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> In that timeframe, it found that 44.5% of all mentions of Cracker Barrel were flagged as likely or higher bot activity. This is a useless statistic without a

> In that timeframe, it found that 44.5% of all mentions of Cracker Barrel were flagged as likely or higher bot activity. This is a useless statistic without a comparison of what percentage of activity is bots for any culture-war news story of the day. And it means that over half weren't bots. People really were genuinely bothered by replacing an old-timey logo they grew up with and loved, with some bland corporate logo that looks like everything else. Also they were pissed off about the similar redesign of the interiors from homey personality to generic bland gray. If you think it's silly because it's not a restaurant you go to, imagine if Coca-Cola replaced their script logo with some generic sans-serif one. Don't you think the outrage would be real?

tdeck 1y ago
As someone who has been to Cracker Barrel many times I find it hard to believe there was such strong affection for the logo. The logo is the least distinctive or memorable thing about Cracker Barrel's restaurant design.
- crazygringo 1y ago
  But it's all part of the same thing. And it wasn't just the logo -- they redid the entire restaurant design. And they've rolled it all back now, the old restaurant design stays. And the logo is more recognizable than you seem to think -- you see signs for it on the highway, it's part of building anticipation for the visit. It's part of childhood memories.
  - multjoy 1y ago
    So nothing can ever change?
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - p1esk 1y ago
      Out of all things they could have improved, they picked one that didn’t need changing.
    - forgotoldacc 1y ago
      People are beyond sick of the corporate soulless overhauls of things people like. Millennials and zoomers talk pretty often about McDonald's and other chains losing the "fun" atmosphere they had decades ago and looking like soulless office dining halls. Cracker Barrel is the only chain that still has that fun atmosphere. The rebrand was turning it into a soulless dining hall. It's not surprising it pissed people off. And all the outrage I saw was from people getting pissed about it on discord. That's a lot harder to fake than random twitter posts, where bots all parrot actual trends in order to boost their views and shill some sort of scam/product. If Taco Bell announced they were bringing back 90s style colorful interiors and decorations, I think the outrage would be zero. People would celebrate. People have no problem with interesting change.
      - multjoy 1y ago
        It’s a chain restaurant. Funny thing to build family traditions around, it’s not like a 300yo family run pub that has been serving a community for time immemorial.
        crazygringo 1y ago
        If that's what you had around growing up, that's what you had so that's where the traditions were. Not everyone is so lucky to have a 300 year old family run pub nearby. So maybe find some more empathy for people's lives growing up? Nobody chooses the situation they're born into.
        multjoy 1y ago
        It's a restaurant chain having a rebrand. I've no sympathy for this absolute childlike behaviour, and even less sympathy for people trying to pretend that the outrage was anything but artificially stoked.
        forgotoldacc 1y ago
        People here on HN complain about tech companies losing their charm and they're giving up and switching to another OS/phone/whatever, and get very upset because (company) is losing their character and everything that made them unique. It's a funny thing to build an identity around a trillion dollar company. But yes, people have things they like. They like when things they consider good don't do total overhauls. There's a very good chance you have something you hold dear or would be upset if it changed, and others will happily mock your frustration.
    - ToucanLoucan 1y ago
      People will accept change if it's better. Yet another distinct, albeit not my cup of tea, and interesting restaurant rebranding into yet another fucking gray box with a flat 2-color logo isn't better, it's more bland in a sea of bland. Even though I have no good vibes for the place, I'm happy it exists, and there are clearly a bunch of other people who DO like it, and I also want them to have it. That makes for a better world to live in, if only by a micron.
      - blooalien 1y ago
        > "People will accept change if it's better." Oh that is so not true for a shocking number of folks, sadly. There's a whole "political" angle these days revolving around "if the other side likes it, then it's automatically the worst thing to happen in the history of ever; we must oppose it at all costs, even if it harms us or destroys us to do so". The introduction of "AI" and "bots" has only served to multiply and magnify that behavior among those prone to it.
    - washadjeffmad 1y ago
      Do you know what a Cracker Barrel is? They're not exactly celebrations of modernity.
    - lotsoweiners 1y ago
      Why does it need to?
- p1esk 1y ago
  I think the old logo was distinctive and memorable. I used to go there because of food and because of atmosphere. If the atmosphere is gone I’m less likely to return in the future.
- scythe 1y ago
  It's just another case of this generally awful trend. Here's the thing about the boiling frog: it's not true. Slowly heating a frog will not make it die peacefully. It still reacts when the temperature gets too high. An awful lot of people I've talked to in real life (including me) are not happy about the encroaching minimal trend in design taking over everything. If it was just Cracker Barrel, it probably wouldn't be that big of a deal. But it is like the fall of Constantinople to the app icons. We're already cursed with hideous buildings and logos everywhere, so when the nostalgia was drained from the restaurant built on nostalgia people reacted. And for whatever reason I saw people trying to make it a culture war issue, accusing anyone who objected of being right-wing. Thankfully a number of prominent Democrats spoke up, too, because it was never about "woke" or whatever.
  - technothrasher 1y ago
    > Here's the thing about the boiling frog: it's not true. That whole thing stems from a 19th century German scientist (Dr Fruedrich Goltz) who wanted to know if the impulse to jump out was from the brain or further down the nervous system. From his experiments, an intact frog freaks out when the water gets too hot. When he destroyed the brain of the frog, it sits their until it dies of exposure. There was actually quite a lot of experimenting in the late 19th century with "reflex frogs" (i.e. brain dead but still alive). W. T. Sedgwick wrote a decent review of it in 1888 titled, "ON VARIATIONS OF REFLEX-EXCITABILITY IN THE FROG, INDUCED BY CHANGES OF TEMPERATURE."
  - pseudalopex 1y ago
    > And for whatever reason I saw people trying to make it a culture war issue, accusing anyone who objected of being right-wing. Thankfully a number of prominent Democrats spoke up, too, because it was never about "woke" or whatever. People who said it was about woke or whatever included a Republican member of Congress, a Trump campaign adviser, a prominent right wing pundit, and a prominent right wing activist recently added to Meta's AI advisory board.[1][2][3][4] Someone speaking for a right wing college said the new logo had the same energy as vandalism of a George Washington statue.[5] This list is far from complete. I saw several comments which observed the attention given to this issue was dominated by right wing outrage. I saw none which implied no other objection was conceivable. [1] https://x.com/ByronDonalds/status/1958570840561275002 https://x.com/ByronDonalds/status/1958570840561275002 [2] https://x.com/alexbruesewitz/status/1958270205466952033 https://x.com/alexbruesewitz/status/1958270205466952033 [3] https://x.com/realchrisrufo/status/1958629455125258479 https://x.com/realchrisrufo/status/1958629455125258479 [4] https://x.com/robbystarbuck/status/1958619336848855228 https://x.com/robbystarbuck/status/1958619336848855228 [5] https://x.com/Hillsdale/status/1958631145614319930 https://x.com/Hillsdale/status/1958631145614319930
