HailCorporate is a community for individuals committed to unmasking the deceptive practice of astroturfing and exposing fake product testimonials. In a digital age where the line between genuine endorsements and corporate manipulations is increasingly blurred, our community has become necessary. Here, we collectively call out comments and posts where everyday people, often unknowingly, become pawns in a company’s PR strategy, spreading scripted messages under the guise of personal opinion. HailCorporate’s mission is to foster a culture of transparency and authenticity, empowering fediverse users to challenge the covert tactics used by most multinational corporations to astroturf the fediverse.
There is a 0.00000% (rounded up) chance that any PR firm is committing resources to Lemmy for product/corporate astroturfing.
I have a hard time believing this won’t become more than a toxic witch-hunt for opinions someone doesn’t like vs calling out legitimate astroturfing campaigns or people inadvertently spreading corporate fallacies.
You’re free to block it if you want. I’d argue that there is a non-zero chance that there are zero astroturfers here right now. The censorship on lemmy.world in general is enough to cause me to start this community. Look at the billionaire thread. The mods were so intensely pro-billionaire that they deleted MANY comments calling for the guillotine as a solution to the world’s billionaire problem. After a while, they had to give up because it was making them look like what they are: Lemmy’s staunch defenders of crony capitalism.
Advocating for murder is generally something that gets moderated.
Are you… surprised? There are “free speech” sites like Truth Social and Gab that may provide a better experience for you.
hexbear.net is the place for people like me
I like infosec.pub a lot, though.
I can already tell that this community is going to be an absolute dumpster fire with this sort of narrow visioned with hunt modding attitude.
And I don’t even think the problem is the community existing hail corporate is a hilarious and fun concept. I think the problem is the person creating and saying they are going to mod the community being narrow-minded, and toxic.
That’s a hilarious straw man. I said that I would mod the community by not doing any modding at all except in the worst cases of bigotry. I’m not sure how I could be any more fair, actually.
You seem to think that I should have created this community on threads with an explicit signed, dated, legally binding, and notarized promise to Mark Zuckerberg himself that I will do the work of censorship in the name of the grinding gears of the very capitalism that this community is a reaction against.
… maybe just don’t call for other people’s deaths. And incidentally, the guillotine is centuries old, and in the modern day would be completely ineffective in the face of offshore bank accounts and private jets.
it’s a start. please don’t discourage the last act of resistance the people have left.
753 people who, if they didn’t exist, the earth would INSTANTLY become a better place. We are being sent barreling enthusiastically toward climate collapse by those exact 753 greedy dragons who are sitting on piles of money that they literally couldn’t spend in 10,000,000 lifetimes, literally buying up governments rather than do ANYTHING to dial back their excess and you? You’re sitting here tone-policing people. If that isn’t hail corporate, I really don’t know what is!
Thanks for so clearly demonstrating exactly why I started this community. I’m guessing you’re a lib who thinks Chuck Schumer, Joe Biden, and Nancy Pelosi are working hard in your best interest but those darned Republicans keep getting in the way.
PS. You’d have a point if mods had removed posts calling for the deaths of innocent Palestinian people.
I haven’t seen any posts where people are calling for Palestinian deaths with no moderation action. Also, your holier than thou attitude is pretty off-putting. You usually get further trying to understand where someone is coming from rather than slinging unfounded accusations just to score points. Straw manning is wack.
wiggida wiggida wack, am I right?
Isn’t that what you’re doing here, too?
This is why most people won’t take you seriously.
Says the 8-day-old account with only one comment on an instance filled with tech serfs who are either too comfortable with their bread and circus and healthcare tied to their employment that they afraid of upsetting their billionaire bosses. That instance, while great for technical talk, is about as fertile ground for political discussion as an automated helpdesk inside of a student loan app.
Good luck in life, you’ll need a lot
I hope you are someday rich enough where you can recover the integrity that left you so early in your life. You don’t even realize that you won the birth lottery. You don’t even realize that if you were simply born in another country, none of the comforts that have found you in life would even be possible. You are clearly comfortable enough to point fingers but captive enough to still kiss the ass of your master. You’re a feudal serf and you don’t even realize it.
I empathize with your plight. I used to be a lot like you (a victim of hustle culture, monetizing all of my hobbies) before I realized how rigged this game is. One doesn’t often realize how rigged the game is until they get ground up like hamburger in it…and that is the difference between us.
