The entire stunt appeals to people's sense of moral outrage over businesses buying influence in the form of political donations. The reason people find it morally outrageous is because it corrupts the political process: politicians are supposed to represent their constituents, not the whims of the highest corporate bidder. Politicians who engage in this kind of quid pro quo behavior put selfish gain ahead of the good of the community.
Which is why I found it particularly galling that the PR firm relied on people's moral outrage about paying for influence to peddle their message ("tell them you like our initiative and are TIRED of politicians taking legal bribes") -- while doing exactly the same thing: paying for influence, in the form of purchased Reddit upvotes, which corrupts the upvote process and puts selfish gain ahead of the good of the Reddit community.
Normally, when PR firms use "hacking" to describe their techniques, they're talking about novel approaches to getting coverage, sort of like how "life hacks" are novel solutions to life's problems. But in this case, the firm is using "hacking" very literally -- infiltrating and taking control of a system by illicit means. They are black hats, and we should view them not only as morally bankrupt but also very dangerous.
I'm expecting that any day now they'll run a follow-up post, "How we hacked the U.S. media to help an anonymous powerful Russian client sway the presidential election."
Almost every modern campaign takes advantage of our hairpin
tendency to get outraged. Hell, this entire thread is people getting outraged about "cheating" using millenia-old social tendencies.
The solution isn't getting outraged about outrage. It's designing systems that compensate for this tendency. Unfortunately, that often means slowing down sensitive discourse.
I think a good solution would be to get up early in the morning, assess what you'd like to influence or draw attention away from, and then craft a message that takes advantage of this tendency.
I think the way to deal with both justified and unjustified outrage is to just face it. Discourse that excludes any sort of indignation or deep love isn't more sensitive than one that includes such things.
Sometimes anger, sadness and other emotions are simply strong signals that something is wrong and needs to be changed. Changing the emotion isn't useful in cases where it's the situation that is at fault, it's what the abuser would like to see though. If the outrage led to these firms being eradicated from the face of the Earth, it would wrap to a celebration real quick. Why not push for that?
Just because there's a whole lot of huffing and puffing going on, too, just because there's a lot of emotions "produced" if you will, out of thin air and with no grounding and purpose, doesn't mean you can throw it all together and judge it by the "hype".
Normal people have emotions. Normal intelligent people have emotions and can hold their own in discourse. People without a connection to their core want it to be solely about some supposedly objective and external set of rules, but that's like computing very nice colorful patterns on a computer without a monitor connected. Getting more RAM or a faster CPU is not the upgrade you need in that case.
Friedrich Nietzsche saw this a long, long time ago.. or maybe he didn't, what do I know what he's talking about, but I recognize the timid people walking carefully to protect something that they already lost by doing that erry day. They're so protective of what they lost that they won't even lift the lid.
> "I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. I say unto you: you still have chaos in yourselves.
> Alas, the time is coming when man will no longer give birth to a star. Alas, the time of the most despicable man is coming, he that is no longer able to despise himself. Behold, I show you the last man.
> 'What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?' thus asks the last man, and blinks.
> The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. His race is as ineradicable as the flea; the last man lives longest.
> 'We have invented happiness,'say the last men, and they blink. They have left the regions where it was hard to live, for one needs warmth. One still loves one's neighbor and rubs against him, for one needs warmth...
> One still works, for work is a form of entertainment. But one is careful lest the entertainment be too harrowing. One no longer becomes poor or rich: both require too much exertion. Who still wants to rule? Who obey? Both require too much exertion.
> No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.
> 'Formerly, all the world was mad,' say the most refined, and they blink...
> One has one's little pleasure for the day and one's little pleasure for the night: but one has a regard for health.
> 'We have invented happiness,' say the last men, and they blink."
You left out the fact that the proposed legislation was fake too. This whole thing was simply to draw attention to a politician that nobody knew. It's scummy to the core, but the dumbest thing they did was write a post about how they did it. That kinda goes against what their client wanted and probably against their own best interest as well.
Sometimes you have to operate in the system that exists. The way reddit is setup allows companies to blast their Coke ads and Bill Gates PR pieces to the frontpage. A campaign trying to limit a money for influence exchange in one context that uses a money for influence exchange in another is just doing the exact same thing their opposition will. This seems more like a case of "Don't hate the player, hate the game."
I'm digressing a little here, but I'd really like to comment on this point.
I have always detested the "don't hate the player, hate the game" ethos. It's a total shirking of responsibility that inadvertently praises being able to game any existing system regardless of the purpose for which the system exists in the first place -- that is if somebody has or discovers the opportunity to exploit a social contract of any scale for pure personal gain, then the onus isn't on the person to maintain any sort of ethical footing. It's on the system to have processes built in to deal with such a situation -- if it doesn't then it deserves to be exploited.
Maybe somebody would have some valuable input here, but I see no value in that sort of ethos. It tends to end in waste. Or at the very least, the returns are diminishing.
I guess my end point is I don't understand, and as such dislike, how nonchalantly the platitude is thrown around as if it's to just be accepted.
Agreed. To put on my white hat for a moment, vulnerabilities in a system should be documented and publicized so that they can be fixed. Exploiting those vulnerabilities for personal gain (to the detriment of society) is immoral, and in many cases, illegal.
And what do you do when the creator is not fixing the system? Astroturfed ads and PR pieces has been a problem on reddit for quite a while with no fix in sight.
If it just kept happening I think I might take a screwdriver and show it him at the next cookout. Maybe complain that his inaction was bringing bad characters to the neighborhood. Now that's obviously not the intention of this PR piece but it is the effect so I don't really see any issue.