- blurbleblurble 1y ago
  It makes people remember relatives who are no longer with us. Doesn't matter what the logo looks like.
deleted 1y ago
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Forgeties79 1y ago
There is no way people are that passionate about graphic design. All the debate about the logo has to do with conservatives declaring Cracker Barrel was going woke and getting angry about it and turning it into yet another front for their culture war. Cracker Barrel is a mediocre chain people associate with the term “American.” That being said, this isn’t changing the Statue of Liberty. It’s a corporate logo change. People took this personally because virtually everything is part of the culture war now.
- dave78 1y ago
  Ahem: https://x.com/TheDemocrats/status/1958659652708716776 https://x.com/TheDemocrats/status/1958659652708716776 The dislike for the new logo was one of the very rare things that people on both sides in the US seemed to agree on...
  - thrance 1y ago
    Doesn't matter. Republican politicans and influencers (if separating the two still makes any sense) framed it as an attack by the "woke" and "radical left" on these fabled american values.
    - JohnFen 1y ago
      Maybe so, but that was just rhetorical lying that had no basis in actual reality.
      - Forgeties79 1y ago
        Not maybe so, it is what’s happening. Whether their stance reflects reality or not is not (is it ever with these people?) the point - they’re using it to stir the pot as usual.
      - thrance 1y ago
        Yes? Doesn't make it any better. I think it makes it even worse, in fact.
marginalia_nu 1y ago
> And it means that over half weren't bots. Just a small number of fake accounts can likely stir up tensions quite a lot. I've noticed some of the biggest outrage usually comes as reactions to screenshots of what the other side is saying. There is of course nothing preventing you from running some of those accounts as well.
- throwaway667555 1y ago
  The logo and interior design was s--t.
  - tantalor 1y ago
    Found the bot
- rconti 1y ago
  Also, the tone of the posts might be quite different. Maybe the non-bot critical posts have more nuance or say "this new logo is boring, bring back the new one" and the bots say "this is DEI run amok, boycott Cracker Barrel!" and a bunch of other invectives I don't even want to post as an example.
  - rbanffy 1y ago
    Outrage drives engagement. It’s expected any algorithm that tries to maximize engagement will push inflammatory messages.
- rbanffy 1y ago
  Twitter API access was quite expensive last time I checked.
  - marginalia_nu 1y ago
    Residential proxies and headless browsers are also a thing, as is hiring a bunch of actual people to carry out the operation. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency
HardwareLust 1y ago
If you are literally angry your favorite corporately owned chain restaurant changed their logo and/or their decor, you got bigger problems.
- techblueberry 1y ago
  I think it’s a microcosm for the conflict for the fact that we’re all nostalgic for this world that doesn’t exist, and bizarrely that nobody wants. I find nostalgia in general fascinating, and it was funny, I watched this Fox News / Gutfeld clip and I think maybe with one exception, none of them had been to Cracker Barrel, and it makes sense, if you’re a Fox News host, you’re probably a city person. I think even Christopher Rufo who led the culture war charge against it didn’t really go. But it’s anger at this abstract attack on “Americana”(this is the best explanation I’ve seen for why some people have called it woke) that only some of our grandparents truly value anymore. And the weird thing is, if the brand really is dying, attempts to stop it from changing will only hasten its demise. Anyways, fascinating.
  - mapontosevenths 1y ago
    Conservatives, almost by definition, need the past to have been better than the future. Otherwise, what are they conserving?
    - grayhatter 1y ago
      I don't think this is true? What about people who believe the future will be better, but view change in of self as risky and destabilizing? You can want to turn the ship, but be unwilling to capsize it, no?
    - like_any_other 1y ago
      > Otherwise, what are they conserving? They're conserving the things they like as they are, while letting things they don't like change. This is such a ridiculous strawman view - like saying progressives think all change is good.
jjulius 1y ago
I'll allow being upset that something you love is changing because you're nostalgic for what it's always been, struggle with change and don't like how bland modern design is. I don't personally get it (though I've got solidarity regarding the blandness of design), but I understand those sentiments exist in others and am OK with that. What I don't get, and what was truly excessive, is blaming it on "woke" and watching our politicians and president get involved. That was all beyond stupid.
- rashkov 1y ago
  Everything is weaponized, whether it makes sense or not. They’re just throwing things at the wall to see what sticks, and these things take a life of their own
- techblueberry 1y ago
  The funny thing about calling it woke is it wasn’t a partisan issue, nobody was going to Cracker Barrel Republicans included, that’s why it was dying, and all my woke/liberal friends were just as nostalgic. But it’s really representative of how little of a shared vision for America there is on the modern right, like this full throated attack in an attempt to protect something they don’t want.
  - api 1y ago
    My take is that some on the right, perhaps most, correctly identify that our culture is in the doldrums but don’t have an answer. Being conservatives and reactionaries their instinct is to reach for a point in the past they think was better and try to roll back to that. But they haven’t thought it through in any depth. They don’t know what they actually want. Leftists, having different instincts, reach for things like class conflict and social injustice to explain the doldrums, but I’m not convinced they’ve thought it through either.
    - techblueberry 1y ago
      Yeah, the weird annoyance from me is I probably value things like cracker barrel more than your average Republican. I think about how there was this era of Vegas in the 80’s and 90’s where they built all those crazy theme hotels, and now the “theme” for most hotels in Vegas is just like “glam”
glenstein 1y ago
>This is a useless statistic without a comparison of what percentage of activity is bots for any culture-war news story of the day. There's a grain of truth in here, but you're taking it way too far. I'd rather have that number you're asking for than not have it to be sure, but the percentage still matters in absolute terms.
KronisLV 1y ago
> And it means that over half weren't bots. I think the important thing here is to see which came first. How many people in a crowd do you need to start clapping, to end up with everyone applauding?
- mhb 1y ago
  Steven Pinker's new book: When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life https://www.amazon.com/When-Everyone-Knows-That-Knowledge/dp/1668011573 https://www.amazon.com/When-Everyone-Knows-That-Knowledge/dp...
astine 1y ago
If you think it's silly because it's not a restaurant you go to, imagine if Coca-Cola replaced their script logo with some generic sans-serif one. Don't you think the outrage would be real? I can't imagine being upset at something like that. I'm sure there would be people upset, given the nonsense that happened in the 80s, but being personally invested in corporate branding has got to be the saddest sort of parasocial relationship possible.
