Anybody remember that? How damaging were those threads to Ford, I wonder. Hurt executive pride the most?
If you also want 'alledged assholery' on that list, the list will just turn into a list of CEOs, due to false reports.
But if you’re gonna hate someone it’s good if you have a real reason to do so instead of bullshit and rumors.
Are you sure they're false?
now they want the cash up front, and with sizable markups to CYA.
a reasonable person would try to unfuck that perception; instead Trump double-down on the grift
Trump has always preferred dragging out a court battle to actually signing a small check for services rendered, and outright brags about it. He explicitly believes stiffing your contractors is what "Good business" means. Because he is a selfish child and getting stuff for free is his worldview.
But utter morons still line up to get shafted. I just don't understand.
I couldn't get a car loan because I have no credit history even though I had enough cash in the bank to buy the car yet people will still line up to suck the toe of someone with a known history of successfully screwing all their business partners.
Same with how his administration is full of people who don't recognize he will happily throw them under the bus for any reason even though that's all he has done for the past decade.
There is just a shocking inability for the common person to connect people to their history in the USA. The guy who started a trade war and caused prices to increase was voted in because prices were too high.
The math don't math.
Um, really? If I were to look at your comment history, what would I see?
EDIT: ok, yeah, I actually checked. The threads on page 1 include: 1) this one, 2) "National sales tax would be significantly better than income tax.", 3) "Meta has made more positive contributions to society and the world than every HN commenter combined". Can you feel the left leaning?
they can drive uber, clean toilets, work at a starbucks, etc
There is Glassdoor etc though for people who want to have their say; that all these platforms will be gamed and manipulated is a given.
Now of course within the rules of our society everyone should get a fair process. But these people are the ones who ignore and bend the rules the most and even have them rewritten. At some point when you play a game and you constantly have the other guy break the rules and bribe the referee to make ever more elaborate exceptions for them, at some point you just have to cancel the game and ensure it is never again played with that person on the field. They can watch from the sideline, but playing? Nope.
Now this should not target the occasional ethically neutral or even ethically responsible CEO, but I am afraid by that point it will be hard to have people see that difference anymore. It will come crashing down one way or another.
> At first, Underwood recalls, he was confused and hurt. “We were trying to figure out what the hell’s going on,” he tells me when I visit his offices in Camarillo, Calif., in December. “Because we were really vulnerable, both in the percentage of our business that he commanded—and I guess our belief that we were going to have a long-term relationship.” But he soon became convinced, Underwood tells me, that Tran’s intentions were bad, and had been for some time. “Basically, he really was out to destroy me,” he says. “He didn’t give a damn about me or our family or all that we’d done together.”
> Over at Huy Fong, feelings were similarly raw. Tran felt betrayed, and blindsided by accusations that he had been underhanded. For most of three decades, he had remained loyal to Underwood as his only pepper producer, and each year he had handed over millions on the promise of a harvest, a gesture that he saw as an act of faith. Now all that trust had collapsed in a petty argument over money.
> Tran has come to believe that Underwood was trying to drive him to bankruptcy, then steal his sauce business. “I helped him because he grew chili for me,” he says. “He made money, he owned land. But it is not enough. He wanted to take over my business.” It felt like being “stabbed in the back,” adds Donna Lam, Tran’s sister-in-law and executive operations officer.
* https://archive.is/https://fortune.com/2024/01/30/sriracha-s...
> When Roberts arrived, Tran told him that he was forming a new company. Lam was going to operate the company. Tran told Roberts that Roberts would be working for the new company.
> When Roberts declined the job offer, Tran was not happy. Tran told Roberts that Underwood would have to deliver peppers for $500 per ton to compete with Chinese pepper mash that sold for $300 per ton. [...] Underwood was suddenly facing imminent catastrophic financial consequences. It could not grow peppers for $500 a ton. Its costs averaged $610 a ton. [...] Tran refused to provide Underwood with prepayments needed to finance the crop. Tran also insisted that Underwood contract with Chilico rather than Huy Fong.
