> 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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
> 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...
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows . . .: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life
https://www.amazon.com/When-Everyone-Knows-That-Knowledge/dp...
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.
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.
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.
Anyways, fascinating.
Dead Comment
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.
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.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/architecture/comments/199sjmn/thoug...
[1] https://medium.com/@zuktechnologies/why-modern-logos-all-loo...
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.
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).
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.
Some people just like to be mad about things.
Pennies, Daylight Savings Time, bike lanes, all kinds of inconsequential things get anger-seekers angry.
Deleted Comment
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.
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.
One can also think it's silly because... It's silly. The assumption that everyone who doesn't care must not be a customer is incorrect.
> imagine if Coca-Cola replaced their script logo with some generic sans-serif one.
I'm imagining it and find myself indifferent. 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...
Deleted Comment
(Just teasin')
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.
It bothered me because it was yet another instance of our built world becoming increasingly sterile and lifeless, like a rejection of humanity itself.
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.
The dislike for the new logo was one of the very rare things that people on both sides in the US seemed to agree on...
Deleted Comment
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10129173/
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.
Ahhh, I see most of us are swimming around the bottom of Maslow's heirarchy of needs.
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!
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?
:)
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.
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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.