- notmyjob 1y ago
  Yrs, it’s real. People collect coke stuff as a … hobby? Lifestyle? Disney too. While they seem as bizarre to me as adults who collect toy anime figurines or those who go to opening night of superhero/comicbook based movies, they do exist. I suspect such people are not that rare amongst Cracker Barrel’s demographic.
- crazygringo 1y ago
  > being personally invested in corporate branding has got to be the saddest I think you misunderstand. It's about growing up, going to a restaurant with your grandparents, it becomes a kind of comfort and home. It's not just branding, it's the entire experience, of which the logo serves as a central symbol. What you see from the highway, what you see when you arrive. And then the company is taking away something you love. When you go back, it's not the same. They were completely changing the interiors too. It wasn't where you went with grandma and grandpa anymore. They did a total 180° on it's atmosphere and personality. From that perspective, can you find more empathy for people's emotional connections to a place and its symbols?
  - rbanffy 1y ago
    What you describe is being attached to a parasocial relationship with a brand. What the company took away from you was never yours to begin with.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - 1y ago
ants_everywhere 1y ago
If you look around the room and half the people agreeing with you are plants then something seems off. It's not hard to start a bar fight if you don't care who wins or what it's over. The angriest people are easily manipulated to point their anger in whatever direction the manipulator wants.
grayhatter 1y ago
It's actually not that useless. Everything organic, or interacting with something natural follows the power law. Or 80/20 if you prefer. When working on security and integrity issues, we found 10-20% of all traffic would be inorganic. The more course the metric, the more likely it was to be exactly 20% To me, knowing nothing about this specfic domain, and just abuse/integrity in general, 45% means it's well over double what I'd expect from an unmanaged source. Well over double, because true double wouldn't be 40% (20/100) + 20 = 40/120 = 33% This heuristic tells me it's specific, targeted, and well above the background noise youms might ignore for higher priorities. In other words, it's a problem that's actionable. Here, I assume stoking anger and outrage is the goal. That's why it not being 20% is significant.
- crazygringo 1y ago
  > knowing nothing about this specfic domain Then your comment isn't actually contributing anything. And the 80/20 rule doesn't have anything to do with this. The idea that the baseline value for any statistic at all in the world is 20% is not how anything works. The 80/20 rule is an informal observation that you get 80% of profits from 20% of customers, or can draw 80% of conclusions from 20% of data. It doesn't say anything about the baseline rate of any arbitrary statistic.
  - grayhatter 1y ago
    > Then your comment isn't actually contributing anything. Well, you thought that the 45% was meaningless on it's own too, perhaps the problem is more your context window is too small? But, I'll try again. The behavior of bots translates well across domains, the domain of rage fueling bots has additional nuance that I haven't spent significant time studying. i.e. The generalized heuristic is useful, but this comment is lacking in the domain expertise of rage fueling bots. Perhaps the 45% has more meaning with more experience in rage bait? > The idea that the baseline value for any statistic at all in the world is 20% is not how anything works. That's not what I said. > The 80/20 rule is an informal observation that you get 80% of profits from 20% of customers, or can draw 80% of conclusions from 20% of data. It doesn't say anything about the baseline rate of any arbitrary statistic. The 80/20 rule is a simplification of the power curve. I mentioned it not to imply that 80/20 is somehow magic here, but to reference it as a useful heuristic many people will already be familiar. The power curve does show up seemingly everywhere. The more common example where it shows up in understanding social media, is in the behavior of real users. Roughly 1% will generate content, 20% will interact with content, and 79% will scroll/lurk. This also applies to users on the individual level too. The near exclusive majority will spend 79% of their time reading, 20% clicking like/ignore, and 1% of their time submitting or commenting. I mention the power law, because when working with inauthentic behavior, it becomes anomalous when it diverges from that 20% ish expectation. (This is basically the example you mentioned that you're already familiar, it's the same 80/20 from your examples) Say you have a spam botnet, only about 20% of it will interact with any given post. If it's more or less, that's weird. The reverse works too, you'll never see more than 20% of real organic users interacting with spam/bot content. If you see more, or less, that's weird (that cohort is probably not real users) or in other words: If the thing having something to do with how humans interact with social media doesn't follow the power law, it's weird. How does that apply here? If the number was 20% instead of 45%, it would actually be meaningless (you could just say there are bots). What does that extra 15 points mean? That I can't tell you. But it's not in the range of "boring inorganic behavior", which I say as someone who's spent a lot of time trying to find, classify, and remove inauthentic accounts/behavior.
like_any_other 1y ago
> If you think it's silly because it's not a restaurant you go to It would be fine if Cracker Barrel was just an isolated example - I would guess then it would be just a curiosity, not an "outrage". But it's not isolated - it's a broad aesthetic trend in everything from architecture [0] to art to graphic design [1]. It's that trend people object to. Cracker Barrel is just the latest slice of the salami. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/architecture/comments/199sjmn/thoughts_on_this_transformation_this_is_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/architecture/comments/199sjmn/thoug... [1] https://medium.com/@zuktechnologies/why-modern-logos-all-look-the-same-the-psychology-behind-the-simplicity-fb689befc9d2 https://medium.com/@zuktechnologies/why-modern-logos-all-loo...
- UncleMeat 1y ago
  That would make sense if the complaint was just "this is a bland redesign that removes the charm of the old logo." But a significant part of the complaint (amplified by major figures like Rufo) was that the redesign was woke.
blurbleblurble 1y ago
^ Found the bot! (Just teasin') But in seriousness, yes people may have been feeling genuinely nostalgic, the point is that bots were used to play up peoples' nostalgia, to turn it into fear, moral outrage and finally "victory against a woke enemy", a deep sense of oxytocin and loyalty.
pcdoodle 1y ago
It's also very likely that bots attach to spreading memes to gain visibility however that helps, IDK but then again banner ads were a thing.
deleted 1y ago
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intended 1y ago
Your point doesn’t exist in opposition to the research, because both can be true. This misses that virality is driven by amplification. Further, that bots were aiming to drive a specific take/narrative/vibe. This is abuse and manipulation of our common spaces. Deciding that this is unacceptable, understanding the mechanisms, is how we develop approaches that deal with the situation to the best of our ability. It may be that we don’t hamper speech when its happening, but we can decide that post analysis and evidence, to hold manipulators accountable. Or figure out some other path forward. Either way, reading the report before dismissing it out of habit and a desire to return to the olde days, doesn’t result in much of a discussion.