OK, 8 days after agreeing on contract (!), the Huy Fong man tried to hire away Underwood's COO (Roberts), pushes hard for price below cost, refuses to provide money for planting, and tries to offload responsibility to a shell company. This sounds about as evil as it gets, and Underwood was right to refuse.
And what does the journalist say about this? "He wanted to take over my business"? "It felt like being "stabbed in the back""? I am sorry, I think that story author was fed some BS by Tran, and did not bother to verify it.
(Alternatively, maybe Tran has a explanation that makes sense for him... I'd like to hear the thoughts of someone who walks back on contract few days after it's made, and how they justify it to themselves - but sadly that fortune story does not have this)
[0] https://cases.justia.com/california/court-of-appeal/2021-b30...
The story I heard at the time was heavily positive, talking up the handshakes and relationship angle - suggesting the supplier had a bad harvest (drought) so the manufacturer had decided not to produce sauce rather than produce an inferior product.
Either rumours or more lies - and a good way to help the market forget the earlier flavour and be grateful for a sloppier solution to 'return'?
To me "Sriracha" is like "ketchup", it's a common name, not a brand.
Never heard of the names cited on Reddit.
We find this sauce everywhere here in France, Go-Tan being the most popular but there's also some smaller brands or products imported by "Tang Frères"
So it's not so much that "sriracha is like ketchup" but just that you don't know the origin of the sauce. It's like saying "we have a lot of cola products in France, what's so special about Coca Cola?"
Now, if you were Thai that would be different story, as "sriracha" means a completely different sauce (and place) in Thailand, and thus more "generic"
My understanding was/is that Huy Fong could have trademarked the name in the US back then, but they chose not to based on the founder's humiity and/or naivete.
Somewhere around 2003(?), Sriracha (still only Huy Fong) became an Internet sensation and then very quickly there were a dozen brands available, all calling themselves Sriracha (legally OK), and often imitating the Huy Fong trade dress in sort-of subtle ways. Huy Fong pushed back on some of those imitators.
And then Huy Fong stopped being able to produce marketable volumes ("bad harvest" was the explanation at the time), and then it started tasting far less good, but still less bad than the others. Presumably this corresponds to their supplier change, which gives me a new appreciation for terroir.
I have never found another Sriracha that is comparable to Y2K-era Huy Fong. Modern Huy Fong is just OK. I don't think it would have become an Internet sensation if the product was always thus. I've tried at least 25 other brands, searching for that taste. So much disappointment!
Related: why does HN always link to old.reddit?
I’m sure that in the Boston area we’d have had no trouble rustling up half a dozen or more.
We now live in Vermont. The options are pretty much limited to Huy Fong. Reese makes a vastly inferior product that doesn’t belong on the same shelf that can be found in some supermarkets. I know two Asian grocery stores (neither of which specializes on any particular country to my uninformed eye). They’re both small enough that they aren’t stocking hundreds of varieties of any single sauce.
So yeah. Credit to Huy Fong for capturing the mindshare with a quality product and getting available basically nationwide.
In urban areas its not necessarily too hard to find a variety of both. Going further out it'll get harder, so the brand presence of sriracha will often win for the spot of the sole Asian-style spicy sauce on the store shelf. Asian restaurants will typically have one or the other. I think a lot of Americans prefer sriracha partially because of the brand presence but also because of its smoother texture. Americans have tended to use a squeeze bottle for condiments more, having a jar to spoon things out just isn't quite as popular. Even things like relish, jelly, and sour cream these days are moving towards squeeze packages instead of jars and tubs.
I’m glad to hear there was a happy ending to the epic greediness and underhanded tactics of Huy Fong:
> Later, obviously, there's a lawsuit. Funnily enough, it wasn't actually Underwood who sued Huy Fong. It was Huy Fong who sued Underwood, seeking refunds for payments it had made earlier under their contracts. Underwood turned around and counterclaimed for breach of contract and fraud and a bunch of other shit. Underwood succeeded - there was a unanimous jury verdict in their favor - and got awarded about $13 million in compensatory damages, and another $10 million in punitive damages (these are only awarded where you've done something so outrageous that it's quasi-criminal; it's to deter other people from doing similar things).
