LOL we monitor the stupidity of what people say about our companies 24/7... even send it to its own channel in our internal Slack chat.
It’s all pretty stupid.
If ya do it, make sure folks know they’re absolutely never allowed to engage and who is allowed to.
At least we haven’t done the really annoying thing the big companies do to be cute now where they hire some marketing moron to snark at customers on Twitter. That’s ultimately a loser strategy. Funny at times but not right.
Welcome to the Covid Internet. If I had to guess judging by our monitoring feeds, more than 20% are day drinking heavily.
The internet is a cess pool. Always has been. Nowadays you can hire 100 people cheap to write fake reviews of anything you want. Real cheap.
Obviously that’s not the case here but it’s estimated some 20% and in many cases as high as 50% of Amazon product reviews are fake. There’s a couple of websites that apply AI to any Amazon product you are interested in and help determine what percentage are of that “five star” rating and will show you the top guesses as to which are real humans bored enough to review paper towels.
Last weeks anti-trust stuff with the big tech names has been interesting to dig into. The testimony was the usual lies and boring scripts, but the emails released... wow. Pure evil. All of them.
Of course one good group of tech reviewers of that information nailed it and said two things...
All the hearings did was ...
- highlight that a bunch of old ass politicians have absolutely zero clue about the technology...
- showed that once again they’re far more interested in Facebook than the pure evil going on at Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc... because the FB model is supposedly human to human and affects elections.
They can’t even fathom what bad consequences occur from the other tech companies behaving badly. In fact, they’re probably personally invested heavily in all of them.
But their cluelessness is a good macro picture of the reaction you’re having as do many others. “Wait a second. Everyone everywhere has a platform to talk about everything and it might look bad!”
Can probably plunk down a couple thousand bucks and have a whole call center overseas make anyplace you want look great or horrid for way less than traditional and mostly useless advertising.
Just last week hackers inserted an article into a journal website and every major news outlet including AP and Reuters ran it. Which with most “local” news websites linked directly into one of those meant the systems themselves simply amplified it.
There’s really no way to put this genie back into the bottle. Your example of Google placing this place high in results is an excellent example of what’s really wrong with it. What Google does NOT show is far more nefarious and makes for interesting real articles... that you’ll find difficult to find via Google.
Haven’t seen any major online sites putting their own internal e-mails from those hearings out as front page stuff, now have you? LOL.
Google got messed with by Germany trying to make them pay to be a news aggregator to try to get people to go more directly to German news without the Google filters. Google simply said sure... and turned off aggregating all German news. The German news came begging within weeks to turn it back on.
Australia’s courts just upheld a similar thing. Be interesting to see if Google handles it the same way. One tech review place pontificated — if you’re Google you just agree and turn off ALL Google services to any country messing with them. Oh sorry. No more GMail. Your country doesn’t want us tracking or filtering or using you anymore. Bye.
The real threat of the internet isn’t the real people, even if hiding behind pseudonyms. It’s the fake stuff and the agendas in the largest entrenched companies that are nearly impossible to avoid.
A little “outpost” like here? No real big deal. Google amplifies it a bit for whatever their reasons are, but could make it all disappear equally as fast. All we have to do is tick them off.
Meanwhile the largest user takeover hack in Twitter history was a 17 year old from mom’s basement with a phishing e-mail to one of 1000 people (way too many) that had access to do what he wanted at Twitter. Hilarious if it didn’t expose just how little these giants pay any attention to risk. Piles of money and people and not a single clue what to do with them all.
Vatican. Phishing. Chinese government during negotiations with them. Email disguised as a condolence note about someone who really died.
An entire worldwide Comm system based on completely unsecured logins and unauthenticated users. It’s just... spiffy.
Amazon. Says law enforcement requests to know what people purchase is up three or more fold and it’s thousands and thousands daily. They provide answers 75% of the time. Also buried in that recent testimony.
When I worked in telecom. Permanent wiretapping. Automated judicial requests. Nobody wanted to pay to man that. Add hackers... and this was two decades ago.
All that to say at least here, many of us have actually met some of the others. In person. Might even recognize if one’s account seemed to start saying things way out of character. A few grumps complaining about a clearly bad product isn’t much of a big deal at all compared to the rest of the cesspool. This is the shallow end for sure.
And yes, people say nice things about the companies I work for, too. LOL. It’s mild entertainment to see where the internet stream of BS flows, watching that chat channel. But I still have it muted and barely look at it. For me it might be a canary in a coal mine if we somehow had an outage we weren’t monitoring for. “Is XYZ company down?” That’s about it really.