> 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?
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.
> 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?
> I'm sure there would be people upset, given the nonsense that happened in the 80s
Why do you feel that was “nonsense”? Norm Macdonald had a joke about Coke and Pepsi—Basically he said it’s a misconception for restaurants to assume that if Coke is your favorite beverage, that Pepsi is your second favorite beverage and an acceptable alternative. In fact, if Coke is your favorite beverage Pepsi is probably your least favorite beverage. You end up opting for something else…that’s not a cola at all.
People rejected New Coke because Coca Cola turned their favorite beverage into their least favorite. Of course someone would complain about that.
Things used to have personality, but there's been this slow march toward making everything as bland and boring as possible. Restaurants are becoming grey utilitarian boxes, logos that used to have interesting designs are boiled down to a max of 3 colors.
It's corporate min-maxxing for attention economy and the hope you don't offend anyone's taste. If you're bland, then it's hard for anyone to sincerely dislike you. Bland logos are more instantly recognizable than complex ones, so we must ensure that we save a few milliseconds of cognition before the consumer makes a choice.
We're surrounded by company logos all the time. At least make them interesting.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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."
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?
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.
> 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.)
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.
>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.
The fact that so many people were played up to that point and that this energy was so effectively harvested for polarization means that we've got bigger problems.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
> 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.
> 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...
> 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.
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.
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
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.
While I don't entirely disagree here, it is very much the case that the kind of "Americana nostalgia" that Cracker Barrel's once and future look epitomizes is much more something that the American right cares about than the left, in and of itself.
That doesn't mean that the left doesn't care about the corporate blandicization of everything with any personality, nor that the right was actually going to Cracker Barrel in droves. But it does mean that it's very easy for those who wish to stir up more polarization to paint the original rebrand as an attack on the right.
I mean, it’s real in the sense that any culture war point is real, in that it’s probably more salient on the extremes than in the middle.
But if you were talking about about gay rights or trans rights or abortion you’d have a loud and vocal group on the left saying the right was absolutely morally wrong. In this case though. Where’s the attack? The attack is coming from capitalism, not from the left, so maybe I get what you’re trying to say, but this is the first culture war issue where I would say the reality, even if not the perception is that most people are either in the center(don’t care) or affected (don’t like it), I don’t think there are many serious people on the other side of it (the Cracker Barrel rebrand is good, and you’re wrong for being against it.). But ironically, you could even argue the “attack” came from the right! No longer protecting its own institutions(this is overstated for effect but I think the point still stands)
I don’t know that I’m saying I disagree with you- there’s the very real observation that about Americana that say the right brings American flags to protest and too many on the left don’t, but still, it’s funny.
Oh, the attack itself absolutely comes from the right! The bland rebrands are 100% a product of right-wing corporate America trying to maximize profits at the expense of everything else.
I think my point is just that while you're right that there isn't really anyone on the left saying "this is a good thing that we should keep", the vast, vast majority of the people who are being animated by the perception that it is an attack are on the right.
Those people reflexively blame the left, because they have been conditioned to see anything that attacks the things they care about as coming from the left, but it is 100% a clash between the corporate wing and the rural-culture wing of the American right.
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.
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”
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Republican politicians and influencers frame everything as an "attack" by the "woke" and "radical left". It makes for a great preemptive distraction when they're actually responsible for most of those things. Bland gray/beige color schemes get decided in board rooms full of uninspiring executive-class types who can't think of anything but trying to cargo cult their way into making the Line go up.
Anecdotally, either and both could be true: what "normal" person actually cares very much about the logo of a chain restaurant? Most people care about whether they can afford fun things, who they're sleeping with, and what they're having for dinner.
Yes, that's exactly what the poster above was saying, just not in those words. The idea that we are one and all on a high-minded journey of self-actualisation is hopelessly naive; most people are indeed flailing around at the bottom of the Maslow's pyramid, and that's how we got to where we are today politically.
I mean, I kinda? When I'm not working, I mostly think about tabletop rpgs, wingfoil/windsurf, my SO/family, and what I will do for dinner. Pegged me down to the T here.
That is a fascinating article and definitely something to bear in mind.
To some extent we all have fragile egos. Speaking personally, if I upset someone then I will be devastated for days, even if it was just a misunderstanding rather than me deliberately trying to hurt. Yet in social media world, it is a world of pain, with people getting brutal comments every day, for them still to post the next day and the day after that.
To some extent, negative attention is still attention, and, presumably for some, if you can't get positive attention, any attention will do. Cue 'rage-baiting', where the goal is to incite lots of negative comments.
Anyway, I am of the opinion that in the last century 'the camera never lied' but in today's world, the camera is always lying. On social media everything needs to be considered a lie first until proven otherwise. Add to that, the posters are likely to have psychiatric disorders, and I think I am now outta there!
Most viral things are driven, at least initially, by bots or click farms.
Also, fake promotions from websites to artificially amplify posts or stories.
View counts on a video or post can easily be manipulated.
You can buy server racks for under $200 from China that are made for holding like 20 Android motherboards. Get 50 of those and some centralised management software to interact with all of them on one big screen and you have potentially 1000 unique users that will be really hard to distinguish from bots using normal techniques. That's more than enough to jump-start a viral moment on many social media platforms. And if you hire 5 guys to post full time, you can completely steer the discussion on individual channels like facebook groups, instagram posts or reddit/HN threads.
Yep. There was a paper a few years ago that looked at how Russian bots spread disinformation. Basically the bots hype the disinformation internally amongst themselves until it lands on a real persons feed. By that point it looks real because of all of the engagement. From there, real human emotion and the engagement algorithms take over.
What I don't understand about bot farms is how they don't get IP banned.
If you do buy such a rack, how do people in practice get a rack full of devices to look like they're coming from valid ips that aren't in a VPN or cloud provider's ip range?
