewards of the world. My understanding is that China is environmentally devastated. If that’s true it is completely the fault of the Chinese, not the fault of those that asked of them to do it. Other countries have stricter rules, so companies choose not to do business there. Especially in developing countries that limits growth, but the local environment benefits. Also the factory orders were coming from multinational corporations, they have no real allegiance with the West, they disrupt Western political, taxation and legal systems just like anywhere else. Moreover, consumers don’t realize the damage they are causing if you let a corporation completely externalized the associated costs,(this is not a uniquely Chinese problem) and markets won’t pick the correct winner in those conditions either, who cares if $CHEAPPLASTICGOOD will last a tenth as long if it’s essentially free? China has not only enabled western consumerism, it disrupted the natural economic forces that would prevent such a thing from arising in the first place. To the detriment of the both parties and the world, all because they didn’t respect their environment and thirsted for power. Please explain how this rational is wrong.
        TeMPOraL 7y ago
        Your points are fair, and I'm not saying China isn't directly responsible for the environmental costs of both their internal and export manufacturing. But it's not fair to shift all of the blame, as some naïve or disingenuous people do, because most of the export manufacturing is either managed by and done for western companies (China being "the factory of the world"), or simply driven by the demand on western markets. In other words, their environmental impact is in large part caused by our consumerism. And if China decided to no longer serve as the world's 3D printer, you're correct that some other nation would probably take up that role - and those same naïve/disingenuous people would then decry that nation for all its environmental problems. In other words: it's bad that China is offering, but it's also bad for the west to take them up on that offer. > Also the factory orders were coming from multinational corporations, they have no real allegiance with the West, they disrupt Western political, taxation and legal systems just like anywhere else. That's IMO just giving up. Corporations are not yet independent governments, they should still be taken to account in the countries they originate from and those they operate in. > China has not only enabled western consumerism, it disrupted the natural economic forces that would prevent such a thing from arising in the first place. Not sure what they disrupted. It looks to me they played by the books, simply arbitraging labor costs like everyone else does in a global economy. Still, it's a feedback loop - China is enabling western consumerism, but growing consumerism is driving further growth in environmentally unsound manufacturing, most of which happens in China. If China did not enable it, probably some other nation would. It's a feedback loop, and both sides of it are to blame.
  - captainbland 7y ago
    I feel like on a place like this site where there are occasionally job postings and networking opportunities, there's an element of "my comments are my CV/resume" which biases some people towards defending/advocating for companies just in case it affects their career prospects.
  - ajna91 7y ago
    Agreed, I see this often. To be honest if the devil is far more powerful in a given situation, I find it distasteful to fight for him against the hurt party.
  - Zarath 7y ago
    At least in the case of corporate defense, most of them are the "free market solves everything" types who believe that if completely left alone, business will turn the world into some utopia.
- panarky 7y ago
  Yes, definitely. And there are also paid propagandists who attack Google at every opportunity, while ignoring far worse behavior by Google's competitors. I'd really like to know what percentage of online content is authentic, and what percentage is paid astroturf to shape public opinion by business interests and ideological/political campaigns.
  - close04 7y ago
    > while ignoring far worse behavior by Google's competitors. That’s because whataboutism ia rarely an excuse, if ever. At best it could offer some context. But given the sheer scale of Google’s operations there's not much context to add. They have both the power to do everything on a massive scale: both the violations and the subsequent “opinion shaping”. The only reason mentioning a competitor would be relevant in many Google related topics is as a distraction. I don’t have to care about the competitors to be 100% correct when attacking Google. On the other hand I got downvoted into oblivion even when comparing Google to competitors with undisputed data. My subjective experience is that the pro-Google camp is doing more overtime on the interwebs. And it makes sense that they would be more organized since they are working under one umbrella with more or less one voice. I find it hard to believe that all anti-Google parties would manage to reach anything close to the same level of organization and alignment of goals.
    - panarky 7y ago
      > the pro-Google camp is doing more overtime on the interwebs By "pro-Google camp" do you mean paid shills trolling and astroturfing to promote Google? If so, I'd love a cite or three, because I haven't heard of pro-Google astroturfing campaigns. Doesn't mean they don't exist, but I have heard of very real anti-Google campaigns sponsored by business competitors and ideological warriors.
      - close04 7y ago