I love that they had to buy chilis on the open market because their supplier fired the customer. Mostly because I’ve hardly ever gotten to fire a customer. Even when they really should have.
You're thinking of two different words.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/consistency
Sense 1: agreement of parts or features to one another or a whole
Sense 2: degree of firmness, density, or viscosity
Notably, sense 1 has a related adjective, consistent, and sense 2 does not.
Now HF sauce sucks, I wasn't paying attention to this and got a bottle after this whole debacle, and it's horrible.
Since company leadership has a fiduciary duty to shareholders, profit-maxxing for shareholders is the only moral thing to do /s.
It's weird that supposedly clever people cannot see beyond "this number goes down/up now" to "this is not immediately beneficial, but it keeps our company healthier in the long run".
It looks like this:
Then, can't remember where, I found out about Gochujang[0] and now it's my go-to fermented chili for everything
Hot sauce is pretty easy to make if you're inclined to go that route. You only need a scale and a blender, and some basic kitchen skills. You get to explore a lot and control for flavour / heat with adding stuff to the mix. Plenty of good content on yt you can get inspiration from.
It's also something you can make into a hobby. You can go as low effort as buying fresh peppers from a market when in season, or start growing yourself. Growing can be anywhere from extremely low maintenance (i.e. just water them from time to time and leave them on a window sill) or get into advanced stuff like pruning, soil ph, cross pollination and all that stuff. Some peppers are prolific growers, and you get fresh peppers, pepper paste, chili flakes and sauce from a potentially low effort hobby. And they make some nice gifts as well.
Ooooh anybody have a rec for the most idiot-proof hot thing to try to grow?
These things: https://seedsbeeblooming.com/shop/ols/products/rainbow-tabas...
Can't vouch for that merchant though
https://scottsmiraclegro.com/en-us/aerogarden.html
They cost a bit but they are idiot proof. The company also sells materials at an Okay price to grow whatever seeds you want, and you can use standard hydroponic supplements rather than their name brand ones.
I got a kit with Basil and it grew more Basil by accident than I could use. I was ripping off leaves and throwing them into store brand pasta sauce. I had a single plant in one of the $100 growers.
Their "salsa" kit is cherry tomatoes and Jalapenos so maybe it won't work so well on other peppers, but they have a Banana pepper kit. Pepper growers might have nutrient and growing recommendations to better manage flavor and spice profiles.
My preferences in cooking are like software: high level is fun (cooking dishes), low level is annoying (growing or producing ingredients).
I also like making cocktails. A brief try with homemade coffee licqueurs was disappointing - knowing a couple of good brands, I can buy and enjoy them, no hassle. Closest to preparing ingredients I do is occasionally doing batches of "super juice", where you squeeze a bunch of limes and add some conservatives and enhancers (and water), that increase the yield, flavor and shelf life by a lot. Then it's really practical to just use the juice like a normal ingredient, versus having the cytrus available having to squeeze them and having more stuff to clean.
Definitely wear gloves when chopping chillis!
Meanwhile Huy Fong rooster sauce went from a nice red hue to a weird red green puke hue. If it was that color at the start, I’m not sure I would have tried it. The taste seems to be the same though. Regardless, it’s hard to support a company that’s lost so much good will. They should have just increased prices just like everyone else
Best hot sauce ever
1. https://www.amazon.com/Pepper-Plant-Seasoning-11-oz/dp/B01LY...
“Red jalapeno, sugar, water, salt acetic acid, garlic, natural flavor, xanthan gum, sodium metabisulfite, and/or sodium bisulfite (sulfiting agent / preservative), potassium sorbate (preservative).”
I’ve had sriracha in the past and it’s disgustingly sweet. Apparently it’s 17% sugar!
Sure, you can skip sugar entirely if you want to. But then you're getting a different flavor entirely. Southeast Asian stuff is often sweet and spicy and gets that flavor through sugar. No way around it, unless you're using artificial sweeteners.
And I agree. I like many varieties of hot sauce, but sriracha is just too sweet for me.
It's the same reason I am picky about Thai restaurants. So many of them lean hard on the sugar. Not to my taste! I like a more balanced flavor.