IP banning is way more difficult in practice than most people realise due to NAT. How do you distinguish a bot farm that is heavily posting on some trendy topic from a school full of highly engaged kids? They'll both have a ton of traffic coming from a single IP as far as your server is concerned. And if any IP ever does get flagged (which only makes sense for static ones anyways), it is trivial to move to a new one.
Most (all?) commercial social networks sell ads. Outrage-farm bots drive activity in two ways: the bot traffic itself and human response to the outrage bait.
I think the sad truth is the bots are good for business.
Reading this thread is making me want to go out for breakfast, but the reminders that cracker barrel is a corporate entity is making me want to patron a local diner.
The thing that would get me to actually go to Cracker Barrel would be if they brought back rosin potatoes. It's a weird method of cooking potatoes where you throw them in a CAULDRON OF BOILING ROSIN, and apparently it's quite good.
Idk, I read about them and I'm super curious now - but it's not like you can go to the store, grab a cauldron of rosin, and do them at home.
My tinfoil hat conspiracy is that most outrages online is “fake” in general. They just need to get the ball rolling and the internet community takes the bait. For instance, I’m heavily convinced the Travis and Taylor subreddit was some sort of bot generated outrage or Peter Theil/Spez project. Mind you, I’m not a fan of either (I don’t even watch football) but the community really took off after Taylor Swift supported Kamala in the election. There’s a ton of stuff with (in my opinion) unwarranted hate on the subreddit and it’s always on my front page despite never clicking into either subreddit or read news about them.
I got a similar vibe from the “controversy” over that Sydney Sweeney American Eagle ad. Not a single human I talked to about it, left or right, gave anything approaching two craps about it.
It’s almost as if there are companies out there now selling outrage-as-a-service because outrage drives engagement and thus, attention market share, ideally translating into sales. Who knows if that last assumption has any merit though.
I feel bad for the brand team at CB. Their logo is perfect for a printed menu and basically nothing else.
The only reason we recognize it on the highway is because we’ve seen it a million times. But it’s actually a low-contrast yellow-brown blob.
On mobile, it’s bad. It doesn’t feel right on social media. It doesn’t fit in a website header. It’s hard to make black-and-white.
I’m sure the team who put together the new mark were attempting to be faithful to the classic sense of Cracker Barrel while making a mark that’s a lot more flexible - and it was.
For me, the tone of this article is off-putting. "Doesn't that make more sense than ..." "Did something feel…off ..."? " A little ironic, given ..." This signals that what I'm reading is not journalism, and therefore nothing in the article is reliable or credible.
All that aside: What would really be helpful: some recommendations as to bloggers or other sources in this field whom people here find reliable and credible.
Out of curiosity as to how PeakMetrics was getting access to Twitter's APIs after all the talk of Elon Musk turning off the tap & making it prohibitively expensive to even pull data off them, I wanted to see how they were doing it.
But, I stumbled onto a different rabbit hole. On their website, PeakMetrics has an article about the Cracker Barrel logo debacle and in it, they don't use the term 'bot' once.
So, is Gizmodo framing this completely wrong? Did the article PeakMetrics put up change after Gizmodo put up their article? What's going on here?
Except this is a hot button issue. Everyone has an opinion on brands ruining their iconic logos. Nobody cares about cracker barrel specifically, they care about what the change represents. Real people love dumb low stakes drama, that has been true before social media and will be true long after it. Real people spent weeks all consumed by a cheating CEO.
Almost all supposed outrage marketing is just marketing teams making terrible decisions because they’re people and people make terrible decisions.
People don't care about single specific change. But they notice and are annoyed when it becomes a trend and half of the market is turning to generic boring sameness. So they latch on to the current culprit.
I think people in general value identity of the brands more than many brands themselves do. And the change is in some ways attack to them, not to the brand.
I would really like to see a comparison of how many bots started with the cracker barrel news story vs other news stories.
Personally, I find most of the crap on the news to be utterly meaningless and I have no idea why they talk about it and just assume its because all content creators need content to fill their 24 hour news channel, huge newspaper, consistent YouTube or social media posting schedule, etc.
That’s why the original daily show was so great, because it made fun of the lengths that the media goes to to fill their schedule.
One I learned about on HN. Prior to this I would have thought this was a real tinfoil hat idea, but groups like this are actively online every day sowing unrest and it is working so well at destroying America. How can we combat it?
I think one possible technical solution would be inherent bandwidth, range and commercial exploitation limitations. E.g. I think in a LoRa mesh network, you find those naturally. RNodes and Reticulum come to mind: https://unsigned.io/
Basically, through these hardware/physics restrictions abuse and enshittification doesn't scale, but genuine information does, and social communication patterns and scope resembles human nature/biological legacy better than the global web. Artificial software limitations can be cheated always, like with GPS spoofing, VPNs and so on. I presume, you could build communities around people, whose fates are actually connected significantly. A "killer app" to start off, could be dating, or blackboards, get the cool kidz aboard by using it to exclusively advertise the next rave, etc.. It is hard to censor and will be used for illegal activities, too, but it won't enable anything that's not happening on messengers anyway.
We know this is a thing from the Mueller report. The Russians had their hands in everything from LGBT and black advocacy groups to the Tea Party movement.
Indeed. Amplify the most divisive messages. Anyone planning advocacy for anything nowadays has to figure out how to deal with the worst messengers for their cause getting the biggest platforms.
I think we're also witnessing influence a meta level deeper, where accelerationists' stochastic terrorism ideologically seeks social rift and chaos, directly. Individual acts won't be explainable by a grand conspiracy, but rather I presume these communities are fed and pushed to birth random acts of terror with ambiguous or misleading messaging.
Quite frankly, I think too many cooks are benefiting from outrage and disarray. Look at the Charlie Kirk case, where "respectable" reports of "transgender ideology" inscribed on bullet casings spread immediately, although that's been a complete fabrication, which was later redacted. How vile a thing to do, for any supposedly journalistic platform. That's not bots, it's people who are to blame. I don't even think, it's much instructed, but rather sociopathic individuals/groups seeing opportunity for a minuscule gain, even if it's destroying the social fabric in the process.