        I clearly said it’s my subjective experience. On top of that I just heard things the same way you did. Also some common sense. Is your implication that ideological warriors can only exist on one side, against Google? Or that Google would resort to plenty of things that are borderline immoral or illegal but they draw the line at playing the PR card to make it look better? How about some of the thousands of employees that support the company line? You have switched between “whatabout the other guys” and “Google never does this but all their ideological warrior opponents do”. The wording alone is already suspiciously aggressive, not to mention the naive implication that a company like Google would not resort to something all of its opponents are (apparently) doing. Perhaps Google’s real strength is getting people to blindly support their crap. You see, it doesn’t actually have to be a “campaign” if all they did was train people to distract and constantly point the finger at others, pretend everybody else is bad but Google can’t be, and try to censor (via downvotes, reports, etc.) any internet opinion that doesn’t conform. Might sound weird but it’s more or less a literal summary of what you did in the previous 2 comments.
- philwelch 7y ago
  I'm fairly confident China (and for that matter Russia, but we all knew that) do this. As for tech companies, I would honestly mark a lot of that down to fanboyism. Not that I'd be entirely surprised, but I somewhat doubt that Elon Musk, in particular, is actually paying all of those people. And Tesla seems to have the most defensive supporters on the internet. People talk about Facebook and Google for their privacy practices, Apple for their crappy laptop keyboards, but it's a tiny minority that goes after Tesla when they're the company least capable of hiring people to argue on the internet. (I would also assume that it's a little bit overrated how often this happens, for the sole reason that I spend a lot of time arguing on the internet and never once have I received an offer to go pro!)
  - fmajid 7y ago
    China or Russia don't need to pay shills in all case, there are always nationalists to do it for free. In other cases, it's Stockholm Syndrome. As for paid shills, there is an entire sub-industry of PR called "Reputation management" devoted to this.
    - paganel 7y ago
      I used to read a Financial Times article from either 2011 or 2012 (can’t remember exactly) where some Israeli military person was confirming that Israel was using what we now call shill accounts (he used a different, more pleasantly sounding term). If Israel does it I’m pretty sure Russia and China do it, too. (I don’t have a direct link to said FT article, just a photo I took of said military person’s quote which is somewhere on one of my computers)
    - philwelch 7y ago
      > As for paid shills, there is an entire sub-industry of PR called "Reputation management" devoted to this. Sure. But there are also fanboys everywhere. Between presumption of good faith, Occam's Razor, Hanlon's Razor, and the breadth and depth of fanboyism I've seen online, my default presumption is always "fanboy" over "shill". Similar to your point about nationalists.
  - aphextim 7y ago
- kaolti 7y ago
  You know it.
aserafini 7y ago
It doesn’t even require a ‘paid agent’ theory to explain. Large companies actively court allegiance from their employees and spend serious effort to retain it by, for example, relentlessly offering mandatory courses in the company’s Cultural Values and evaluating promotions through that lens. So it’s not surprising that some BigTech employees are going to actively defend their employer’s values on forums. The best way to understand modern tech company culture is to consider them all very successful cults.
- philwelch 7y ago
  I don't know if Google is different in this regard, but every tech company I've worked at has forbidden me from "actively defending my employer's values on forums". Maybe not in so many words, but at the very least there's a prohibition against commenting on the company's business on the internet. PR depends a lot on message discipline, which is not what you get from random employees jumping into these arguments.
- mfg76 7y ago
  Ive even created an account to answer this. It's true that most of these companies have cultural values trainings and a bunch of policies, but it's naive to assume that the hired top 1% will follow these policies or even take them seriously. They are smart enough to not get caught (as if anybody cares to catch them), but that's about it. The today's employment model is a no strings attached contract: the employment can be terminated for no reason at any moment without a notice. This is a double edged sword: not only it gives the company flexibility to fire anyone they don't like, it makes employees mostly indifferent about the company as long as it cuts the paycheck. A typical software engineer does a 4 year gig and when the stock vesting plan ends, he moves on to another gig. There is no reason to take seriously policies of a company he worked at 10 years ago. And regarding evaluating promotions thru the cultural values lens. Yawn. There's no money in promotions. For a cult to be successfull, its members need to be bound by something more serious than a company values training they watch once a year.
navigatesol 7y ago
>Would explain why most comments seem ridiculous. Or maybe people have widely differing views on all kinds of subjects? I've been called all kinds of things, which I definitely am not, so I'm inclined to think that people put far to much weight on the conspiracies.