I like the taste of peppers but most hot sauces taste more like vinegar or capsaicin than actual peppers. I think I'm sensitive to vinegar, and my spice tolerance is not always high.
I find Chili crisp to get me what I want.
There are far better hot sauces out there, available at your local Chinese, Pakistani, or Iranian supermarket.
Try it, it's fun!
https://successfulsoftware.net/2024/08/04/making-your-own-ho...
There is a place for simple hot sauces, because you don't want to add additional flavours. Sometimes all you want is straight up chilis.
More complex hot sauces might include dried shrimp, fermented soy, lemon grass, dried mushrooms, but those flavours might not be desirable in some dishes. And some dishes require specific hot sauces because they are an integral part of the flavour profile (Mapo tofu, Tom Yum).
I think the first time I tried it was about 15 years ago. Out to lunch at a bahn mi spot with coworkers and all the guys were drenching their sandwiches in the stuff. I think in that context it’s overpowering and awful and ruins a good sandwich. Preferentially, I love the Three Mountain Yellow Sriracha as a condiment for a lettuce wrap or a sandwich.
Where I feel red sriracha is a staple item is making sauces and marinades. Whenever I’m making vaguely Thai peanut sauces at home for a pad Thai or a satay it’s the #2 ingredient after the peanut butter itself and often at a 1:1 ratio. Combined with all the other ingredients it mellows out the harsh flavors and makes a wonderful layered sauce.
There are definitely better things out there.
What does "ketchup" mean to you? I don't see how you can call it "ketchup" when it contains no tomatoes.
In Indonesia the same word ["kecap"] would mean "soy sauce", but that is obviously also a completely unrelated product.
I will find out for you.
Nope, also of garlic.
"I don't like $PopularThing" is always a boring take. Other people clearly like it if it's popular.
It is known since ancient times, De gustibus non est disputandum (1): Tastes differ, so it's pointless to dispute matters of taste as if there's a correct answer.
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_gustibus_non_est_disputandu...
For reference, de gustibus non est disputandum translates as "tastes shouldn't be discussed". Don't be confused by the etymological relationship to dispute.
https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext...
https://fablesofaesop.com/the-goose-with-the-golden-eggs.htm...
Using Xantan gum is a sign of ultra processing. It's used to change mouth-feel, which is basically lying to the body.
I always recommend people to read / listen to https://www.amazon.com/Ultra-Processed-People-Science-Behind... to understand these ingredients and what they do to our bodies.
In this post, Underwood is obviously a virtuous, hard working victim and the sriracha guys are the villains. I don’t believe that there are good and bad companies and I firmly believe that there is some underlying reason for this situation.
The more power a person believes they have, the stupider they act.
Quoth wikipedia: "The jury unanimously ruled in favor of Underwood on the grounds of breach of contract and fraud."
https://www.reddit.com/search/?q=huy+fong
Each time it gets retold, the sriracha cartoon villain's mustache grows longer and more twirled.
Somehow, Underwood Ranches' competing product never gets failed to get mentioned in a top comment, along with all the places you can buy it, how much better/hotter it tastes, and how superior its ingredients are.
I've never seen something so obviously and clumsily astroturfed, yet be so effective. Their entire growth strategy is enemy positioning on social media. You gotta hand it to the COO (who according to the story he's crafted is the loyal and virtuous hero) as he's running circles around the incompetent and out-of-touch management at sriricha who likely have no idea what's going on.
It appears sheer spite and vengeance is what brought Underwood Ranches back from the brink of bankruptcy. Now that's a genuine American success story.
There’s also the slopification of the internet to consider. The human centipede style pass through of a story across platform after platform means the same story appears again and again and again. And that’s happening more and more as time goes on. One YouTube video that generates a few hundred thousand views can spawn hundreds of other videos, posts, tweets, podcasts… all across the internet.
Sometimes I play a game; before clicking to read comments I try to come up with what the conspiracies will be. This one was obvious (since I’m familiar with the story).
similar to https://x.com/JenMsft/status/1381640311357628420/photo/1 : corporations need to understand that people don't have conversations where they randomly recommend carbonated beverages to each other
[1] https://x.com/JarekLupinski/status/1303766512541589504
when you are in the business of making money off of this, and you know how it works, it's not hard to see it.