- kcplate 1y ago
  Social media and “bots” didn’t exist in 1985 when Coca Cola did their formulation and branding changes, but it still managed to get amplified by outrage alone. Cracker Barrel had some of the same qualities that Coca Cola did. Loyal customer base, distinctiveness—I don’t think it’s unreasonable to conclude that even without bots and social media that this brand change wouldn’t have made news especially east of the Mississippi and ultimately stalled the conversion. May have happened quicker with the amplification, but would have happened all the same with out it.
  - intended 1y ago
    In 1985, Coca Cola was a by-word for America, fast food, and consumerism. I assume this fact is obvious to you, because not too many people pull out 1985 marketing history/trivia in 2025. I suggest going through these analyses oneself. Typically they aren’t that complex, and it’s worth getting familiar with the tools available for people to analyze network manipulation.
    - kcplate 1y ago
      Quite familiar, I have been on the technical side of marketing and advertising industry for over 30 years. Also, I lived through the 1985 New Coke debacle and was one of the people that were pissed off at the change. I know why I reacted how I did and quite a few others around me. It wasn’t because we felt “America” change, it’s because the new product tasted like shit compared to the old one. I didn’t want a “generic” tasting cola. Cracker Barrel fans didn’t want a generic feeling restaurant. Whatever bots did for the great Cracker Barrel crisis of 2025, they didn’t cause my 88 year old mother who goes to CB once a week to be pissed off that they changed “her restaurant to look like those stupid damned First Watch places”.
kcplate 1y ago
> imagine if Coca-Cola replaced their script logo with some generic sans-serif one. Don't you think the outrage would be real? The Coca Cola comparison is apt, but it’s beyond the logo. In the 80s formulation of the product changed to taste more like the competitor, it came with a logo change as well. Basically they took an iconic brand with a distinctive iconic flavor and made it a bland and generic cola. It was a disaster. Cracker Barrel literally did the same thing. They set off changed the things that made them distinct from every other generic bland southern food restaurant. Their food isn’t distinctive, but their ambience and lore is. I wonder if someone would have brought up New Coke when they were having the product and marketing meets around the design change. I suspect CEO excitement around the idea probably caused folks to sit silent.
rconti 1y ago
I initially didn't understand it at all, the "it's because DEI" complaints made no sense to me. So they took a dude off the logo, and suddenly it's diversity run amok? It felt like too much of a stretch. And then after being exposed to the controversy for a bit, I saw an article quoting the _female_ CEO, and suddenly the line of thinking made sense. I wonder if the botnets are primarily driven by legit grassroots-ish political actors, moneyed interests, or something else. Could be generic foreign influence/destabilization groups. Could also be effectively be a convenient bot/LLM training ground.
- UncleMeat 1y ago
  It is a step further than that. The outrage was started by Chris Rufo. He has spoken publicly and clearly about his strategy of ginning up DEI controversies and rallying far right online people to harass targeted businesses as a mechanism of making every business be extremely cautious about doing anything at all that could be considered DEI by right wing weirdos. In the past he amplified things like the Bud Light and Target harassment campaigns. By choosing something so incredibly anodyne as this logo update he signals to businesses that they need to not just refuse to acquiesce to left wing demands but that they need to a right wing movement that (like you mention) can fly into a rage whenever they see a woman in a position of power.
jmull 1y ago
> This is a useless statistic without a comparison of what percentage of activity is bots for any culture-war news story of the day. Why is that? The large proportion of early bot posts suggests the outrage was largely manufactured, which is pretty interesting to me. Now, if culture war news stories are typically artificially manufactured, that would be even more interesting. So I agree that context would be good. But this info still stands on its own. (And, of course there are sincere objections to this logo/branding change. But that doesn't appear to explain why this blew up.)
- Eddy_Viscosity2 1y ago
  > the outrage was largely manufactured This is true even when the activity is from actual humans. Very very little in the culture wars is genuine offense, its nearly all performative outrage.
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JohnFen 1y ago
I've never been to a Cracker Barrel so it has no personal meaning to me, but I was bothered by the logo change anyway. Bothered, not enraged. It bothered me because it was yet another instance of our built world becoming increasingly sterile and lifeless, like a rejection of humanity itself.
SAI_Peregrinus 1y ago
I don't particularly care about Cracker Barrel (the logo wasn't great to begin with) but I do dislike the steady loss of decoration in mainstream design. It's not just generic, it's also uglier. I blame the French Union of Modern Artists & the rest of the Modernist movement in the late 1930s for starting the decline.
jsbisviewtiful 1y ago
> Don't you think the outrage would be real? It would be real but only because people’s priorities tend to be incredibly silly. Like, giving children free school lunch is an original sin to probably a lot of the subset that gave a care about the Cracker Barrel logo… and for some reason there was a whole internet movement to remake a movie because a group didn’t like what was released (Justice League).
Volundr 1y ago
> If you think it's silly because it's not a restaurant you go to One can also think it's silly because... It's silly. The assumption that everyone who doesn't care must not be a customer is incorrect. > imagine if Coca-Cola replaced their script logo with some generic sans-serif one. I'm imagining it and find myself indifferent. Why would I have an emotional connection to the Coke logo?
- prewett 1y ago
  > Why would I have an emotional connection to the Coke logo? Decades of Coca-Cola advertising creating an emotional connection? Maybe it's your favorite drink? Maybe it was a special treat on your birthday? Maybe Warren Buffett gave you a Coke and some investment advice that took you from near bankruptcy to comfortably retired, when you met him randomly in downtown Omaha? I'm guessing HN is not the hangout place for people with attachment to brands...
  - Volundr 1y ago
    > Decades of Coca-Cola advertising creating an emotional connection? Sure maybe, doesn't sound like something that should be celebrated, more like brainwashing. > Maybe it's your favorite drink? Maybe it was a special treat on your birthday? Coke is still around in this scenario no? I know people got upset about the reformulation, and that tracks. But it's not like I can't have a coke on my birthday because it's got a different logo.
reaperducer 1y ago
they were pissed off about the similar redesign of the interiors from homey personality to generic bland gray. Some people just like to be mad about things. Pennies, Daylight Savings Time, bike lanes, all kinds of inconsequential things get anger-seekers angry.
- josephcsible 1y ago
  Nobody gets angry about bike lanes in a vacuum. E.g., turning old unused railroad tracks into bike lanes is basically unanimously supported. The only time people get angry about bike lanes is when they're taking car lanes away from roads that already have too few.

