Cracker Barrel Outrage Was Almost Certainly Driven by Bots, Researchers Say

https://gizmodo.com/cracker-barrel-outrage-was-almost-certainly-driven-by-bots-researchers-say-2000664221

by rbanffy • 10 months ago

106 177 10 months ago

Simulacra2• 10 months ago

I don't think this is good evidence for this, there was a lot of people vociferously and quite publicly concerned about Cracker Barrel. This bot excuse seems more like a ploy to downplay things.

j_maffe• 10 months ago

Why don't you think it's good evidence? Did you even read the report?

Simulacra2• 10 months ago

Hi, accusing someone and asking if they even read the report is actually against the rules. Go ahead check it out.

smt88• 10 months ago

"A lot of people" meaning bots.

No real-life person thought the logo was offensive before or that the logo became woke. It never passed the smell test.

Thorrez2• 10 months ago

Of course, that means 75% of those posts were from people. PeakMetrics notes that the earliest posts expressing dismay and frustration at Cracker Barrel’s decision to update its logo came from human-run accounts. Once the bot networks started to pick up on the trend, though, they blew the whole thing up. “Authentic voices articulated cultural dissatisfaction, which bots then amplified,” the report said.
PeakMetrics didn’t attribute the bot megaphone to any specific organization or state actor. Rather, it found, “The initiators are ideological activist accounts with prior culture-war posting histories, supported by botnets.”

skippyboxedhero• 10 months ago

The people who complain about bots never seem to identify bots posting things that they agree with.

"the bots" is the new false consciousness, it is a deliberate attempt to avoid engaging

its-summertime• 10 months ago

Or its easier to talk about pro party X bots, in a space that is pro party Y? and harder to talk about pro party Y bots in a space that is pro party Y.

gdulli• 10 months ago

I believe that black lives matter, but also thought it made a lot of sense that the movement and branding of it could have been bot-driven to engineer a culture war.

add-sub-mul-div• 10 months ago

I think the implication is that the bots bootstrapped the drama which created real offense from real people. That's why the bots are effective, because the audience is predictably easy to rile up once one of two sides is labeled as "woke".

api3• 10 months ago

I hated the new logo, but I don’t get how it was a “woke” thing or had anything to do with left/right politics. It seemed to me like a “sterile flat millennial-modernist design fatigue” thing. I’m very sick of flat designs and everything trying to look like the Apple Store.

I could buy that the politicizing was bot and troll driven.

q3k3• 10 months ago

I think some people are convinced that everything they don't like about society (in this case, companies coming up with "sterile" logos) is Woke and generally part of The Culture War.

As they say, the internet makes you stupid.

yostrovs• 10 months ago

It's not people that are "convinced". It's the bots.

mapontosevenths3• 10 months ago

the internet makes you stupid.

Fifty percent of people were already of below average intelligence, and the average has been decreasing for years.

Based on the invalid premise that the most commonly held belief is the correct one the internet has now given those idiots super charged megaphones.

Nasrudith• 10 months ago

I think it is defined backwards. They aren't convined that "woke" isn't everything that they don't like. They define "woke" is whatever you don't like. Mixed in with bigotry and conspiratorial logic attributing the cause, of course.

pwython2• 10 months ago

The logo has an old, southern white man, which some would call a "cracker" as a sort of white slur. That term originally comes from someone being a "whip-cracker." I'll let you fill in the blanks.

antonymoose2• 10 months ago

Insofar as I’m aware the Cracker term does indeed involve whips, but rather than whipping slaves, it was Florida Crackers driving cattle.

However, as relates to the business, I believe it’s meant to invoke a literal barrel of crackers an old timey good Ol’ fashioned country store?

api3• 10 months ago

Cracker Barrel is a nostalgic homage to the old country store, which often featured a barrel of crackers as in actual crackers and sometimes a block of cheese. You could cut a piece of cheese and put it on a cracker. Cue “people don’t know this but you can just take the crackers! I have one thousand crackers!” meme.