They actually simultaneously were promoting the Bernie Sanders campaign. Seems likely these candidates were chosen as the ostensibly most divisive and disruptive elements in American politics.
This is what happens in the EU, even more noticeable since 2021. Hell, it's basically the horseshoe theory put into practice. In some subjects similar ideas are supported by both extremes, mostly just for political gain in the moment. You know, populists are like that.
Take a look at France. That's what has been happening since political interests took over the gilets jaunes protest (which didn't really end in 2020, mind you), and continues to this day in one way or another.
In This case, gp should change to 'all extremes'. The extreme center is a thing. Boulanger is the origin, but he has adept, the most known in the Anglo world is probably Blair, but the closest ideologically is Macron (just read 'how democracy dies' if you aren't convinced yet, or read about 'retenue institutionnelle' if you want to dog into the concept of democracy more deeply).
There are no doubt many ways one can define what is and isn't extreme. The definition of extreme I apply is in the context of the comment I made is something like political viewpoints or groups on the outside or on the fringes of the political establishment.
Figures like Macron or Blair may be or have been extreme in some regards, but not in this one.
But let's be honest, if you are hinting at that time Macron used anti-obstruction of parliament measures to combat the stupid high number of ammendements the opposition proposed [1], I don't know what to say. Seemed like the only case where one _should_ use such measures.
Either way, point stands that by fuelling appeasement to both extremes via bots in social networks, a state actor can destabilize a country much more effectively.
No, the time when he took two months to choose a prime minister, because he could, that's legal. That's also against the spirit of democracy. When he chooses a prime minister from the 3rd largest group, that's also legal. Had he chosen from the RN, which I think is worst, I would have been happier, because at least the spirit of the law would have been followed.
But that's not the first time he did away with either the spirit of the law, or with returning on his words.
The CCC: 'i'll propose all your suggestions as laws if they're correctly written, without filters', then later 'except 3 jokers', then he proposed a small part as is, a bigger part modified, and 19, not at all. That's legal, he can go back on his words as he wants, a president words don't mean anything. Usually, a candidate words didn't mean anything, but politics exercising power words used to be believed. But that's only convention, not law.
The 49-3 for the retirement reform. Waiting for the parliamentary discussions to happen, at least a month or two, would have been a lot less brutal. Even for those who agreed with the idea, the way it was done was authoritarian.
And the recent 'motion de rejet' against the law Duplomb they wanted to pass, to prevent _any_ discussion in the parliament, that's was the chef kiss imho. That has to be the most illegitimate legal thing they did. Totally against the spirit of the law. Classic. Hindenburg and Bruning then Von Papen used similar tactics for almost 5 years.
Bruning is also a perfect example of the extreme center by the way, even if less well-known.
Sincere question: was there any actual outrage about it?
I try to avoid the news as much as possible but a little about this slopped over my barriers. What I saw was pushback against the pushback, but none of the actual "oh no new logo is woke".
I assume there must have been some, since Cracker Barrel did change course. Still, I can't tell how upset anyone actually was, and how much was just outrage about outrage.
In my vague recollection, there was some legitimate outrage. The logo was just what people rallied behind, people were really upset that they planned to remodel the whole restaurant/store with some generic corporate slop. The “woke” comments came after from the usual crowd.
If you have ever been in a Cracker Barrel, it has a very distinct feel of soulful agrarian Americana. I suspect most people used the fight as a proxy for preserving that part of our culture, which is getting more rare/unknown in modern America.
I definitely saw some. It came from people who were in that culture war space where they interpret every trend as being part of a big left-wing plot to impose their values on everybody else.
Has anyone dived more deeper into this, how do they determine if it is a bot or not? It seems like a non-trivial problem to me, on Reddit there is the BotBouncer [1] but that's all seemingly based on user-flagging.
I couldn't find any real sources for it besides [2] but its not even mentioning bots, did Gizmodo make it up? Why don't they link their sources ffs!
Like people constantly allege botting or brigarding for things they don't like, and even if it wasn't a machine it can still be inauthentic. The methodology seems really important to explain in detail otherwise this is all just vibes and junk science.
I'm sure a lot of people on HN are very aware of AI, bots, manipulation.
But I have to say, it is getting harder to tell. If you think the AI slop is the only AI content, you are missing all the AI content that is good and nobody is noticing.
Its just that AI tools have become so wide spread that a lot of people are generating low quality slop. That is hiding the realistic slop.
I hated the new logo, but I don’t get how it was a “woke” thing or had anything to do with left/right politics. It seemed to me like a “sterile flat millennial-modernist design fatigue” thing. I’m very sick of flat designs and everything trying to look like the Apple Store.
I could buy that the politicizing was bot and troll driven.
I really try to avoid anything about politics here, but I recall there already being a controversy about this back in May of 2024. Specifically, there were public comments from the new CEO to investors about Cracker Barrel needing to change the demographics of the customers who ate at Cracker Barrel, and, depending on your point of view, some people interpreted the way the comments were said as suggesting that there was something morally suspect about how non-diverse, non-inclusive, old-and-white-and-straight the current dining demographics at Cracker Barrel were. There was a small right-of-center online public outrage du jour about it at the time. I'm not interested in litigating what the CEO said or how justified the outrage was, just noting precedent.
So there already was a pre-existing history here for people who are sympathetic to this point of view, particularly coming as it did shortly after some similar Bud Light and Target controversies.
They did need to change the demographics. It is currently overwhelmingly “a bunch of old people who are going to die soon”. The same as the CBS network.
Seems like a plausible strategy to try to associate existing outrage with the cause the bot operator is trying to advance.
Interesting. I do remember encountering these types of shitstorms and being confused why on earth it's being turned into a debate about capitalism or immigrants or whatever.
I think some people are convinced that everything they don't like about society (in this case, companies coming up with "sterile" logos) is Woke and generally part of The Culture War.