It sounds like you’ve ping-ponged between two radical ideologies. Maybe you became so disillusioned with the lack of success from overworking yourself and now you’re angry at the state of the world, but lashing out at people trying to engage you in a discussion isn’t going to do any good.
Dude stop smoking what you’re smoking. You know nothing about me and here you lay judgement.
Sorry, but if rules are not consistent then they aren’t any good.
fuck rules. do what’s right.
While it can feel good to cut loose, down this path lies madness. Try to remember, people trying to hurt you want you to feel backed into a corner, that perception causes you to disregard some of your real options.
You are not actually backed into a real corner, though. That perception is an illusion to try to make you lash out and hurt yourself in the long-run. It’s a propaganda technique.
If the truth is really on your side, you can use words to spread it, and convince others to help. The actual truth has to be on your side for this to work though, not just feelings and emotions.
i believed that naive shit for a long time, but then i realized that truth does not prevail because of its merits alone and that sort of thinking is what has allowed sociopaths to rule the world.
Try on a longer, larger view. For instance, we say “witch hunt, witch hunt” these days, mostly disingenuously, but when was the last time we actually burned one like we used to?
It’s tempting to wish for the world to be made perfect, it’s certainly nowhere near close. But focusing in on only the problems, like a propagandist might want, makes it harder to see the things that are actually good and getting better, and on our ability to actually genuinely change things, or sometimes die trying.
There is no quick, magical solution though. People will always be people, for the foreseeable future.
You’re right, we have far more effective tools these days.
For legal reasons I shall not name them.
although there’s definitely astroturfing, mods tend to censor calls to violence regardless
but they shouldn’t
it’s all fun and games till the court cases…
Seriously it’s not fucking rocket surgery. Direct calls to violence like that are illegal in most of the world. In contexts where it seems like it’s meant sincerely and not as a joke, mods would be crazy not to remove it.
in an unjust society, following the rules allows evil to go unchecked.
True, and unjust laws should be broken.
Murder is not unjust.
gotta choose your battles…
There’s definitely spam, although it tends to be more of the boner pill variety.
How many people are actually buying suspicious dick pills on the internet? The I always assumed its scam/info stealing and you get nothing. There can’t be enough people dumb to buy those to keep it profitable, right?
Someone bonehead posted an ad on the technology community yesterday for a dental practice in Melbourne
I mean, what were they thinking?!?
I tried to convince my small company to put an account on Mastodon instead of X. Our social media person opened a Mastodon account, but decided it wouldn’t be run until Mastodon was a little more, well, relevant.
It already is a toxic witch-hunt here. Try posting that you like an Apple product or that you don’t like Linux or Android and you’ll immediately get called a shill. Try it! It’s fun!
I work for a telecommunications company and we obviously sell mobile phones as well as our own brand of routers and repeaters. Here in Germany, there is no obligation to use anything your provider gives you, so ppl are legitimately free to use whatever modem/router they want. Our’s is plenty enough for everyone who just wants a thing that sits in the corner and is never interacted with. Hell, It even has VPN via Wireguard and dynamic DNS and a little display. Are there more sophisticated routers out there? Hell yes. Yet, whenever my noob friends or family ask me for advice and I go “just by the one we’re offering and be done with it”, they call me a shill.
So… Why do you ask if you don’t want to hear the response and why the hell would I sell you something I know doesn’t fit your needs when you’d come to me with your complaints?!
Jesse… what the fuck are you talking about?
That people call me a shill for recommending the stuff from the company I work for which I only recommend because
A) I know it so I can help them with their problems and
b) I got it cheaper, so I tried it and I know that it’s alright
But people will first ask me “because I work at a Telco” and then not believe me because “of course you’d say that, you work at a Telco”.
I was adding a personal anecdote to the argument you made that people calling out “shills” often depends on if they share your opinion or not.
Got it. I think we’re specifically talking about Lemmy, though, and online communities where people don’t even know your identity. Your anecdote just makes me think your family is crazy. They know you and still call you a shill? That’s nuts.
If you get downvoted on lemmy you don’t get a 10min timeout and karma reduction like on reddit. So you may as well say what you want and wear the downvotes proud.
The app I use doesn’t even LET me downvote, so hah!
then use a different app!?