This was also a feature in some bars in the Midwest and South. I doubt the idea of a communal cheese block has survived into modern times, certainly not post pandemic, but I remember stopping into a pub as a kid in Ohio and seeing one and yes I did help myself and am still alive. That block of cheese had to have been one foot by one foot at least.

lyu072822• 10 months ago

But they kept the word "Cracker" in the logo! That's why it was so confusing. Was the outrage about them keeping the word? But then they changed the logo back to its original that also had the word? It just makes zero sense. That's why it seems plausible that it might have been inauthentic, even right-wing people are still capable of basic logical reasoning.

Perhaps it was literally the result of an algorithm, pattern matching the word "cracker"? Like there was a idiotic controversy of Hasan saying the word awhile back, so the algorithms may have learned that. Perhaps a bunch of right-wing people all of a sudden got the name change announcement recommended in their feeds because of the keyword and it just spread from there. I think that is the most likely actually.

perks_12• 10 months ago

100 %.I absolutely did not get the political view. Some people made the female CEO out to be the devil.

The logo is very corporate, some might say soulless now, but I get it; it's a first step to modernize the brand.

Thorrez2• 10 months ago

The logo change was rolled back.

cj• 10 months ago

because apparently, one of the demands of leftist extremists is conforming to sans-serif supremacy.

I think we can unanimously agree that serif fonts are an existential threat to civilization.

I really hope it was bots that drove the outrage. If it wasn’t, I don’t know what to say.

It’s a logo.

marginalia_nu7• 10 months ago

Seems like a plausible strategy to try to associate existing outrage with the cause the bot operator is trying to advance.

Interesting. I do remember encountering these types of shitstorms and being confused why on earth it's being turned into a debate about capitalism or immigrants or whatever.

antonymoose2• 10 months ago

I would assume the association with “woke” comes from prior instances of Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben, the butter lady all being sanitized such that any such sanitation is now associated with “woke politics.”

It’s now a trained knee-jerk response.

i_c_b• 10 months ago

I really try to avoid anything about politics here, but I recall there already being a controversy about this back in May of 2024. Specifically, there were public comments from the new CEO to investors about Cracker Barrel needing to change the demographics of the customers who ate at Cracker Barrel, and, depending on your point of view, some people interpreted the way the comments were said as suggesting that there was something morally suspect about how non-diverse, non-inclusive, old-and-white-and-straight the current dining demographics at Cracker Barrel were. There was a small right-of-center online public outrage du jour about it at the time. I'm not interested in litigating what the CEO said or how justified the outrage was, just noting precedent.

I can't find any of that discussion online, because it has been totally overshadowed by the more recent logo drama, but you can see a bloodless summary of the event here from the time: https://www.nrn.com/family-dining/cracker-barrel-unveils-str...

So there already was a pre-existing history here for people who are sympathetic to this point of view, particularly coming as it did shortly after some similar Bud Light and Target controversies.

scarface_742• 10 months ago

They did need to change the demographics. It is currently overwhelmingly “a bunch of old people who are going to die soon”. The same as the CBS network.

thrance3• 10 months ago

Any event, no matter how insignificant, is cause enough for the right to manufacture outrage against that ever ill-defined "wokeness" and point the finger at "the radical left".

cramcgrab• 10 months ago

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.

sigmoid102• 10 months ago

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.

ants_everywhere3• 10 months ago

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?

matwood• 10 months ago

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.

mouse_• 10 months ago

All sentiment will be driven by bots, who will be driven by whoever has the most money.

marginalia_nu7• 10 months ago

Don't discount state actors.

You can absolutely derail a democracy you are not fond of by stoking the flames on both extremes on the political spectrum.

tomrod• 10 months ago

Money is a place holder for power, which state actors currently have in their geographic monopolies

antris• 10 months ago

both extremes

Oh come on

mosura• 10 months ago

Given that everyone I disagree with on here is almost certainly a bot this fits.

q3k3• 10 months ago

I'm not a bot! You're the bot!