It's a dopamine hit. It's addicting. The medium of the internet seems to add to this where most interactions are conversationally broken, because a thread is a bunch of people airdropping thoughts and never really coming back to back up their arguments or admit something was wrong.
The brain wants things to be simple so rewards you for simple solutions that are "better" and totally ignores complexity and nuance and reality because those are energetically expensive things to pay attention to.
This comment is self demonstrating.
It’s much wider. This is why QAnon and contemporary fascism spread. People love a story.
The QAA podcast deep-dives explaining conspiratorial thinking. They started with QAnon and then expanded. The episodes on the Queen of Canada (Romana Didulo) were especially interesting. She’s a dangerous person and so are her followers. Sovereign citizens, too (though they’ve abandoned that term). Think Freemen in Montana in the 90s.
The #1 goal one needs to accomplish to render an environment safe for the execution of conspiratorial activity, is to inure the occupants of said environment to the possibility of conspiratorial action taking place. Apriori dismissal shuts down game theoretic behavioral modeling in the operational loop, rendering concerted acts of manipulation near invisible. It's why Hanlon's Razor is both a heuristic for organizational productivity and alignment, and one of the greatest foundational psyops of all time. Assuming benevolent intent of other actors makes it easier to get things done, but makes it nigh impossible to defend oneself against actual malicious intent. Geekdom is one of the few niches where most participants routinely value depth first vs. breadth first knowledge. Deep understanding of behavior, and the nature of motivated reasoning and modelling asymmetry of information with regards to intent quickly makes assumption of benevolent intent a realistically untenable posture to maintain unconditionally. In big business or contexts that tend toward near zero-sum anyway. Is it exhausting? Absolutely. Does it keep you safe from people? Hell yes. Does it make life fun? That depends on the general character of the people you're generally surrounded by I suppose.
It wouldn't surprise me if something similar is happening with social media and indeed a lot of the news is astroturfed to some extent, though I agree we shouldn't discount the extent to which people are willing to participate in this by reposting popular content for a quick ego/karma boost. And increasingly that reposting is done by bots.
There are a few competing products on my supermarket's shelf (FWIW, Underwood's is not among them), but only Underwood's gets mentioned in the post. Where there's smoke, there's fire.
They started making the hot sauce years after the main events referred to in the lawsuit.
Their socials are silent and the website is a godaddy landing page with just their logo.
I don't think these people are savvy submarine astroturfers.
I think you are underestimating the love of the original Sriracha.
Only reason I mention that is that is you're not really faking the grassroots part if you really do have a good origin story--you just got... lucky?
[0] https://cases.justia.com/california/court-of-appeal/2021-b30...
https://lacabaarodriguez.shop/news/127/2026-03-06-huy-fong-f...
And as you mentioned, that lawsuit has pretty convincing evidence of a multi-year plan to really screw the supplier in order to get even more fantastically wealthy. Amazing greed combined with profound stupidity about the difficulty of reliably sourcing 2 _thousand_ acres of ripe chilies. There's been a decade of rolling shortages.
You can spend your entire online life seeing ghosts of astroturfing in everything you read. Like, how do we know that Huy Fong didn't pay you to come here on HN to neg the Reddit story that makes them look bad? You're stuck trying to prove a negative: impossible.
There is a reason accusations of astroturfing are against the HN guidelines, and it's this: in the absence of evidence, anything opinionated could be astroturfing... or it could not. Which makes it completely useless as a heuristic. It feels like smart skepticism, but it does not actually add any substance to the conversation.
I think it's gotten a bit worse as the platform has grown since there's more reward, astroturfing gets more eyes and is more effective, posts in general can get more karma so more fake internet points.
Was active on Reddit a long time ago, there's a liminal band of popularity in which a service tends to offer the best experience. Enough interest to be good, not enough interest to make it shitty or incentivize abuse.