I get the feeling this is much more prevalent than any of us realize. Would explain why most comments seem ridiculous.

by kaolti 7y ago

I get the feeling this is much more prevalent than any of us realize. Would explain why most comments seem ridiculous.

You mean how there are somehow always commenters in every topic ready to leap to the defense of China and major US tech companies?

dpkonofa 7y ago
Meh. I would probably be considered (and have been called) a shill for Apple because I tend to defend them way more than most and it's very popular in tech communities to host anti-Apple circlejerks. I have yet to be paid by them for any of my pro-Apple posts.
derefr 7y ago
I would guess that those are, more often than not, not paid shills but rather just people who like taking devil’s-advocate sides in arguments “for fun”, i.e. just for the challenge of seeing if they can construct a valid rebuttal to a comment. (I say this because I believe I’ve done this myself more than once, and I know my personality-type isn’t uncommon on HN.)
- mannykannot 7y ago
  A simpler explanation is that they are individuals defending against what they perceive as a personal attack via 'tribal' affiliations.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    How about people who simply are commenting against what they consider to be bullshit? I've commented here defending China on some issue a few times in the past. I have no ties with the country (except being on a business trip in Shenzhen for two months), nobody paid or even offered to pay me to do it. It's just I hate bullshit, especially when it becomes popular opinion. Just because China has serious issues doesn't mean it's the Devil and everything it does is evil. It's a country, not unlike Russia or the US. (Particular things I've been addressing in the past are a) treating a billion+ population as if it was a small country, and b) blaming China for all cheap mass produced crap and its environmental impact, conveniently forgetting that they aren't doing it for fun, but to fulfill orders from Western companies.)
    - mannykannot 7y ago
      Yeah - I can recognize a little bit of me in that (the bugged by bad arguments part). The answer is probably e) all of the above.
    - riversflow 7y ago
      Really confused about b) as I see it, a nation must be its own steward and we must all be stewards of the world. My understanding is that China is environmentally devastated. If that’s true it is completely the fault of the Chinese, not the fault of those that asked of them to do it. Other countries have stricter rules, so companies choose not to do business there. Especially in developing countries that limits growth, but the local environment benefits. Also the factory orders were coming from multinational corporations, they have no real allegiance with the West, they disrupt Western political, taxation and legal systems just like anywhere else. Moreover, consumers don’t realize the damage they are causing if you let a corporation completely externalized the associated costs,(this is not a uniquely Chinese problem) and markets won’t pick the correct winner in those conditions either, who cares if $CHEAPPLASTICGOOD will last a tenth as long if it’s essentially free? China has not only enabled western consumerism, it disrupted the natural economic forces that would prevent such a thing from arising in the first place. To the detriment of the both parties and the world, all because they didn’t respect their environment and thirsted for power. Please explain how this rational is wrong.
      - TeMPOraL 7y ago
        Your points are fair, and I'm not saying China isn't directly responsible for the environmental costs of both their internal and export manufacturing. But it's not fair to shift all of the blame, as some naïve or disingenuous people do, because most of the export manufacturing is either managed by and done for western companies (China being "the factory of the world"), or simply driven by the demand on western markets. In other words, their environmental impact is in large part caused by our consumerism. And if China decided to no longer serve as the world's 3D printer, you're correct that some other nation would probably take up that role - and those same naïve/disingenuous people would then decry that nation for all its environmental problems. In other words: it's bad that China is offering, but it's also bad for the west to take them up on that offer. > Also the factory orders were coming from multinational corporations, they have no real allegiance with the West, they disrupt Western political, taxation and legal systems just like anywhere else. That's IMO just giving up. Corporations are not yet independent governments, they should still be taken to account in the countries they originate from and those they operate in. > China has not only enabled western consumerism, it disrupted the natural economic forces that would prevent such a thing from arising in the first place. Not sure what they disrupted. It looks to me they played by the books, simply arbitraging labor costs like everyone else does in a global economy. Still, it's a feedback loop - China is enabling western consumerism, but growing consumerism is driving further growth in environmentally unsound manufacturing, most of which happens in China. If China did not enable it, probably some other nation would. It's a feedback loop, and both sides of it are to blame.
- captainbland 7y ago