tdeck 1y ago

As someone who has been to Cracker Barrel many times I find it hard to believe there was such strong affection for the logo. The logo is the least distinctive or memorable thing about Cracker Barrel's restaurant design.

crazygringo 1y ago
But it's all part of the same thing. And it wasn't just the logo -- they redid the entire restaurant design. And they've rolled it all back now, the old restaurant design stays. And the logo is more recognizable than you seem to think -- you see signs for it on the highway, it's part of building anticipation for the visit. It's part of childhood memories.
- multjoy 1y ago
  So nothing can ever change?
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - p1esk 1y ago
    Out of all things they could have improved, they picked one that didn’t need changing.
  - forgotoldacc 1y ago
    People are beyond sick of the corporate soulless overhauls of things people like. Millennials and zoomers talk pretty often about McDonald's and other chains losing the "fun" atmosphere they had decades ago and looking like soulless office dining halls. Cracker Barrel is the only chain that still has that fun atmosphere. The rebrand was turning it into a soulless dining hall. It's not surprising it pissed people off. And all the outrage I saw was from people getting pissed about it on discord. That's a lot harder to fake than random twitter posts, where bots all parrot actual trends in order to boost their views and shill some sort of scam/product. If Taco Bell announced they were bringing back 90s style colorful interiors and decorations, I think the outrage would be zero. People would celebrate. People have no problem with interesting change.
    - multjoy 1y ago
      It’s a chain restaurant. Funny thing to build family traditions around, it’s not like a 300yo family run pub that has been serving a community for time immemorial.
      - crazygringo 1y ago
        If that's what you had around growing up, that's what you had so that's where the traditions were. Not everyone is so lucky to have a 300 year old family run pub nearby. So maybe find some more empathy for people's lives growing up? Nobody chooses the situation they're born into.
        multjoy 1y ago
        It's a restaurant chain having a rebrand. I've no sympathy for this absolute childlike behaviour, and even less sympathy for people trying to pretend that the outrage was anything but artificially stoked.
      - forgotoldacc 1y ago
        People here on HN complain about tech companies losing their charm and they're giving up and switching to another OS/phone/whatever, and get very upset because (company) is losing their character and everything that made them unique. It's a funny thing to build an identity around a trillion dollar company. But yes, people have things they like. They like when things they consider good don't do total overhauls. There's a very good chance you have something you hold dear or would be upset if it changed, and others will happily mock your frustration.
  - ToucanLoucan 1y ago
    People will accept change if it's better. Yet another distinct, albeit not my cup of tea, and interesting restaurant rebranding into yet another fucking gray box with a flat 2-color logo isn't better, it's more bland in a sea of bland. Even though I have no good vibes for the place, I'm happy it exists, and there are clearly a bunch of other people who DO like it, and I also want them to have it. That makes for a better world to live in, if only by a micron.
    - blooalien 1y ago
      > "People will accept change if it's better." Oh that is so not true for a shocking number of folks, sadly. There's a whole "political" angle these days revolving around "if the other side likes it, then it's automatically the worst thing to happen in the history of ever; we must oppose it at all costs, even if it harms us or destroys us to do so". The introduction of "AI" and "bots" has only served to multiply and magnify that behavior among those prone to it.
  - washadjeffmad 1y ago
    Do you know what a Cracker Barrel is? They're not exactly celebrations of modernity.
  - lotsoweiners 1y ago
    Why does it need to?
p1esk 1y ago
I think the old logo was distinctive and memorable. I used to go there because of food and because of atmosphere. If the atmosphere is gone I’m less likely to return in the future.
scythe 1y ago
It's just another case of this generally awful trend. Here's the thing about the boiling frog: it's not true. Slowly heating a frog will not make it die peacefully. It still reacts when the temperature gets too high. An awful lot of people I've talked to in real life (including me) are not happy about the encroaching minimal trend in design taking over everything. If it was just Cracker Barrel, it probably wouldn't be that big of a deal. But it is like the fall of Constantinople to the app icons. We're already cursed with hideous buildings and logos everywhere, so when the nostalgia was drained from the restaurant built on nostalgia people reacted. And for whatever reason I saw people trying to make it a culture war issue, accusing anyone who objected of being right-wing. Thankfully a number of prominent Democrats spoke up, too, because it was never about "woke" or whatever.
- technothrasher 1y ago
  > Here's the thing about the boiling frog: it's not true. That whole thing stems from a 19th century German scientist (Dr Fruedrich Goltz) who wanted to know if the impulse to jump out was from the brain or further down the nervous system. From his experiments, an intact frog freaks out when the water gets too hot. When he destroyed the brain of the frog, it sits their until it dies of exposure. There was actually quite a lot of experimenting in the late 19th century with "reflex frogs" (i.e. brain dead but still alive). W. T. Sedgwick wrote a decent review of it in 1888 titled, "ON VARIATIONS OF REFLEX-EXCITABILITY IN THE FROG, INDUCED BY CHANGES OF TEMPERATURE."
- pseudalopex 1y ago
  > And for whatever reason I saw people trying to make it a culture war issue, accusing anyone who objected of being right-wing. Thankfully a number of prominent Democrats spoke up, too, because it was never about "woke" or whatever. People who said it was about woke or whatever included a Republican member of Congress, a Trump campaign adviser, a prominent right wing pundit, and a prominent right wing activist recently added to Meta's AI advisory board.[1][2][3][4] Someone speaking for a right wing college said the new logo had the same energy as vandalism of a George Washington statue.[5] This list is far from complete. I saw several comments which observed the attention given to this issue was dominated by right wing outrage. I saw none which implied no other objection was conceivable. [1] https://x.com/ByronDonalds/status/1958570840561275002 https://x.com/ByronDonalds/status/1958570840561275002 [2] https://x.com/alexbruesewitz/status/1958270205466952033 https://x.com/alexbruesewitz/status/1958270205466952033 [3] https://x.com/realchrisrufo/status/1958629455125258479 https://x.com/realchrisrufo/status/1958629455125258479 [4] https://x.com/robbystarbuck/status/1958619336848855228 https://x.com/robbystarbuck/status/1958619336848855228 [5] https://x.com/Hillsdale/status/1958631145614319930 https://x.com/Hillsdale/status/1958631145614319930
blurbleblurble 1y ago
It makes people remember relatives who are no longer with us. Doesn't matter what the logo looks like.

