Game marketing company takes down blog post bragging about how good it is at astroturfing Reddit after Reddit finds the post
Game marketing company takes down blog post bragging about how good it is at astroturfing Reddit after Reddit finds the post
Reddit be like
User A: i made this
Reddit: fuck off with the self marketing!
User B: my friend(definitely not me) quit their job and made this
Reddit: ohh my god this is brilliant!
r/gaming is shit. Bunch of sycophants all soft criticizing games like a review magazine afraid of offending the makers while talking about their playthrough. Go figure. Heaven help you if you have an actual opinion outside of the box, or don’t know some bit of terminology or lore about a game that is “common knowledge”.
I was hated on Reddit for not hating the main character of Horizon Forbidden West. God forbid someone enjoys a woman speaking.
I never understood the hate for Aloy. She was at worst bland with a pretty heavy helping of "I'm better at everything because I'm the main character", but she's hardly alone in that, and it doesn't usually attract that much ire.
I really didn't understand the complaints that she was unattractive or even outright ugly.
Bunch of sycophants all soft criticizing games like a review magazine afraid of offending the makers while talking about their playthrough.
Almost as though its a heavily astroturfed community and many of the accounts are exactly this.
Heaven help you if you have an actual opinion outside of the box
That's just social media in a nutshell. You're either a loyal footsoldier or a radical insurgent. But you need to find your opposing faction and do battle with them. And then, if you get too confrontational, the Mods/Admins need to ban you for doing exactly what the site incentivizes.
Don't forget the lack of accountability among mods in reddit.
They can remove whatever they want, and we wouldn't even know it was there. This alone causes people to self-censor.
I was banned from r/gaming for daring to go against that grain, and as I understand that is typical. It was about a game I liked too , just wished they had taken a few risks. I think it was Breakpoint. I had some very harsh things to say about the Ubisoft formula and how much better that game could have been if they had embraced the sneaky techie gameplay instead of the looter shooter bullshit they'd done instead. What's funny to me is that shortly after release they updated the game to get rid of the looter shooter bullshit. So I clearly wasn't alone.
That sucks.
I left myself after being shouted down over criticizing a game for restricting player kits. The game was more fun without the restrictions, but fuck me for wanting more freedom in player classes.
That's basically all large fandom/hobby subs now, in my experience.
And yeah, don't forget the shallow memes or fear of arbitrary banning.
Yeah if they hit critical mass the quality drops significantly. I've bookmark a handful of my niche subs that haven't hit that point yet but I saw it all the time over the years on there. Even something as straight forward as a liminal space, not as a term but there is a lot of writings on the topic, subreddit just turns into everybody posting pictures of there closets and and any old building.
Reddit is like, dude you can't just come out and SAY it.
Cool, so- everyone should boycott those games and send a message to any developer hiring shitfucks like this clown and his company.
The clear blend of cynicism and resignation in replies to the Reddit thread about the deleted Trap Plan post clearly illustrate how widely pervasive these practices are perceived to be.
I mean, back when professional game reviewing was more of a thing, game publishers used to do things like take said reviewers on outings and stuff to influence them, give them free copies, whatever. Marketers trying to subvert information flow isn't something that suddenly showed up with social media.
Silly all of them lol
This confirms what I expected. I thought I was going crazy the first time I saw an ask reddit repost and I recognized all the top answers. Eventually they bots will outnumber the users and dead Internet theory will prevail
There are definitely pockets of reddit that don't have their content flooded with bots, but they are the exception in today's day and age. I especially enjoy the college football subreddit, as there still isn't quite something similar on lemmy
A lot of the sports subs' better content is instant reaction. Harder to fake. The only participation I still have on reddit is a similar community for a large video game. It's more like a chatroom than a message board. Small wonder I spend way more time talking on Discord than anywhere these days.
"I'm 39 and a single dad to three girls with special needs, but five years ago I quit my job and started pursuing my lifelong dream of being a game developer. This metroidvania styled RPG with roguelite elements is my dream come true. Here's a short clip of the gameplay."
Shitty 8-bit sprites jiggle on the screen
Reddit: OMG! I'm literally crying right now as I buy this. It's so good!
I see you too are familiar with Heart Forth Alicia.
An outright confession of what sure sounds like blatant astroturfing—a deceptive marketing campaign that's meant to look like natural, spontaneous conversation—is probably not the sharpest move for any company that wants to attract or keep new clients.
The clients are just fine with it. This guy was off talking about it to market his company; publishers that he attracted did so because of what he was doing.
The users being astroturfed are the ones who aren't going to like it.
What the client is going to be pissed about is that the guy mentioned their actual game while trying to promote their astroturfing company:
Still, Beresnev did what he could to put space between War Robots developer My.Games and Trap Plan, telling Kotaku the intent "was to experiment with a more organic way of promoting games on Reddit—without using bots or fake accounts—and to build a new case study we could use in the future," and that mentioning the game and studio by name was a mistake.
"This was entirely our initiative and not commissioned or endorsed by My.Games in any way," Beresnev said. "We understand this was a mistake and have since removed the case study. We sincerely apologize to My.Games and the War Robots: Frontiers team for the misunderstanding and any confusion it may have caused."
https://www.trapplan.com/about-us
Trap Plan by The Numbers
We sell thousands of copies of games a month, collaborate with thousands of creators, work on all platforms from Reddit to TickTok
2023 Trap Plan Founded
$10M+ Sold Games
20+ Clients in 2024
How do you do this without having “fake accounts”? How do they define “fake accounts” here?