I think it is defined backwards. They aren't convined that "woke" isn't everything that they don't like. They define "woke" is whatever you don't like. Mixed in with bigotry and conspiratorial logic attributing the cause, of course.
I would assume the association with “woke” comes from prior instances of Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, the butter lady all being sanitized such that any such sanitation is now associated with “woke politics.”
Any event, no matter how insignificant, is cause enough for the right to manufacture outrage against that ever ill-defined "wokeness" and point the finger at "the radical left".
The logo has an old, southern white man, which some would call a "cracker" as a sort of white slur. That term originally comes from someone being a "whip-cracker." I'll let you fill in the blanks.
Cracker Barrel is a nostalgic homage to the old country store, which often featured a barrel of crackers as in actual crackers and sometimes a block of cheese. You could cut a piece of cheese and put it on a cracker. Cue “people don’t know this but you can just take the crackers! I have one thousand crackers!” meme.
This was also a feature in some bars in the Midwest and South. I doubt the idea of a communal cheese block has survived into modern times, certainly not post pandemic, but I remember stopping into a pub as a kid in Ohio and seeing one and yes I did help myself and am still alive. That block of cheese had to have been one foot by one foot at least.
But they kept the word "Cracker" in the logo! That's why it was so confusing. Was the outrage about them keeping the word? But then they changed the logo back to its original that also had the word? It just makes zero sense. That's why it seems plausible that it might have been inauthentic, even right-wing people are still capable of basic logical reasoning.
Perhaps it was literally the result of an algorithm, pattern matching the word "cracker"? Like there was a idiotic controversy of Hasan saying the word awhile back, so the algorithms may have learned that. Perhaps a bunch of right-wing people all of a sudden got the name change announcement recommended in their feeds because of the keyword and it just spread from there. I think that is the most likely actually.
I don't think this is good evidence for this, there was a lot of people vociferously and quite publicly concerned about Cracker Barrel. This bot excuse seems more like a ploy to downplay things.
Or its easier to talk about pro party X bots, in a space that is pro party Y? and harder to talk about pro party Y bots in a space that is pro party Y.
I believe that black lives matter, but also thought it made a lot of sense that the movement and branding of it could have been bot-driven to engineer a culture war.
I think the implication is that the bots bootstrapped the drama which created real offense from real people. That's why the bots are effective, because the audience is predictably easy to rile up once one of two sides is labeled as "woke".
>Of course, that means 75% of those posts were from people. PeakMetrics notes that the earliest posts expressing dismay and frustration at Cracker Barrel’s decision to update its logo came from human-run accounts. Once the bot networks started to pick up on the trend, though, they blew the whole thing up. “Authentic voices articulated cultural dissatisfaction, which bots then amplified,” the report said.
>PeakMetrics didn’t attribute the bot megaphone to any specific organization or state actor. Rather, it found, “The initiators are ideological activist accounts with prior culture-war posting histories, supported by botnets.”
well gizmodo is a left wing outlet so no surprise here. when the left can't win an argument based on logic or even emotion, next tactic up is often ad hominem
> 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?
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.
> 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?
> I'm sure there would be people upset, given the nonsense that happened in the 80s
Why do you feel that was “nonsense”? Norm Macdonald had a joke about Coke and Pepsi—Basically he said it’s a misconception for restaurants to assume that if Coke is your favorite beverage, that Pepsi is your second favorite beverage and an acceptable alternative. In fact, if Coke is your favorite beverage Pepsi is probably your least favorite beverage. You end up opting for something else…that’s not a cola at all.
People rejected New Coke because Coca Cola turned their favorite beverage into their least favorite. Of course someone would complain about that.
Things used to have personality, but there's been this slow march toward making everything as bland and boring as possible. Restaurants are becoming grey utilitarian boxes, logos that used to have interesting designs are boiled down to a max of 3 colors.
It's corporate min-maxxing for attention economy and the hope you don't offend anyone's taste. If you're bland, then it's hard for anyone to sincerely dislike you. Bland logos are more instantly recognizable than complex ones, so we must ensure that we save a few milliseconds of cognition before the consumer makes a choice.
We're surrounded by company logos all the time. At least make them interesting.
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.
> 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.
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.
The logo and interior design was s--t.
Found the bot
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So nothing can ever change?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Out of all things they could have improved, they picked one that didn’t need changing.
Do you know what a Cracker Barrel is? They're not exactly celebrations of modernity.
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.
Why does it need to?
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.
It makes people remember relatives who are no longer with us. Doesn't matter what the logo looks like.
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.
> 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."
> 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?
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...
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.
> 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.)
> 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.
>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.
If you are literally angry your favorite corporately owned chain restaurant changed their logo and/or their decor, you got bigger problems.
The fact that so many people were played up to that point and that this energy was so effectively harvested for polarization means that we've got bigger problems.
Now imagine what can be achieved with TikTok under domestic control.
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.
Conservatives, almost by definition, need the past to have been better than the future.
Otherwise, what are they conserving?
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?
> 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.
Its a generalization. I don't mean to imply that every conservative feels that way about every aspect of the past.
I'm just saying that, in general, conservatives exist in opposition to change.
EDIT: I checked the dictionary. It literally means "a person who is averse to change and holds traditional values."
It's literally in the name.
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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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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).
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.
> 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.
> 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?
> 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...
> 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.
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.
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
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.
While I don't entirely disagree here, it is very much the case that the kind of "Americana nostalgia" that Cracker Barrel's once and future look epitomizes is much more something that the American right cares about than the left, in and of itself.
That doesn't mean that the left doesn't care about the corporate blandicization of everything with any personality, nor that the right was actually going to Cracker Barrel in droves. But it does mean that it's very easy for those who wish to stir up more polarization to paint the original rebrand as an attack on the right.
I mean, it’s real in the sense that any culture war point is real, in that it’s probably more salient on the extremes than in the middle.