deleted 1y ago

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Forgeties79 1y ago

There is no way people are that passionate about graphic design. All the debate about the logo has to do with conservatives declaring Cracker Barrel was going woke and getting angry about it and turning it into yet another front for their culture war. Cracker Barrel is a mediocre chain people associate with the term “American.” That being said, this isn’t changing the Statue of Liberty. It’s a corporate logo change. People took this personally because virtually everything is part of the culture war now.

dave78 1y ago
Ahem: https://x.com/TheDemocrats/status/1958659652708716776 https://x.com/TheDemocrats/status/1958659652708716776 The dislike for the new logo was one of the very rare things that people on both sides in the US seemed to agree on...
- thrance 1y ago
  Doesn't matter. Republican politicans and influencers (if separating the two still makes any sense) framed it as an attack by the "woke" and "radical left" on these fabled american values.
  - JohnFen 1y ago
    Maybe so, but that was just rhetorical lying that had no basis in actual reality.
    - Forgeties79 1y ago
      Not maybe so, it is what’s happening. Whether their stance reflects reality or not is not (is it ever with these people?) the point - they’re using it to stir the pot as usual.
    - thrance 1y ago
      Yes? Doesn't make it any better. I think it makes it even worse, in fact.

marginalia_nu 1y ago

> And it means that over half weren't bots. Just a small number of fake accounts can likely stir up tensions quite a lot. I've noticed some of the biggest outrage usually comes as reactions to screenshots of what the other side is saying. There is of course nothing preventing you from running some of those accounts as well.

throwaway667555 1y ago
The logo and interior design was s--t.
- tantalor 1y ago
  Found the bot
rconti 1y ago
Also, the tone of the posts might be quite different. Maybe the non-bot critical posts have more nuance or say "this new logo is boring, bring back the new one" and the bots say "this is DEI run amok, boycott Cracker Barrel!" and a bunch of other invectives I don't even want to post as an example.
- rbanffy 1y ago
  Outrage drives engagement. It’s expected any algorithm that tries to maximize engagement will push inflammatory messages.
rbanffy 1y ago
Twitter API access was quite expensive last time I checked.
- marginalia_nu 1y ago
  Residential proxies and headless browsers are also a thing, as is hiring a bunch of actual people to carry out the operation. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency

HardwareLust 1y ago

If you are literally angry your favorite corporately owned chain restaurant changed their logo and/or their decor, you got bigger problems.

techblueberry 1y ago
I think it’s a microcosm for the conflict for the fact that we’re all nostalgic for this world that doesn’t exist, and bizarrely that nobody wants. I find nostalgia in general fascinating, and it was funny, I watched this Fox News / Gutfeld clip and I think maybe with one exception, none of them had been to Cracker Barrel, and it makes sense, if you’re a Fox News host, you’re probably a city person. I think even Christopher Rufo who led the culture war charge against it didn’t really go. But it’s anger at this abstract attack on “Americana”(this is the best explanation I’ve seen for why some people have called it woke) that only some of our grandparents truly value anymore. And the weird thing is, if the brand really is dying, attempts to stop it from changing will only hasten its demise. Anyways, fascinating.
- mapontosevenths 1y ago
  Conservatives, almost by definition, need the past to have been better than the future. Otherwise, what are they conserving?
  - grayhatter 1y ago
    I don't think this is true? What about people who believe the future will be better, but view change in of self as risky and destabilizing? You can want to turn the ship, but be unwilling to capsize it, no?
  - like_any_other 1y ago
    > Otherwise, what are they conserving? They're conserving the things they like as they are, while letting things they don't like change. This is such a ridiculous strawman view - like saying progressives think all change is good.

jjulius 1y ago

I'll allow being upset that something you love is changing because you're nostalgic for what it's always been, struggle with change and don't like how bland modern design is. I don't personally get it (though I've got solidarity regarding the blandness of design), but I understand those sentiments exist in others and am OK with that. What I don't get, and what was truly excessive, is blaming it on "woke" and watching our politicians and president get involved. That was all beyond stupid.

rashkov 1y ago
Everything is weaponized, whether it makes sense or not. They’re just throwing things at the wall to see what sticks, and these things take a life of their own
techblueberry 1y ago
The funny thing about calling it woke is it wasn’t a partisan issue, nobody was going to Cracker Barrel Republicans included, that’s why it was dying, and all my woke/liberal friends were just as nostalgic. But it’s really representative of how little of a shared vision for America there is on the modern right, like this full throated attack in an attempt to protect something they don’t want.
- api 1y ago
  My take is that some on the right, perhaps most, correctly identify that our culture is in the doldrums but don’t have an answer. Being conservatives and reactionaries their instinct is to reach for a point in the past they think was better and try to roll back to that. But they haven’t thought it through in any depth. They don’t know what they actually want. Leftists, having different instincts, reach for things like class conflict and social injustice to explain the doldrums, but I’m not convinced they’ve thought it through either.
  - techblueberry 1y ago
    Yeah, the weird annoyance from me is I probably value things like cracker barrel more than your average Republican. I think about how there was this era of Vegas in the 80’s and 90’s where they built all those crazy theme hotels, and now the “theme” for most hotels in Vegas is just like “glam”

glenstein 1y ago

>This is a useless statistic without a comparison of what percentage of activity is bots for any culture-war news story of the day. There's a grain of truth in here, but you're taking it way too far. I'd rather have that number you're asking for than not have it to be sure, but the percentage still matters in absolute terms.