_9ptr2• 10 months ago

Oh yeah? Can you even recognize all these stop signs?

technothrasher2• 10 months ago

The scary part of your joke is that there is no way to tell from the post if you are, in fact, a bot or not.

syntaxing• 10 months ago

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.

crazygringo6• 10 months ago

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?

tdeck• 10 months ago

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.

crazygringo6• 10 months ago

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.

p1esk2• 10 months ago

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.

scythe• 10 months ago

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.

blurbleblurble3• 10 months ago

It makes people remember relatives who are no longer with us. Doesn't matter what the logo looks like.

Forgeties794• 10 months ago

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.

dave78• 10 months ago

Ahem: https://x.com/TheDemocrats/status/1958659652708716776

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...

marginalia_nu7• 10 months ago

And it means that over half weren't bots.

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.

throwaway667555• 10 months ago

The logo and interior design was s--t.

rconti2• 10 months ago

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.

rbanffy3• 10 months ago

Twitter API access was quite expensive last time I checked.

HardwareLust• 10 months ago

If you are literally angry your favorite corporately owned chain restaurant changed their logo and/or their decor, you got bigger problems.

techblueberry4• 10 months ago

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.

Anyways, fascinating.

blurbleblurble3• 10 months ago

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.

jjulius• 10 months ago

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.

rashkov• 10 months ago

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

techblueberry4• 10 months ago

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.

glenstein• 10 months ago

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.

KronisLV• 10 months ago

And it means that over half weren't bots.

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?

mhb• 10 months ago

Steven Pinker's new book:

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...

astine2• 10 months ago

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.

notmyjob• 10 months ago

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.

crazygringo6• 10 months ago

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?

kcplate4• 10 months ago

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.

techjamie• 10 months ago

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.

ants_everywhere3• 10 months ago

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.

grayhatter3• 10 months ago

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.

crazygringo6• 10 months ago

knowing nothing about this specfic domain

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.

like_any_other2• 10 months ago

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.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/architecture/comments/199sjmn/thoug...

[1] https://medium.com/@zuktechnologies/why-modern-logos-all-loo...

UncleMeat2• 10 months ago

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.

blurbleblurble3• 10 months ago

^ Found the bot!

(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.

pcdoodle• 10 months ago

It's also very likely that bots attach to spreading memes to gain visibility however that helps, IDK but then again banner ads were a thing.

intended2• 10 months ago

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.

kcplate4• 10 months ago

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.

kcplate4• 10 months ago

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.

rconti2• 10 months ago

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.

UncleMeat2• 10 months ago

It is a step further than that.

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.

jmull• 10 months ago

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.)

Eddy_Viscosity2• 10 months ago

the outrage was largely manufactured

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.

JohnFen2• 10 months ago

I've never been to a Cracker Barrel so it has no personal meaning to me, but I was bothered by the logo change anyway. Bothered, not enraged.

It bothered me because it was yet another instance of our built world becoming increasingly sterile and lifeless, like a rejection of humanity itself.

SAI_Peregrinus• 10 months ago

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.

jsbisviewtiful• 10 months ago

Don't you think the outrage would be real?

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).

Volundr2• 10 months ago

If you think it's silly because it's not a restaurant you go to

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?

prewett• 10 months ago

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...

reaperducer• 10 months ago

they were pissed off about the similar redesign of the interiors from homey personality to generic bland gray.

Some people just like to be mad about things.

Pennies, Daylight Savings Time, bike lanes, all kinds of inconsequential things get anger-seekers angry.

josephcsible• 10 months ago

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.

jfengel2• 10 months ago

Sincere question: was there any actual outrage about it?

I try to avoid the news as much as possible but a little about this slopped over my barriers. What I saw was pushback against the pushback, but none of the actual "oh no new logo is woke".

I assume there must have been some, since Cracker Barrel did change course. Still, I can't tell how upset anyone actually was, and how much was just outrage about outrage.

astine2• 10 months ago

I definitely saw some. It came from people who were in that culture war space where they interpret every trend as being part of a big left-wing plot to impose their values on everybody else.

crims0n• 10 months ago

In my vague recollection, there was some legitimate outrage. The logo was just what people rallied behind, people were really upset that they planned to remodel the whole restaurant/store with some generic corporate slop. The “woke” comments came after from the usual crowd.