But if you were talking about about gay rights or trans rights or abortion you’d have a loud and vocal group on the left saying the right was absolutely morally wrong. In this case though. Where’s the attack? The attack is coming from capitalism, not from the left, so maybe I get what you’re trying to say, but this is the first culture war issue where I would say the reality, even if not the perception is that most people are either in the center(don’t care) or affected (don’t like it), I don’t think there are many serious people on the other side of it (the Cracker Barrel rebrand is good, and you’re wrong for being against it.). But ironically, you could even argue the “attack” came from the right! No longer protecting its own institutions(this is overstated for effect but I think the point still stands)
I don’t know that I’m saying I disagree with you- there’s the very real observation that about Americana that say the right brings American flags to protest and too many on the left don’t, but still, it’s funny.
Oh, the attack itself absolutely comes from the right! The bland rebrands are 100% a product of right-wing corporate America trying to maximize profits at the expense of everything else.
I think my point is just that while you're right that there isn't really anyone on the left saying "this is a good thing that we should keep", the vast, vast majority of the people who are being animated by the perception that it is an attack are on the right.
Those people reflexively blame the left, because they have been conditioned to see anything that attacks the things they care about as coming from the left, but it is 100% a clash between the corporate wing and the rural-culture wing of the American right.
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.
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”
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.
> 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/thoug...
[1] https://medium.com/@zuktechnologies/why-modern-logos-all-loo...
^ 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.
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.
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.
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.
Ahem: 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...
>ahem
If you’re going to open your comment with that I have no desire to read what follows.
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.
Maybe so, but that was just rhetorical lying that had no basis in actual reality.
Yes? Doesn't make it any better. I think it makes it even worse, in fact.
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.
Republican politicians and influencers frame everything as an "attack" by the "woke" and "radical left". It makes for a great preemptive distraction when they're actually responsible for most of those things. Bland gray/beige color schemes get decided in board rooms full of uninspiring executive-class types who can't think of anything but trying to cargo cult their way into making the Line go up.
While bots are possible, another confounding factor is that the most prolific social media posters are strongly correlated with psychiatric disorders.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10129173/
Anecdotally, either and both could be true: what "normal" person actually cares very much about the logo of a chain restaurant? Most people care about whether they can afford fun things, who they're sleeping with, and what they're having for dinner.
> Most people care about whether they can afford fun things, who they're sleeping with, and what they're having for dinner.
Ahhh, I see most of us are swimming around the bottom of Maslow's heirarchy of needs.
Yes, that's exactly what the poster above was saying, just not in those words. The idea that we are one and all on a high-minded journey of self-actualisation is hopelessly naive; most people are indeed flailing around at the bottom of the Maslow's pyramid, and that's how we got to where we are today politically.
Sure — and I agree as well.
It’s the base because it’s the most important; not the least “erudite”.
I mean, I kinda? When I'm not working, I mostly think about tabletop rpgs, wingfoil/windsurf, my SO/family, and what I will do for dinner. Pegged me down to the T here.
That is a fascinating article and definitely something to bear in mind.
To some extent we all have fragile egos. Speaking personally, if I upset someone then I will be devastated for days, even if it was just a misunderstanding rather than me deliberately trying to hurt. Yet in social media world, it is a world of pain, with people getting brutal comments every day, for them still to post the next day and the day after that.
To some extent, negative attention is still attention, and, presumably for some, if you can't get positive attention, any attention will do. Cue 'rage-baiting', where the goal is to incite lots of negative comments.
Anyway, I am of the opinion that in the last century 'the camera never lied' but in today's world, the camera is always lying. On social media everything needs to be considered a lie first until proven otherwise. Add to that, the posters are likely to have psychiatric disorders, and I think I am now outta there!
Most viral things are driven, at least initially, by bots or click farms. Also, fake promotions from websites to artificially amplify posts or stories. View counts on a video or post can easily be manipulated.
You can buy server racks for under $200 from China that are made for holding like 20 Android motherboards. Get 50 of those and some centralised management software to interact with all of them on one big screen and you have potentially 1000 unique users that will be really hard to distinguish from bots using normal techniques. That's more than enough to jump-start a viral moment on many social media platforms. And if you hire 5 guys to post full time, you can completely steer the discussion on individual channels like facebook groups, instagram posts or reddit/HN threads.
Yep. There was a paper a few years ago that looked at how Russian bots spread disinformation. Basically the bots hype the disinformation internally amongst themselves until it lands on a real persons feed. By that point it looks real because of all of the engagement. From there, real human emotion and the engagement algorithms take over.
What I don't understand about bot farms is how they don't get IP banned.
If you do buy such a rack, how do people in practice get a rack full of devices to look like they're coming from valid ips that aren't in a VPN or cloud provider's ip range?
IP banning is way more difficult in practice than most people realise due to NAT. How do you distinguish a bot farm that is heavily posting on some trendy topic from a school full of highly engaged kids? They'll both have a ton of traffic coming from a single IP as far as your server is concerned. And if any IP ever does get flagged (which only makes sense for static ones anyways), it is trivial to move to a new one.
Mobile phones end up sharing an external IP address with may other (real human) mobile phones on the same cellular network.
Residential proxies and other such techniques, I imagine.
Most (all?) commercial social networks sell ads. Outrage-farm bots drive activity in two ways: the bot traffic itself and human response to the outrage bait.
I think the sad truth is the bots are good for business.
Given that everyone I disagree with on here is almost certainly a bot this fits.
I'm not a bot! You're the bot!
:)
The scary part of your joke is that there is no way to tell from the post if you are, in fact, a bot or not.
You're absolutely right!
You’re absolutely - right!
Oh yeah? Can you even recognize all these stop signs?
Reading this thread is making me want to go out for breakfast, but the reminders that cracker barrel is a corporate entity is making me want to patron a local diner.
The thing that would get me to actually go to Cracker Barrel would be if they brought back rosin potatoes. It's a weird method of cooking potatoes where you throw them in a CAULDRON OF BOILING ROSIN, and apparently it's quite good.