  I feel like on a place like this site where there are occasionally job postings and networking opportunities, there's an element of "my comments are my CV/resume" which biases some people towards defending/advocating for companies just in case it affects their career prospects.
- ajna91 7y ago
  Agreed, I see this often. To be honest if the devil is far more powerful in a given situation, I find it distasteful to fight for him against the hurt party.
- Zarath 7y ago
  At least in the case of corporate defense, most of them are the "free market solves everything" types who believe that if completely left alone, business will turn the world into some utopia.
panarky 7y ago
Yes, definitely. And there are also paid propagandists who attack Google at every opportunity, while ignoring far worse behavior by Google's competitors. I'd really like to know what percentage of online content is authentic, and what percentage is paid astroturf to shape public opinion by business interests and ideological/political campaigns.
- close04 7y ago
  > while ignoring far worse behavior by Google's competitors. That’s because whataboutism ia rarely an excuse, if ever. At best it could offer some context. But given the sheer scale of Google’s operations there's not much context to add. They have both the power to do everything on a massive scale: both the violations and the subsequent “opinion shaping”. The only reason mentioning a competitor would be relevant in many Google related topics is as a distraction. I don’t have to care about the competitors to be 100% correct when attacking Google. On the other hand I got downvoted into oblivion even when comparing Google to competitors with undisputed data. My subjective experience is that the pro-Google camp is doing more overtime on the interwebs. And it makes sense that they would be more organized since they are working under one umbrella with more or less one voice. I find it hard to believe that all anti-Google parties would manage to reach anything close to the same level of organization and alignment of goals.
  - panarky 7y ago
    > the pro-Google camp is doing more overtime on the interwebs By "pro-Google camp" do you mean paid shills trolling and astroturfing to promote Google? If so, I'd love a cite or three, because I haven't heard of pro-Google astroturfing campaigns. Doesn't mean they don't exist, but I have heard of very real anti-Google campaigns sponsored by business competitors and ideological warriors.
    - close04 7y ago
      I clearly said it’s my subjective experience. On top of that I just heard things the same way you did. Also some common sense. Is your implication that ideological warriors can only exist on one side, against Google? Or that Google would resort to plenty of things that are borderline immoral or illegal but they draw the line at playing the PR card to make it look better? How about some of the thousands of employees that support the company line? You have switched between “whatabout the other guys” and “Google never does this but all their ideological warrior opponents do”. The wording alone is already suspiciously aggressive, not to mention the naive implication that a company like Google would not resort to something all of its opponents are (apparently) doing. Perhaps Google’s real strength is getting people to blindly support their crap. You see, it doesn’t actually have to be a “campaign” if all they did was train people to distract and constantly point the finger at others, pretend everybody else is bad but Google can’t be, and try to censor (via downvotes, reports, etc.) any internet opinion that doesn’t conform. Might sound weird but it’s more or less a literal summary of what you did in the previous 2 comments.
philwelch 7y ago
I'm fairly confident China (and for that matter Russia, but we all knew that) do this. As for tech companies, I would honestly mark a lot of that down to fanboyism. Not that I'd be entirely surprised, but I somewhat doubt that Elon Musk, in particular, is actually paying all of those people. And Tesla seems to have the most defensive supporters on the internet. People talk about Facebook and Google for their privacy practices, Apple for their crappy laptop keyboards, but it's a tiny minority that goes after Tesla when they're the company least capable of hiring people to argue on the internet. (I would also assume that it's a little bit overrated how often this happens, for the sole reason that I spend a lot of time arguing on the internet and never once have I received an offer to go pro!)
- fmajid 7y ago
  China or Russia don't need to pay shills in all case, there are always nationalists to do it for free. In other cases, it's Stockholm Syndrome. As for paid shills, there is an entire sub-industry of PR called "Reputation management" devoted to this.
  - paganel 7y ago
    I used to read a Financial Times article from either 2011 or 2012 (can’t remember exactly) where some Israeli military person was confirming that Israel was using what we now call shill accounts (he used a different, more pleasantly sounding term). If Israel does it I’m pretty sure Russia and China do it, too. (I don’t have a direct link to said FT article, just a photo I took of said military person’s quote which is somewhere on one of my computers)
  - philwelch 7y ago
    > As for paid shills, there is an entire sub-industry of PR called "Reputation management" devoted to this. Sure. But there are also fanboys everywhere. Between presumption of good faith, Occam's Razor, Hanlon's Razor, and the breadth and depth of fanboyism I've seen online, my default presumption is always "fanboy" over "shill". Similar to your point about nationalists.
- aphextim 7y ago
kaolti 7y ago
You know it.