KronisLV 1y ago

> And it means that over half weren't bots. I think the important thing here is to see which came first. How many people in a crowd do you need to start clapping, to end up with everyone applauding?

mhb 1y ago
Steven Pinker's new book: When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life https://www.amazon.com/When-Everyone-Knows-That-Knowledge/dp/1668011573 https://www.amazon.com/When-Everyone-Knows-That-Knowledge/dp...

astine 1y ago

If you think it's silly because it's not a restaurant you go to, imagine if Coca-Cola replaced their script logo with some generic sans-serif one. Don't you think the outrage would be real? I can't imagine being upset at something like that. I'm sure there would be people upset, given the nonsense that happened in the 80s, but being personally invested in corporate branding has got to be the saddest sort of parasocial relationship possible.

notmyjob 1y ago
Yrs, it’s real. People collect coke stuff as a … hobby? Lifestyle? Disney too. While they seem as bizarre to me as adults who collect toy anime figurines or those who go to opening night of superhero/comicbook based movies, they do exist. I suspect such people are not that rare amongst Cracker Barrel’s demographic.
crazygringo 1y ago
> being personally invested in corporate branding has got to be the saddest I think you misunderstand. It's about growing up, going to a restaurant with your grandparents, it becomes a kind of comfort and home. It's not just branding, it's the entire experience, of which the logo serves as a central symbol. What you see from the highway, what you see when you arrive. And then the company is taking away something you love. When you go back, it's not the same. They were completely changing the interiors too. It wasn't where you went with grandma and grandpa anymore. They did a total 180° on it's atmosphere and personality. From that perspective, can you find more empathy for people's emotional connections to a place and its symbols?
- rbanffy 1y ago
  What you describe is being attached to a parasocial relationship with a brand. What the company took away from you was never yours to begin with.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
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ants_everywhere 1y ago

If you look around the room and half the people agreeing with you are plants then something seems off. It's not hard to start a bar fight if you don't care who wins or what it's over. The angriest people are easily manipulated to point their anger in whatever direction the manipulator wants.

grayhatter 1y ago

It's actually not that useless. Everything organic, or interacting with something natural follows the power law. Or 80/20 if you prefer. When working on security and integrity issues, we found 10-20% of all traffic would be inorganic. The more course the metric, the more likely it was to be exactly 20% To me, knowing nothing about this specfic domain, and just abuse/integrity in general, 45% means it's well over double what I'd expect from an unmanaged source. Well over double, because true double wouldn't be 40% (20/100) + 20 = 40/120 = 33% This heuristic tells me it's specific, targeted, and well above the background noise youms might ignore for higher priorities. In other words, it's a problem that's actionable. Here, I assume stoking anger and outrage is the goal. That's why it not being 20% is significant.

crazygringo 1y ago
> knowing nothing about this specfic domain Then your comment isn't actually contributing anything. And the 80/20 rule doesn't have anything to do with this. The idea that the baseline value for any statistic at all in the world is 20% is not how anything works. The 80/20 rule is an informal observation that you get 80% of profits from 20% of customers, or can draw 80% of conclusions from 20% of data. It doesn't say anything about the baseline rate of any arbitrary statistic.
- grayhatter 1y ago
  > Then your comment isn't actually contributing anything. Well, you thought that the 45% was meaningless on it's own too, perhaps the problem is more your context window is too small? But, I'll try again. The behavior of bots translates well across domains, the domain of rage fueling bots has additional nuance that I haven't spent significant time studying. i.e. The generalized heuristic is useful, but this comment is lacking in the domain expertise of rage fueling bots. Perhaps the 45% has more meaning with more experience in rage bait? > The idea that the baseline value for any statistic at all in the world is 20% is not how anything works. That's not what I said. > The 80/20 rule is an informal observation that you get 80% of profits from 20% of customers, or can draw 80% of conclusions from 20% of data. It doesn't say anything about the baseline rate of any arbitrary statistic. The 80/20 rule is a simplification of the power curve. I mentioned it not to imply that 80/20 is somehow magic here, but to reference it as a useful heuristic many people will already be familiar. The power curve does show up seemingly everywhere. The more common example where it shows up in understanding social media, is in the behavior of real users. Roughly 1% will generate content, 20% will interact with content, and 79% will scroll/lurk. This also applies to users on the individual level too. The near exclusive majority will spend 79% of their time reading, 20% clicking like/ignore, and 1% of their time submitting or commenting. I mention the power law, because when working with inauthentic behavior, it becomes anomalous when it diverges from that 20% ish expectation. (This is basically the example you mentioned that you're already familiar, it's the same 80/20 from your examples) Say you have a spam botnet, only about 20% of it will interact with any given post. If it's more or less, that's weird. The reverse works too, you'll never see more than 20% of real organic users interacting with spam/bot content. If you see more, or less, that's weird (that cohort is probably not real users) or in other words: If the thing having something to do with how humans interact with social media doesn't follow the power law, it's weird. How does that apply here? If the number was 20% instead of 45%, it would actually be meaningless (you could just say there are bots). What does that extra 15 points mean? That I can't tell you. But it's not in the range of "boring inorganic behavior", which I say as someone who's spent a lot of time trying to find, classify, and remove inauthentic accounts/behavior.

like_any_other 1y ago

> If you think it's silly because it's not a restaurant you go to It would be fine if Cracker Barrel was just an isolated example - I would guess then it would be just a curiosity, not an "outrage". But it's not isolated - it's a broad aesthetic trend in everything from architecture [0] to art to graphic design [1]. It's that trend people object to. Cracker Barrel is just the latest slice of the salami. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/architecture/comments/199sjmn/thoughts_on_this_transformation_this_is_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/architecture/comments/199sjmn/thoug... [1] https://medium.com/@zuktechnologies/why-modern-logos-all-look-the-same-the-psychology-behind-the-simplicity-fb689befc9d2 https://medium.com/@zuktechnologies/why-modern-logos-all-loo...

UncleMeat 1y ago
That would make sense if the complaint was just "this is a bland redesign that removes the charm of the old logo." But a significant part of the complaint (amplified by major figures like Rufo) was that the redesign was woke.

blurbleblurble 1y ago

^ Found the bot! (Just teasin') But in seriousness, yes people may have been feeling genuinely nostalgic, the point is that bots were used to play up peoples' nostalgia, to turn it into fear, moral outrage and finally "victory against a woke enemy", a deep sense of oxytocin and loyalty.

pcdoodle 1y ago

It's also very likely that bots attach to spreading memes to gain visibility however that helps, IDK but then again banner ads were a thing.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

intended 1y ago

Your point doesn’t exist in opposition to the research, because both can be true. This misses that virality is driven by amplification. Further, that bots were aiming to drive a specific take/narrative/vibe. This is abuse and manipulation of our common spaces. Deciding that this is unacceptable, understanding the mechanisms, is how we develop approaches that deal with the situation to the best of our ability. It may be that we don’t hamper speech when its happening, but we can decide that post analysis and evidence, to hold manipulators accountable. Or figure out some other path forward. Either way, reading the report before dismissing it out of habit and a desire to return to the olde days, doesn’t result in much of a discussion.