It's difficult to remain in that band particularly because at some point you have to actively fight growth, not sure HN is all that immune either. I think HN tries to stay in that band via it's archaic UI and somewhat intimidating culture.
Ha, I don't know your friends but in my experience that's like a textbook phrase people use to try to play off being duped when they're clued in
It's like people who only consume TV shows and movies, they know it's all fiction, but if you talk to them about how the world works, you realize that all their mental structures are based on Hollywood tropes.
This even tracks to reddit, where everyone knows it's bullshit and reddit is dumb, but their entire perception of the world is still reddit's dumb views anyway.
https://www.reddit.com/r/nothingeverhappens/
Upvotes cost nothing, and even if someone figures out the astroturfing, you just spend a dollar or two and bury them in downvotes.
One of my favorite tactics is just to use throwaway accounts to keep repeatedly asking variations of the same question "What x should I get for y?" and then consistently replying from my main shilling account with variations of "Hey, this gets posted ALL THE TIME but here is what I suggested previously and people seemed to like it ...". This way I can just keep recycling the same high-effort copy endlessly.
The reddit shills you spot are either lazy or idiots. There's no chance you'd ever suspect any of my biggest earning posts, simply because they're entirely consistent with the other content in the community and could have naturally achieved similar levels of upvotes had I just been lucky. But with bots I don't have to be lucky.
Due to the cyclical nature of posts and the exhausted moderators trying to mod all of them, it's quite effective for "organic" growth. Many companies use these methods to grow, because it's way cheaper than paying for ads and users online are simply too gullible to catch on. And even if they did, you can just delete the thread and make a new one later on.
It's the same strategy used in TikTok where the influencer subtly hints at the product rather than overtly talking about it (perhaps as one slide in a slideshow), and then when a commenter asks what they used, the influencer replies with the name of the product.
For example [0], there have been large scale astroturfing campaigns for things like games, posting large numbers of comments to influence users.
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1ot0nvg/game_dev_adm...
Conversely if Reddit astroturfing was actually valuable, "upvotes cost nothing" could not be true. Like, we know that Meta and Google ads are effective, and those cost something. Not because they're hard to do, but because everyone is trying to do them at once.
will it? who is occupying and competing in that space, in a business sense? and are they using reddit? if so, which subs and who are they targeted at?
the various build-a-PC subs are a great example -- they have ones for high end GPUs -- literally, r/gpu -- and others for more generic uses. you can shill all-day on r/buildapcsales and do well without having to battle on the more general buildapc
in a broader sense, building consensus is critical, and plenty of businesses or political entities are willing to take huge losses to completely corral public perception -- most notably the purchase of Paramount by everyone's least favorite villian Larry E
It's also likely that many businesses are simply too risk averse to engage in things like purchasing farmed reddit accounts and upvotes.
I’m sure it’s possible to make small amounts of money with Reddit bots, just like it’s possible to make small amounts of money with email spam, and posting AI slop to Facebook and X, and SMS scams.
The idea that major brands do this habitually, is what I’m objecting to.
I'm getting clients who are each spending a minimum of 500k USD pa on services.
There's a very wide variety of eyeballs you can reach on reddit. It's everything from people inserting impressively large items in their body to people trading eye-wateringly expensive jewelry from cult brands like Chrome Hearts and nerds discussing enterprise telco equipment and EDR platforms.
But sure, I don't think it scales.
>The idea that major brands do this habitually, is what I’m objecting to.
I doubt major brands do this habitually. There are countless smaller players who do.
People should probably be more aware that the social media they use is astroturfed to hell and back but marketing and advertising is far too demonized.
In another sense? Not really, because the one thing I've learned is that if the content couldn't work without the botted upvotes, it's not good worth posting.
The marketing posts I make are easily in top 1% of reddit content. That's not a hard bar to meet when you have more than an hour or two to spend on a single comment!
I take some supplements for health reasons and its pretty obvious in that space too. I remember one day one brand of a certain something (which came from a no-name company and over-priced compared to competitors) was near everywhere in comments. In fact, people just referred to the product by the brand name, not the actual chemical. Eventually people got wise to it, and you'd see a "hey this is astroturfing," but the comments remain and if you google or reddit search this supplement, the top results are people raving about this one specific brand still. This stuff works and I imagine it works very well because it keeps happening.