I mean, I would imagine that they may well do that, but there are businesses that buy and sell social accounts. Like, the point is that a legitimate user accrues reputation. I mean, that's an important element of how humans interact with each other --- provide useful information, and I give your opinion more weight and stuff. Social media tends to try to leverage that too. But when someone doesn't want their account any more for whatever reason, their reputation has value, and so it can be bought and sold.
kagis
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So they could develop their own "fake" accounts. Or they could just buy accounts from real, actual users, step into their skin and acquire their reputation. Or they could buy accounts from people who intentionally try to karma-farm --- I imagine that that's probably its own industry.
EDIT: Oh, sorry, maybe I misunderstood --- you were quoting the astroturfing guy, using whatever his meaning was. I have no idea what he calls a "fake account", and I don't think that I'd consider him to be incredibly trustworthy in the first place. But he might mean that he doesn't rely on an army of sockpuppet accounts to upvote his astroturfing, I suppose.
They are lying. A work account that's not labelled as such is a fake account.
Just so nobody forgets, North Face planted ads on Wikipedia, and then threw one of their regional managers under the bus when they got caught, as if to claim that it wasn’t really the real company doing it.
https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2019/05/29/lets-talk-about-the-north-face-defacing-wikipedia/
This is a major reason why I never follow hype.
Patient gamers always win
If there are enough people who wait until after a game has been out for some time to play it, there will be marketers targeting that group too.
They might promote the thing based on value or something other than what the latest flashy game crowd gets, but put enough wallets together and there's an incentive for someone to go after them. The astroturfing guy's shtick was that he was targeting individual communities with crafted material to try to appeal to them. PatientGamers is another community.
You aren't kidding. I played Kingdom Come Deliverance last year, when I learned about the second one. Was like wow.
Then read how they originally were courting the anti-woke crowd. Who later turned on them because the sequel has "woke" material.
Its great to not be a part of those GAMERS.
The marketer in the article --- as with anyone else trying to do surreptitious marketing of this sort --- is in the business of making hype that is hard to distinguish from buzz. If it were trivial to identify hype, he wouldn't be in business.
Boy that screenshot from War Robots: Frontierstm sure looks intriguing. I'll wishlist it.
/s
Wow, it sure is a unique game experience! I'm ordering a deluxe account right now!!
I love how so many people on Reddit are acting like this is a complete shock. That site has been a cesspool of bots and targeted ads for years now, people still believed they were having real conversations with humans? I'd be surprised if legit content was higher than 50%.
That’s just the consequence of being popular. Lemmy isn’t impervious or even resistant to this
And of insanely easy account creation. You didn't even need an email.
I’d argue it is resistant. Lemmy is federated, which means smaller instances, making it easier to detect this kind of activity. Crime in a city vs crime in a town situation
Oh, absolutely. Which is why I avoid popular social media: you just end up drowning in AI/botted content.
It's so bad, basically every post there is pushed by bots. The entire purpose of reddit is to shape opinion by forced consensus.
It's a propaganda machine inside the bloated husk of a forum aggregator.
Lemmy isn't impervious but it's much better than reddit.
There's a way to look at the top Karma users on Reddit. Most of them are either bots, or corporate account. There's a Marvel one that posts movie stuff, and some Turbo something or other for gaming. They don't comment, they just post what their corporate overlords want you to see, and they probably have bots that push their content to the top. They just aggregate popular sites, though, driving people into the ads.
When I was on Reddit, going to that leaderboard to block people was my first stop. Though, I do think there are a few that are interesting, even bots — like the haiku one is amusing. It doesn't always get it right, but it's fun to see it try. Then there's a guy — pretty sure it's a person, at least — who turns posts into poems. Not quite the same. Got a weird name. Regular Redditors know who they are. "Something for your something", I think. I don't block the fun ones. Just the corporate trash.
Oh, Poem for your Sprog. I remember that one. Users like that are one of the few things I miss about Reddit.
Poem_for_your_sprog
There are some things i miss about that site.
Poem for your sprog. I had no problem with the novelty accounts, and even the bot accounts there were clearly just some dev with a quirky sense of humor. Though those got hate from the anti bot purists, for whatever stupid reason.
It’s the corporate, vote manipulating, spam, Russian propaganda etc bots that piss me off. And those are much more subtle and harder to detect.
Poem for your sprog, right? Not been on reddit for a while, but encountering a post from that guy was generally a fun moment.
As someone who never saw Instagram before yesterday, I was a little shocked at just how much crap was AI generated and just useless fake content. I kept hearing how bad AI was, but until I saw just how bad I really had no idea. I imagine reddit is getting closer to this exact model soon enough.
Most people are unable to tell the difference between human and bot and, to be honest, a significant percentage of humans are dumber than modern LLMs.
That really depends on the community. When I was there, I would avoid the larger communities and seek out smaller communities. When I first joined Reddit, it was to avoid the attention-seeking posts by humans, and near the end it was to avoid attention-seeking posts by bots and humans alike. The best content IMO is on subreddits with <100k subs and <5 posts per day.
Yeah, I suspect most of /r/prisonhooch is still legit content, but it is kinda a rejection of commercialism. Not much you could sell them. A fermenting tub? The fuckers will use a water butt instead.
The big subs were full of bots, but for some it didn't really matter. It a post was a bit but it was still funny on memes or funny then it's fine. I don't care if karma farming bots were the majority of posts so long as it's still good content. The content does seem to be significantly worse now though.