Agreed, the saying to me comes across as a cheap way to try and absolve oneself of any personal (moral/ethical/etc)responsibility as if the mere presence of flaws in a system necessarily means they're not responsible for their own actions. A borderline childish approach to refining like reasoning in my opinion.
I agree with your sentiment, though I do think there are situations where this saying applies. You have to look at how much pressure the overall system puts on the participants.
It's hard for me to tell a specific rule for that; it's more a case of "I'll know it when I see it". One rule of thumb I seem to follow is whether the behaviour is more about explicitly seeking gains, or avoiding expensive loss. Like I described in another comment, there's a meaningful difference between a typical person doing bad things to keep their only job (jobs are hard to come by and vital to survival), vs. an entrepreneur who choses to profit from hurting other people, even though there are alternative strategies of making money.
I see what you're saying (regarding your other comment). In those cases I think the platitude is more closely "Don't shoot the messenger" as it's not their motive.
The saying in question I've always taken to be one where the 'player' is the motivated party, not merely to prevent loss but to distinctly gain. Rather not the employee just trying to keep their job, but the employee playing shady politics to slither their way to the top of the heap and the largest possible portion of the take -- those who see what are team efforts as zero sum games where the teams are `I vs. Everybody else`.
So while we're sorting out the rhetoric, I agree with your sentiment as well -- and it certainly needed to be said that I wouldn't condemn somebody in such a situation. Of course I generally see morality as a gradient.
> I have always detested the "don't hate the player, hate the game" ethos. It's a total shirking of responsibility that inadvertently praises being able to game any existing system regardless of the purpose for which the system exists in the first place
Hm, I've always taken that phrase to mean, "don't be prejudiced against a whole person: people are complex and you can probably find something to agree on with anyone."
So, I often try to say I don't like certain a thing about a person rather than saying I hate them. Hating everything about a person just feels a bit too simple and wrong. Perhaps that is too PC for these days, but, that's how I take it. Even Hitler had a mom- that sort of thing.
I don't think it's too PC for these days and I actually strive to always have the same approach - never hating people, but instead hating particular aspects / behaviours.
That said, I always seen the "don't hate the player, hate the game" saying the way GP does - i.e. shifting moral responsibility away from participants. IMO it does make sense in some cases, but does not in others. I see it as a spectrum of pressure put on individuals.
For instance, I wouldn't blame a customer service employee who lies to me because their boss ordered her to, and she will lose her job if she doesn't. For most of the population, losing a job is as close to life-threatening situation as you can get without an actual medical condition. OTOH, I will blame the boss who ordered lying to people. The boss has many more ways to choose from, and telling employees to lie to people shows preference for profitting by fucking other people over.
>It's a total shirking of responsibility that inadvertently praises being able to game any existing system regardless of the purpose for which the system exists in the first place
I disagree. It is simply an acknowledgement that the system has failed the purpose for which it exists. When that system fails, attacking the people who found the flaw isn't a viable long term solution. The only real solution is to fix the system that failed in the first place.
I have yet to encounter a system that doesn't have some dramatic set of failures. I also have yet to encounter a system whose failures were not made dramatically more painful by 'players'.
The intention is encoded in the terminology. Sometimes it's not a game.
Instead of up votes, I prefer Forum style threads. New replies = bump to top. If those replies are spammy or not contributing, moderation can flag/ban those accounts.
>Which is why I found it particularly galling that the PR firm relied on people's moral outrage [...] while doing exactly the same thing [...] which corrupts the upvote process and puts selfish gain ahead of the good of the Reddit community.
I (truly) mean no disrespect, but surely you see the irony of succumbing to moral outrage over Reddit upvotes? Surely you also see the absurdity of comparing Reddit upvotes to democratic elections.
This tendency to turn everything into a scandal is partly responsible for the very thing you're decrying.
Is there really a qualitative difference? The abomination that is r/the_donald certainly had some effect on the election's outcome, and reddit is somewhere in the top-10 sites worldwide.
It's hard to figure out the exact ratio for the conversion of upvotes to realvotes, but as long as it's positive, buying upvotes is just a roundabout way to buying votes.
Reddit is not a democracy, it's a private forum for discussion. Confusing this with a media outlet or a public forum (to say nothing of a democracy!) is as patently insane as confusing an infomercial with a scientific paper.
Feeding into the outrage only makes the beast stronger. Just roll your eyes and focus on the things that matter, like democracies.
> Surely you also see the absurdity of comparing Reddit upvotes to democratic elections.
He may, but I don't. American elections are decided by very thin margins, and I think even small streams of influence can have outsized outcomes. Swiftboating and Rathergate come to mind. I specifically think the rise of /r/The_Donald, just before the election, which carpet-bombed the ever-living daylights out of the front page, had a non-inconsequential effect on the vote. It's why Reddit changed their long-standing front-page algorithm. I'm truly surprised they didn't do so the month before the election. Utterly astonished, actually.
Which is why I found it particularly galling that the PR firm relied on people's moral outrage about paying for influence to peddle their message ("tell them you like our initiative and are TIRED of politicians taking legal bribes") -- while doing exactly the same thing: paying for influence, in the form of purchased Reddit upvotes, which corrupts the upvote process and puts selfish gain ahead of the good of the Reddit community.
Normally, when PR firms use "hacking" to describe their techniques, they're talking about novel approaches to getting coverage, sort of like how "life hacks" are novel solutions to life's problems. But in this case, the firm is using "hacking" very literally -- infiltrating and taking control of a system by illicit means. They are black hats, and we should view them not only as morally bankrupt but also very dangerous.
I'm expecting that any day now they'll run a follow-up post, "How we hacked the U.S. media to help an anonymous powerful Russian client sway the presidential election."