kcplate 1y ago
Social media and “bots” didn’t exist in 1985 when Coca Cola did their formulation and branding changes, but it still managed to get amplified by outrage alone. Cracker Barrel had some of the same qualities that Coca Cola did. Loyal customer base, distinctiveness—I don’t think it’s unreasonable to conclude that even without bots and social media that this brand change wouldn’t have made news especially east of the Mississippi and ultimately stalled the conversion. May have happened quicker with the amplification, but would have happened all the same with out it.
- intended 1y ago
  In 1985, Coca Cola was a by-word for America, fast food, and consumerism. I assume this fact is obvious to you, because not too many people pull out 1985 marketing history/trivia in 2025. I suggest going through these analyses oneself. Typically they aren’t that complex, and it’s worth getting familiar with the tools available for people to analyze network manipulation.
  - kcplate 1y ago
    Quite familiar, I have been on the technical side of marketing and advertising industry for over 30 years. Also, I lived through the 1985 New Coke debacle and was one of the people that were pissed off at the change. I know why I reacted how I did and quite a few others around me. It wasn’t because we felt “America” change, it’s because the new product tasted like shit compared to the old one. I didn’t want a “generic” tasting cola. Cracker Barrel fans didn’t want a generic feeling restaurant. Whatever bots did for the great Cracker Barrel crisis of 2025, they didn’t cause my 88 year old mother who goes to CB once a week to be pissed off that they changed “her restaurant to look like those stupid damned First Watch places”.

kcplate 1y ago

> imagine if Coca-Cola replaced their script logo with some generic sans-serif one. Don't you think the outrage would be real? The Coca Cola comparison is apt, but it’s beyond the logo. In the 80s formulation of the product changed to taste more like the competitor, it came with a logo change as well. Basically they took an iconic brand with a distinctive iconic flavor and made it a bland and generic cola. It was a disaster. Cracker Barrel literally did the same thing. They set off changed the things that made them distinct from every other generic bland southern food restaurant. Their food isn’t distinctive, but their ambience and lore is. I wonder if someone would have brought up New Coke when they were having the product and marketing meets around the design change. I suspect CEO excitement around the idea probably caused folks to sit silent.

rconti 1y ago

I initially didn't understand it at all, the "it's because DEI" complaints made no sense to me. So they took a dude off the logo, and suddenly it's diversity run amok? It felt like too much of a stretch. And then after being exposed to the controversy for a bit, I saw an article quoting the _female_ CEO, and suddenly the line of thinking made sense. I wonder if the botnets are primarily driven by legit grassroots-ish political actors, moneyed interests, or something else. Could be generic foreign influence/destabilization groups. Could also be effectively be a convenient bot/LLM training ground.

UncleMeat 1y ago
It is a step further than that. The outrage was started by Chris Rufo. He has spoken publicly and clearly about his strategy of ginning up DEI controversies and rallying far right online people to harass targeted businesses as a mechanism of making every business be extremely cautious about doing anything at all that could be considered DEI by right wing weirdos. In the past he amplified things like the Bud Light and Target harassment campaigns. By choosing something so incredibly anodyne as this logo update he signals to businesses that they need to not just refuse to acquiesce to left wing demands but that they need to a right wing movement that (like you mention) can fly into a rage whenever they see a woman in a position of power.

jmull 1y ago

> This is a useless statistic without a comparison of what percentage of activity is bots for any culture-war news story of the day. Why is that? The large proportion of early bot posts suggests the outrage was largely manufactured, which is pretty interesting to me. Now, if culture war news stories are typically artificially manufactured, that would be even more interesting. So I agree that context would be good. But this info still stands on its own. (And, of course there are sincere objections to this logo/branding change. But that doesn't appear to explain why this blew up.)

Eddy_Viscosity2 1y ago
> the outrage was largely manufactured This is true even when the activity is from actual humans. Very very little in the culture wars is genuine offense, its nearly all performative outrage.

deleted 1y ago

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JohnFen 1y ago

I've never been to a Cracker Barrel so it has no personal meaning to me, but I was bothered by the logo change anyway. Bothered, not enraged. It bothered me because it was yet another instance of our built world becoming increasingly sterile and lifeless, like a rejection of humanity itself.

SAI_Peregrinus 1y ago

I don't particularly care about Cracker Barrel (the logo wasn't great to begin with) but I do dislike the steady loss of decoration in mainstream design. It's not just generic, it's also uglier. I blame the French Union of Modern Artists & the rest of the Modernist movement in the late 1930s for starting the decline.

jsbisviewtiful 1y ago

> Don't you think the outrage would be real? It would be real but only because people’s priorities tend to be incredibly silly. Like, giving children free school lunch is an original sin to probably a lot of the subset that gave a care about the Cracker Barrel logo… and for some reason there was a whole internet movement to remake a movie because a group didn’t like what was released (Justice League).

Volundr 1y ago

> If you think it's silly because it's not a restaurant you go to One can also think it's silly because... It's silly. The assumption that everyone who doesn't care must not be a customer is incorrect. > imagine if Coca-Cola replaced their script logo with some generic sans-serif one. I'm imagining it and find myself indifferent. Why would I have an emotional connection to the Coke logo?

prewett 1y ago
> Why would I have an emotional connection to the Coke logo? Decades of Coca-Cola advertising creating an emotional connection? Maybe it's your favorite drink? Maybe it was a special treat on your birthday? Maybe Warren Buffett gave you a Coke and some investment advice that took you from near bankruptcy to comfortably retired, when you met him randomly in downtown Omaha? I'm guessing HN is not the hangout place for people with attachment to brands...
- Volundr 1y ago
  > Decades of Coca-Cola advertising creating an emotional connection? Sure maybe, doesn't sound like something that should be celebrated, more like brainwashing. > Maybe it's your favorite drink? Maybe it was a special treat on your birthday? Coke is still around in this scenario no? I know people got upset about the reformulation, and that tracks. But it's not like I can't have a coke on my birthday because it's got a different logo.

reaperducer 1y ago

they were pissed off about the similar redesign of the interiors from homey personality to generic bland gray. Some people just like to be mad about things. Pennies, Daylight Savings Time, bike lanes, all kinds of inconsequential things get anger-seekers angry.

josephcsible 1y ago
Nobody gets angry about bike lanes in a vacuum. E.g., turning old unused railroad tracks into bike lanes is basically unanimously supported. The only time people get angry about bike lanes is when they're taking car lanes away from roads that already have too few.