> 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?
That makes as much sense as saying someone has a parasocial relationship with a park, or a house, or a beach.
What a strange thing to say. You think there's something "parasocial" about memories of a place with your family? I think you may need to examine whether you're using that term correctly.
And, well, nothing was "ever yours to begin with". That doesn't stop people from acting collectively to try to preserve the things they like. Nor should it.
Your worldview seems strangely sterile and passive, like you don't seem to understand the very basic idea of emotional connection with shared places, or of trying to influence things you don't "own".
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Quite familiar, I have been on the technical side of marketing and advertising industry for over 30 years.
Also, I lived through the 1985 New Coke debacle and was one of the people that were pissed off at the change. I know why I reacted how I did and quite a few others around me. It wasn’t because we felt “America” change, it’s because the new product tasted like shit compared to the old one.
I didn’t want a “generic” tasting cola. Cracker Barrel fans didn’t want a generic feeling restaurant. Whatever bots did for the great Cracker Barrel crisis of 2025, they didn’t cause my 88 year old mother who goes to CB once a week to be pissed off that they changed “her restaurant to look like those stupid damned First Watch places”.
The fact that you're familiar with the Coke controversy proves the point. Before they were rare and memorable. Now it happens ever other week. Bots are intentionally driving division.
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.
Oh that is so not true for a shocking number of folks, sadly. There's a whole "political" angle these days revolving around "if the other side likes it, then it's automatically the worst thing to happen in the history of ever; we must oppose it at all costs, even if it harms us or destroys us to do so". The introduction of "AI" and "bots" has only served to multiply and magnify that behavior among those prone to it.
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."
> And for whatever reason I saw people trying to make it a culture war issue, accusing anyone who objected of being right-wing. Thankfully a number of prominent Democrats spoke up, too, because it was never about "woke" or whatever.
People who said it was about woke or whatever included a Republican member of Congress, a Trump campaign adviser, a prominent right wing pundit, and a prominent right wing activist recently added to Meta's AI advisory board.[1][2][3][4] Someone speaking for a right wing college said the new logo had the same energy as vandalism of a George Washington statue.[5] This list is far from complete.
I saw several comments which observed the attention given to this issue was dominated by right wing outrage. I saw none which implied no other objection was conceivable.
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.
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?
> 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?
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.
The outrage was started by Chris Rufo. He has spoken publicly and clearly about his strategy of ginning up DEI controversies and rallying far right online people to harass targeted businesses as a mechanism of making every business be extremely cautious about doing anything at all that could be considered DEI by right wing weirdos. In the past he amplified things like the Bud Light and Target harassment campaigns. By choosing something so incredibly anodyne as this logo update he signals to businesses that they need to not just refuse to acquiesce to left wing demands but that they need to a right wing movement that (like you mention) can fly into a rage whenever they see a woman in a position of power.
> 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.
That would make sense if the complaint was just "this is a bland redesign that removes the charm of the old logo." But a significant part of the complaint (amplified by major figures like Rufo) was that the redesign was woke.
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.
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.
Nobody gets angry about bike lanes in a vacuum. E.g., turning old unused railroad tracks into bike lanes is basically unanimously supported. The only time people get angry about bike lanes is when they're taking car lanes away from roads that already have too few.
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”
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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 can combat it by passing laws that don't make it so easy to create 1,000 identities on every social platform. In the grand scheme, it's not even a very complex problem to solve. Our lawmakers, however, are completely asleep at the wheel and the owners of these platforms are happy to facilitate foreign disinformation campaigns for the traffic they create.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.”
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.”
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?
reply