Idk, I read about them and I'm super curious now - but it's not like you can go to the store, grab a cauldron of rosin, and do them at home.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41991352
My tinfoil hat conspiracy is that most outrages online is “fake” in general. They just need to get the ball rolling and the internet community takes the bait. For instance, I’m heavily convinced the Travis and Taylor subreddit was some sort of bot generated outrage or Peter Theil/Spez project. Mind you, I’m not a fan of either (I don’t even watch football) but the community really took off after Taylor Swift supported Kamala in the election. There’s a ton of stuff with (in my opinion) unwarranted hate on the subreddit and it’s always on my front page despite never clicking into either subreddit or read news about them.
I got a similar vibe from the “controversy” over that Sydney Sweeney American Eagle ad. Not a single human I talked to about it, left or right, gave anything approaching two craps about it.
It’s almost as if there are companies out there now selling outrage-as-a-service because outrage drives engagement and thus, attention market share, ideally translating into sales. Who knows if that last assumption has any merit though.
It was mostly children. Every child is on the internet and uses the same social medias adults use.
I feel bad for the brand team at CB. Their logo is perfect for a printed menu and basically nothing else.
The only reason we recognize it on the highway is because we’ve seen it a million times. But it’s actually a low-contrast yellow-brown blob.
On mobile, it’s bad. It doesn’t feel right on social media. It doesn’t fit in a website header. It’s hard to make black-and-white.
I’m sure the team who put together the new mark were attempting to be faithful to the classic sense of Cracker Barrel while making a mark that’s a lot more flexible - and it was.
There's an article with more details here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/bot-networks-are-helping-drag-c...
For me, the tone of this article is off-putting. "Doesn't that make more sense than ..." "Did something feel…off ..."? " A little ironic, given ..." This signals that what I'm reading is not journalism, and therefore nothing in the article is reliable or credible.
All that aside: What would really be helpful: some recommendations as to bloggers or other sources in this field whom people here find reliable and credible.
Out of curiosity as to how PeakMetrics was getting access to Twitter's APIs after all the talk of Elon Musk turning off the tap & making it prohibitively expensive to even pull data off them, I wanted to see how they were doing it.
But, I stumbled onto a different rabbit hole. On their website, PeakMetrics has an article about the Cracker Barrel logo debacle and in it, they don't use the term 'bot' once.
So, is Gizmodo framing this completely wrong? Did the article PeakMetrics put up change after Gizmodo put up their article? What's going on here?
https://www.peakmetrics.com/insights/the-politics-of-the-cra...
Stupid press release "research" by PeakMetrics that Gizmodo mindlessly reposts. Maybe 50% of all outrage is bots.
This just reads like PeakMetrics trying to promote their closed source “bot detection” algorithm. Let’s say that algorithm doesn’t work?
Except this is a hot button issue. Everyone has an opinion on brands ruining their iconic logos. Nobody cares about cracker barrel specifically, they care about what the change represents. Real people love dumb low stakes drama, that has been true before social media and will be true long after it. Real people spent weeks all consumed by a cheating CEO.
Almost all supposed outrage marketing is just marketing teams making terrible decisions because they’re people and people make terrible decisions.
People don't care about single specific change. But they notice and are annoyed when it becomes a trend and half of the market is turning to generic boring sameness. So they latch on to the current culprit.
I think people in general value identity of the brands more than many brands themselves do. And the change is in some ways attack to them, not to the brand.
I would really like to see a comparison of how many bots started with the cracker barrel news story vs other news stories.
Personally, I find most of the crap on the news to be utterly meaningless and I have no idea why they talk about it and just assume its because all content creators need content to fill their 24 hour news channel, huge newspaper, consistent YouTube or social media posting schedule, etc.
That’s why the original daily show was so great, because it made fun of the lengths that the media goes to to fill their schedule.
My naive thought here would be: who made money off the outrage?
Gone are the days when real humans needed to own newspapers and spend a lifetime writing to manufacture outrage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency
One I learned about on HN. Prior to this I would have thought this was a real tinfoil hat idea, but groups like this are actively online every day sowing unrest and it is working so well at destroying America. How can we combat it?
Bring people together IRL.
I think one possible technical solution would be inherent bandwidth, range and commercial exploitation limitations. E.g. I think in a LoRa mesh network, you find those naturally. RNodes and Reticulum come to mind: https://unsigned.io/
Basically, through these hardware/physics restrictions abuse and enshittification doesn't scale, but genuine information does, and social communication patterns and scope resembles human nature/biological legacy better than the global web. Artificial software limitations can be cheated always, like with GPS spoofing, VPNs and so on. I presume, you could build communities around people, whose fates are actually connected significantly. A "killer app" to start off, could be dating, or blackboards, get the cool kidz aboard by using it to exclusively advertise the next rave, etc.. It is hard to censor and will be used for illegal activities, too, but it won't enable anything that's not happening on messengers anyway.
All sentiment will be driven by bots, who will be driven by whoever has the most money.
Don't discount state actors.
You can absolutely derail a democracy you are not fond of by stoking the flames on both extremes on the political spectrum.
Money is a place holder for power, which state actors currently have in their geographic monopolies
>both extremes
Oh come on
We know this is a thing from the Mueller report. The Russians had their hands in everything from LGBT and black advocacy groups to the Tea Party movement.
Indeed. Amplify the most divisive messages. Anyone planning advocacy for anything nowadays has to figure out how to deal with the worst messengers for their cause getting the biggest platforms.
I think we're also witnessing influence a meta level deeper, where accelerationists' stochastic terrorism ideologically seeks social rift and chaos, directly. Individual acts won't be explainable by a grand conspiracy, but rather I presume these communities are fed and pushed to birth random acts of terror with ambiguous or misleading messaging.