EXACTLY
Oh I do. Downvotes don’t matter at all on Lemmy. It’s just annoying because some people think they do and they think if they get upvotes that it means they’re right.
If they don’t matter currently for moderation I have to imagine they’ll be part of a moderation toolkit eventually. Leveraging community voting to detect spam would be decently effective, especially for fresh accounts.
Yeah, but reddit automatically bans you for a few minutes in a specific community once you get enough downvotes. The more you get, the longer it takes to reply to people. So any opinion that’s truly unpopular (i.e. not “I like cats better than dogs”) will get you to post less, with toxic people throwing their 3 cents in, calling you names, and you can’t respond at all since you are limited to a comment every 20 mins.
I dobt lemmy would implement autobanning like that.
Apple legitimately makes super solid hardware. Their Apple watch heart rate accuracy is second only to chest straps and has a ton of very useful features. It is pretty much the best as far as integration, a “health watch” and haptics.
Their phones and laptops have some beautiful hardware design too.
Their business side just sucks donkey cock is all. But google is just as bad as Apple so potato potahto. Nobody should fanboy when every choice is shit lol
Well that’s the point. Linux, Firefox, custom Android ROMs - they’re not corporate owned proprietary software, they’re FOSS. And they’re what you should use.
Depends, if you mean for the average user then it’s good, but still overpriced as hell, and you have to deal with the Apple philosophy of “we did the thinking for you, if you dislike our choices it’s not matter of preference, you’re just wrong” no matter what.
Enterprise use cases you might as well pitch your Apple products in the trash, they won’t work and you’ll spend more time figuring out which USB-C Thunderbolt to 10G SR optical fiber converter actually works than you will getting productivity done.
Now you’re getting it!
Begins whistling the start of a musical number
I’ve never understood why people gush over Linux as a windows replacement. Why yes having to manually search for drivers for every product known to man and not being able to run even a fraction of what is on steam sounds like a fantastic time!
You can run most games on Linux, you just have to enable proton, the steam deck uses a custom version of Linux by default, so at minimum anything marked as playable will work on Linux.
Also I never had to deal with drivers at all when setting up linux, but I’m not sure if that’s normal, I’ve only used Linux mint, which was pretty easy to set up.
Sounds like something a shill would say
/s
Shit… busted.
I’m an Apple user who owns a Tesla and thinks both have decently good products.
Do I win Lemmy Tech Product Controversy Bingo?
Nope. I already ticked those boxes. My prize was a punch in the face from a random Lemmy zealot. Better luck next time.
Don’t you dare tell anybody here that you use Chrome and that you like it.
I use Chrome exclusively because Firefox is a broken resource hog.
Seriously? Have you missed the memes that Chrome will eat your memory? They were everywhere for a while.
No, I didn’t miss any of those lies.
The very next post I was reading:
https://old.lemmy.world/comment/7127012
(-15 at time of posting)
I’m shocked anyone thinks this. Lemmy might as well not exist.
https://www.demandsage.com/social-media-users
LOL, not even half a million users:
https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy
This is exactly what’s going to happen, the idea that corporate entities are even aware of us let alone investing resources into convincing the few hundred commenters on Lemmy of their opinions is ridiculous.
This will just turn into “oh, you have a dissenting opinion? You’re a corporate shill.”
Can’t wait, we’ll lose even more people and then I’ll end up just going to Tildes exclusively as the echo chamber becomes even more severe than it already is here.
At times it’s amusing when people get super excited about the “Reddit exodus” and how the Fediverse will end Reddit.
Seems like the really egregious behavior is leaving Reddit and moving here, which might have the effect of actually improving Reddit lol
I agree, everytime I see someone saying how improved this place is I just think “wtf are you seeing that I’m not?”
It feels like this place took the worst of reddit, not the best.
No, there’s definitely some infrequent advertising on lemmy. I block it (and frequently any community that contains it) or I’d point you at two or three examples I’ve seen in my time here.
You’ll know when lemmy gets big enough, because you’ll start seeing subtle Coca Cola placements in posts
this is a very naive guess…
Yeah I see this turned into a witch hunt for places where fruitful discussion may have otherwise happened.
It’s interesting to get an inside view and how some corporations do their BS, which usually requires discussing it which is often kicked off by some complaint or misunderstanding of how the world works.