aserafini 7y ago

It doesn’t even require a ‘paid agent’ theory to explain. Large companies actively court allegiance from their employees and spend serious effort to retain it by, for example, relentlessly offering mandatory courses in the company’s Cultural Values and evaluating promotions through that lens. So it’s not surprising that some BigTech employees are going to actively defend their employer’s values on forums. The best way to understand modern tech company culture is to consider them all very successful cults.

philwelch 7y ago
I don't know if Google is different in this regard, but every tech company I've worked at has forbidden me from "actively defending my employer's values on forums". Maybe not in so many words, but at the very least there's a prohibition against commenting on the company's business on the internet. PR depends a lot on message discipline, which is not what you get from random employees jumping into these arguments.
mfg76 7y ago
Ive even created an account to answer this. It's true that most of these companies have cultural values trainings and a bunch of policies, but it's naive to assume that the hired top 1% will follow these policies or even take them seriously. They are smart enough to not get caught (as if anybody cares to catch them), but that's about it. The today's employment model is a no strings attached contract: the employment can be terminated for no reason at any moment without a notice. This is a double edged sword: not only it gives the company flexibility to fire anyone they don't like, it makes employees mostly indifferent about the company as long as it cuts the paycheck. A typical software engineer does a 4 year gig and when the stock vesting plan ends, he moves on to another gig. There is no reason to take seriously policies of a company he worked at 10 years ago. And regarding evaluating promotions thru the cultural values lens. Yawn. There's no money in promotions. For a cult to be successfull, its members need to be bound by something more serious than a company values training they watch once a year.

navigatesol 7y ago

>Would explain why most comments seem ridiculous. Or maybe people have widely differing views on all kinds of subjects? I've been called all kinds of things, which I definitely am not, so I'm inclined to think that people put far to much weight on the conspiracies.