Its also especially bad in women's spaces because there's so many competing brands of fashion or makeup or whatever. Much of it using stealth advertising, relationships with influencers who won't disclose its a paid partnership, etc. A lot of makeup brands get big almost soley because of internet engagement, so there's a strong incentive to try.
You can see this happening in realtime almost. Suddenly this face cream or this mascara is big on reddit, with new-ish accounts raving about them. I've noticed lately that they've been buying old accounts and repurposing them. I've dug into people's posting histories (a mod can see this if youre on their sub even if private) and the account is 5 years old that went silent 3 years ago and now is suddenly back but this time its someone purporting to be a woman, when the previous posting history is very male-coded and even may call himself a man in comments. I don't think we fully appreciate how fake this all is and how little will there is to fight it. This is also done politically too, especially around election season, but is generally happening all the time.
I remember tracking this stuff for a while when Stellar Blade came out, which had some fair accusations of male gaze-y marketing and graphics. There was no shortage of "I'm a woman gamer/developer, and Stellar Blade is actually not sexist, its empowering," posts and comments on a popular women's gaming sub. It was really incredible to see this and again, a lot of these accounts were recently awakened accounts from someone who did not fit the profile. There is so much bot PR. I won't even go into the Depp-Heard case because its a huge topic, but wow, that was a great example of bots controlling the narrative almost entirely.
This is totally accessible for even the smallest businesses. If you already understand how sites like reddit work, literally all you need to do is google "buy reddit upvotes" to get started.
I might as well lie about being a uber driver, the barrier to entry is higher.
First, I want to be absolutely clear that I am in no way, shape or form affiliated with Underwood. I have no relationship whatsoever with them or any other hot sauce company, for that matter. I do not work in marketing at all - I am actually a disputes lawyer. I knew about this whole fiasco because I had read about/summarized this particular issue for my brother (a Sriracha fan) years ago when it first came to light, as he wanted to know what happened. The reason why I posted that writeup is because there was a viral post on the KitchenConfidential subreddit the day before about Huy Fong using green chili peppers due to supply issues, and I saw a bunch of comments that were all over the place with approx a dozen different narratives regarding what happened that weren't based in anything tangible. I wanted to write something to set the record straight.
Second, the details are drawn from the court case itself. They were not cut from whole cloth. Underwood had a unanimous jury verdict in their favor that decided that the facts I listed were what actually happened. What that means is that a group of (I believe 12, in this case) people sat down, heard testimony from both sides, looked at all the evidence, and found, to a man, that that was what happened. You can try to wriggle out of this as much as you want and deny it, which you appear to be doing by expressing some pretty strong skepticism about the whole thing, but we have court processes for a reason. Juries tend to be pretty good at fact-finding. Also, I would highlight that the jury awarded punitive damages - you do NOT get those unless the conduct on behalf of one side has been truly reprehensible, reprehensibility literally being a criterion for awarding punitive damages. The fact is, Huy Fong was held liable for fraud/breach of contract and had to pay damages accordingly. They appealed and got publicly eviscerated by the Court of Appeal. Those are the facts. I repackaged them into a more user-friendly, non-legalese story. You are entitled to have an opinion on those facts, but you are not entitled to just handwave them away.
Third, it is patently obvious why Underwood sriracha gets mentioned every time this is brought up. Huy Fong screwed Underwood - Underwood suffered quite a bit, but came back and launched a competing product. People generally want to support the underdog. It's that simple. People don't mention Flying Goose or whatever because Huy Fong didn't screw over Flying Goose. If they did, then they would.
That's basically what I wanted to communicate.
Do you think it's fabricated? You can read the exact same thing in the court judgement. It's barely any longer than the reddit comment.
Edit: at least on the web variant, it looks like they finally blocked that ability.
Isn't this what you're doing with the idea that the Sri Racha story is obviously meant to sell?
Because people have made posts on social media sites like HN in the past in an effort to change public perception of companies, right?