Re: On PR and 'community building'

On Thu, Feb 02, 2006 at 08:26:34AM +0900, Miles Bader wrote:
> 2006/2/1, Andrew Suffield <[email protected]>:
> > So I consider: how can you tell that a given person is *not* employed
> > by such a company?
> 
> Well in theory you can't, of course, but in practice, I think it's
> pretty hard to do a believable job without a lot of effort (humans are
> pretty good at detecting the sort of subtle inconsistencies that
> result from a half-assed job), and I don't know if they're really
> getting paid enough to put in that much work.

Well, that could kinda work, but - when I look at free software today,
I see an awful lot of half-arsed jobs being done and a lot of people
making excuses for that. So I don't think it would work very
often.

> Perhaps more damaging is the sort of suspicion and paranoia that may
> result from knowing there _could_ be astroturfers around...

Which is in itself an interesting problem: are false positives or
false negatives the worse result? I can't see any possible outcomes
here that aren't like the spam situation - no matter what you do,
you're screwed both ways as long as there are spammers.

It's a little worse (or, more developed) than astroturfing though -
that's just when people try to gain political capital by inventing a
fake 'grassroots' base that supports them. This is the active
subversion of existing communities. It's a difference in kind rather
than degree - but admittedly not a very big step.

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