Quite frankly, I think too many cooks are benefiting from outrage and disarray. Look at the Charlie Kirk case, where "respectable" reports of "transgender ideology" inscribed on bullet casings spread immediately, although that's been a complete fabrication, which was later redacted. How vile a thing to do, for any supposedly journalistic platform. That's not bots, it's people who are to blame. I don't even think, it's much instructed, but rather sociopathic individuals/groups seeing opportunity for a minuscule gain, even if it's destroying the social fabric in the process.
They did—but their purpose was 100% to lend support to the American right wing.
I think it's fairly disingenuous to characterize that as "fanning the flames on both sides of the political spectrum."
They actually simultaneously were promoting the Bernie Sanders campaign. Seems likely these candidates were chosen as the ostensibly most divisive and disruptive elements in American politics.
This is what happens in the EU, even more noticeable since 2021. Hell, it's basically the horseshoe theory put into practice. In some subjects similar ideas are supported by both extremes, mostly just for political gain in the moment. You know, populists are like that.
Take a look at France. That's what has been happening since political interests took over the gilets jaunes protest (which didn't really end in 2020, mind you), and continues to this day in one way or another.
(Edit: clarify, and add context)
In This case, gp should change to 'all extremes'. The extreme center is a thing. Boulanger is the origin, but he has adept, the most known in the Anglo world is probably Blair, but the closest ideologically is Macron (just read 'how democracy dies' if you aren't convinced yet, or read about 'retenue institutionnelle' if you want to dog into the concept of democracy more deeply).
There are no doubt many ways one can define what is and isn't extreme. The definition of extreme I apply is in the context of the comment I made is something like political viewpoints or groups on the outside or on the fringes of the political establishment.
Figures like Macron or Blair may be or have been extreme in some regards, but not in this one.
Retenue institutionelle is in fact dangerous.
But let's be honest, if you are hinting at that time Macron used anti-obstruction of parliament measures to combat the stupid high number of ammendements the opposition proposed [1], I don't know what to say. Seemed like the only case where one _should_ use such measures.
Either way, point stands that by fuelling appeasement to both extremes via bots in social networks, a state actor can destabilize a country much more effectively.
[1] https://www.lemonde.fr/blog/cuisines-assemblee/2020/02/19/re...
No, the time when he took two months to choose a prime minister, because he could, that's legal. That's also against the spirit of democracy. When he chooses a prime minister from the 3rd largest group, that's also legal. Had he chosen from the RN, which I think is worst, I would have been happier, because at least the spirit of the law would have been followed.
But that's not the first time he did away with either the spirit of the law, or with returning on his words.
The CCC: 'i'll propose all your suggestions as laws if they're correctly written, without filters', then later 'except 3 jokers', then he proposed a small part as is, a bigger part modified, and 19, not at all. That's legal, he can go back on his words as he wants, a president words don't mean anything. Usually, a candidate words didn't mean anything, but politics exercising power words used to be believed. But that's only convention, not law.
The 49-3 for the retirement reform. Waiting for the parliamentary discussions to happen, at least a month or two, would have been a lot less brutal. Even for those who agreed with the idea, the way it was done was authoritarian.
And the recent 'motion de rejet' against the law Duplomb they wanted to pass, to prevent _any_ discussion in the parliament, that's was the chef kiss imho. That has to be the most illegitimate legal thing they did. Totally against the spirit of the law. Classic. Hindenburg and Bruning then Von Papen used similar tactics for almost 5 years.
Bruning is also a perfect example of the extreme center by the way, even if less well-known.
Sincere question: was there any actual outrage about it?
I try to avoid the news as much as possible but a little about this slopped over my barriers. What I saw was pushback against the pushback, but none of the actual "oh no new logo is woke".
I assume there must have been some, since Cracker Barrel did change course. Still, I can't tell how upset anyone actually was, and how much was just outrage about outrage.
In my vague recollection, there was some legitimate outrage. The logo was just what people rallied behind, people were really upset that they planned to remodel the whole restaurant/store with some generic corporate slop. The “woke” comments came after from the usual crowd.
If you have ever been in a Cracker Barrel, it has a very distinct feel of soulful agrarian Americana. I suspect most people used the fight as a proxy for preserving that part of our culture, which is getting more rare/unknown in modern America.
I find it kind of ironic that a chain restaurant is people's idea of authentic America. Which kinda makes it perfect, I guess.
I definitely saw some. It came from people who were in that culture war space where they interpret every trend as being part of a big left-wing plot to impose their values on everybody else.
Has anyone dived more deeper into this, how do they determine if it is a bot or not? It seems like a non-trivial problem to me, on Reddit there is the BotBouncer [1] but that's all seemingly based on user-flagging.
I couldn't find any real sources for it besides [2] but its not even mentioning bots, did Gizmodo make it up? Why don't they link their sources ffs!
Like people constantly allege botting or brigarding for things they don't like, and even if it wasn't a machine it can still be inauthentic. The methodology seems really important to explain in detail otherwise this is all just vibes and junk science.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/BotBouncer/ Github: https://github.com/fsvreddit/bot-bouncer
[2] https://www.peakmetrics.com/insights/the-politics-of-the-cra...
I'm sure a lot of people on HN are very aware of AI, bots, manipulation.
But I have to say, it is getting harder to tell. If you think the AI slop is the only AI content, you are missing all the AI content that is good and nobody is noticing.
Its just that AI tools have become so wide spread that a lot of people are generating low quality slop. That is hiding the realistic slop.
I hated the new logo, but I don’t get how it was a “woke” thing or had anything to do with left/right politics. It seemed to me like a “sterile flat millennial-modernist design fatigue” thing. I’m very sick of flat designs and everything trying to look like the Apple Store.
I could buy that the politicizing was bot and troll driven.
I really try to avoid anything about politics here, but I recall there already being a controversy about this back in May of 2024. Specifically, there were public comments from the new CEO to investors about Cracker Barrel needing to change the demographics of the customers who ate at Cracker Barrel, and, depending on your point of view, some people interpreted the way the comments were said as suggesting that there was something morally suspect about how non-diverse, non-inclusive, old-and-white-and-straight the current dining demographics at Cracker Barrel were. There was a small right-of-center online public outrage du jour about it at the time. I'm not interested in litigating what the CEO said or how justified the outrage was, just noting precedent.
I can't find any of that discussion online, because it has been totally overshadowed by the more recent logo drama, but you can see a bloodless summary of the event here from the time: https://www.nrn.com/family-dining/cracker-barrel-unveils-str...
So there already was a pre-existing history here for people who are sympathetic to this point of view, particularly coming as it did shortly after some similar Bud Light and Target controversies.
They did need to change the demographics. It is currently overwhelmingly “a bunch of old people who are going to die soon”. The same as the CBS network.
Old people are becoming more, not less
The new old people aren’t all of the sudden going to start watching CBS and going to Cracker Barrel.
100 %.I absolutely did not get the political view. Some people made the female CEO out to be the devil.
The logo is very corporate, some might say soulless now, but I get it; it's a first step to modernize the brand.
The logo change was rolled back.
> because apparently, one of the demands of leftist extremists is conforming to sans-serif supremacy.
I think we can unanimously agree that serif fonts are an existential threat to civilization.
I really hope it was bots that drove the outrage. If it wasn’t, I don’t know what to say.
It’s a logo.
Seems like a plausible strategy to try to associate existing outrage with the cause the bot operator is trying to advance.
Interesting. I do remember encountering these types of shitstorms and being confused why on earth it's being turned into a debate about capitalism or immigrants or whatever.
I think some people are convinced that everything they don't like about society (in this case, companies coming up with "sterile" logos) is Woke and generally part of The Culture War.
As they say, the internet makes you stupid.
> the internet makes you stupid.
Fifty percent of people were already of below average intelligence, and the average has been decreasing for years.
Based on the invalid premise that the most commonly held belief is the correct one the internet has now given those idiots super charged megaphones.
It's not people that are "convinced". It's the bots.
I think it is defined backwards. They aren't convined that "woke" isn't everything that they don't like. They define "woke" is whatever you don't like. Mixed in with bigotry and conspiratorial logic attributing the cause, of course.
I would assume the association with “woke” comes from prior instances of Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, the butter lady all being sanitized such that any such sanitation is now associated with “woke politics.”
It’s now a trained knee-jerk response.
Any event, no matter how insignificant, is cause enough for the right to manufacture outrage against that ever ill-defined "wokeness" and point the finger at "the radical left".
The logo has an old, southern white man, which some would call a "cracker" as a sort of white slur. That term originally comes from someone being a "whip-cracker." I'll let you fill in the blanks.
Insofar as I’m aware the Cracker term does indeed involve whips, but rather than whipping slaves, it was Florida Crackers driving cattle.
However, as relates to the business, I believe it’s meant to invoke a literal barrel of crackers an old timey good Ol’ fashioned country store?
Yes, but the term certainly evolved from its origin. And of course, the name Cracker Barrel was just about a literal barrel of soda crackers.
Cracker Barrel is a nostalgic homage to the old country store, which often featured a barrel of crackers as in actual crackers and sometimes a block of cheese. You could cut a piece of cheese and put it on a cracker. Cue “people don’t know this but you can just take the crackers! I have one thousand crackers!” meme.
This was also a feature in some bars in the Midwest and South. I doubt the idea of a communal cheese block has survived into modern times, certainly not post pandemic, but I remember stopping into a pub as a kid in Ohio and seeing one and yes I did help myself and am still alive. That block of cheese had to have been one foot by one foot at least.
But they kept the word "Cracker" in the logo! That's why it was so confusing. Was the outrage about them keeping the word? But then they changed the logo back to its original that also had the word? It just makes zero sense. That's why it seems plausible that it might have been inauthentic, even right-wing people are still capable of basic logical reasoning.
Perhaps it was literally the result of an algorithm, pattern matching the word "cracker"? Like there was a idiotic controversy of Hasan saying the word awhile back, so the algorithms may have learned that. Perhaps a bunch of right-wing people all of a sudden got the name change announcement recommended in their feeds because of the keyword and it just spread from there. I think that is the most likely actually.
[dead]
I don't think this is good evidence for this, there was a lot of people vociferously and quite publicly concerned about Cracker Barrel. This bot excuse seems more like a ploy to downplay things.
The people who complain about bots never seem to identify bots posting things that they agree with.
"the bots" is the new false consciousness, it is a deliberate attempt to avoid engaging
Or its easier to talk about pro party X bots, in a space that is pro party Y? and harder to talk about pro party Y bots in a space that is pro party Y.
I believe that black lives matter, but also thought it made a lot of sense that the movement and branding of it could have been bot-driven to engineer a culture war.
Why don't you think it's good evidence? Did you even read the report?
Hi, accusing someone and asking if they even read the report is actually against the rules. Go ahead check it out.
I think the implication is that the bots bootstrapped the drama which created real offense from real people. That's why the bots are effective, because the audience is predictably easy to rile up once one of two sides is labeled as "woke".
"A lot of people" meaning bots.
No real-life person thought the logo was offensive before or that the logo became woke. It never passed the smell test.
>Of course, that means 75% of those posts were from people. PeakMetrics notes that the earliest posts expressing dismay and frustration at Cracker Barrel’s decision to update its logo came from human-run accounts. Once the bot networks started to pick up on the trend, though, they blew the whole thing up. “Authentic voices articulated cultural dissatisfaction, which bots then amplified,” the report said.
>PeakMetrics didn’t attribute the bot megaphone to any specific organization or state actor. Rather, it found, “The initiators are ideological activist accounts with prior culture-war posting histories, supported by botnets.”
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well gizmodo is a left wing outlet so no surprise here. when the left can't win an argument based on logic or even emotion, next tactic up is often ad hominem
Kind of sounds the the ad hominum is coming from inside the house.
Our next big plan is to insult the measles into submission.