If you have ever been in a Cracker Barrel, it has a very distinct feel of soulful agrarian Americana. I suspect most people used the fight as a proxy for preserving that part of our culture, which is getting more rare/unknown in modern America.

jfengel2• 10 months ago

I find it kind of ironic that a chain restaurant is people's idea of authentic America. Which kinda makes it perfect, I guess.

abxyz• 10 months ago

Except this is a hot button issue. Everyone has an opinion on brands ruining their iconic logos. Nobody cares about cracker barrel specifically, they care about what the change represents. Real people love dumb low stakes drama, that has been true before social media and will be true long after it. Real people spent weeks all consumed by a cheating CEO.

Almost all supposed outrage marketing is just marketing teams making terrible decisions because they’re people and people make terrible decisions.

Ekaros• 10 months ago

People don't care about single specific change. But they notice and are annoyed when it becomes a trend and half of the market is turning to generic boring sameness. So they latch on to the current culprit.

I think people in general value identity of the brands more than many brands themselves do. And the change is in some ways attack to them, not to the brand.

shaftoe• 10 months ago

While bots are possible, another confounding factor is that the most prolific social media posters are strongly correlated with psychiatric disorders.

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.

JKCalhoun2• 10 months ago

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.

laughingcurve• 10 months ago

It’s the base because it’s the most important; not the least “erudite”.

lambdaone• 10 months ago

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.

orwin3• 10 months ago

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.

Theodores• 10 months ago

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!

ants_everywhere3• 10 months ago

Gone are the days when real humans needed to own newspapers and spend a lifetime writing to manufacture outrage.

lyu072822• 10 months ago

Has anyone dived more deeper into this, how do they determine if it is a bot or not? It seems like a non-trivial problem to me, on Reddit there is the BotBouncer [1] but that's all seemingly based on user-flagging.

I couldn't find any real sources for it besides [2] but its not even mentioning bots, did Gizmodo make it up? Why don't they link their sources ffs!

Like people constantly allege botting or brigarding for things they don't like, and even if it wasn't a machine it can still be inauthentic. The methodology seems really important to explain in detail otherwise this is all just vibes and junk science.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/BotBouncer/ Github: https://github.com/fsvreddit/bot-bouncer

[2] https://www.peakmetrics.com/insights/the-politics-of-the-cra...

Mistletoe• 10 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency

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?

jijijijij2• 10 months ago

Bring people together IRL.

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.

IAmGraydon• 10 months ago

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.

waltbosz• 10 months ago

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.

poopiokaka• 10 months ago

This just reads like PeakMetrics trying to promote their closed source “bot detection” algorithm. Let’s say that algorithm doesn’t work?

FrustratedMonky• 10 months ago

I'm sure a lot of people on HN are very aware of AI, bots, manipulation.

But I have to say, it is getting harder to tell. If you think the AI slop is the only AI content, you are missing all the AI content that is good and nobody is noticing.

Its just that AI tools have become so wide spread that a lot of people are generating low quality slop. That is hiding the realistic slop.

dgfitz• 10 months ago

My naive thought here would be: who made money off the outrage?

iambateman• 10 months ago

I feel bad for the brand team at CB. Their logo is perfect for a printed menu and basically nothing else.

The only reason we recognize it on the highway is because we’ve seen it a million times. But it’s actually a low-contrast yellow-brown blob.

On mobile, it’s bad. It doesn’t feel right on social media. It doesn’t fit in a website header. It’s hard to make black-and-white.

I’m sure the team who put together the new mark were attempting to be faithful to the classic sense of Cracker Barrel while making a mark that’s a lot more flexible - and it was.

xnx• 10 months ago

Stupid press release "research" by PeakMetrics that Gizmodo mindlessly reposts. Maybe 50% of all outrage is bots.

NelsonMinar• 10 months ago

There's an article with more details here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/bot-networks-are-helping-drag-c...

daft_pink• 10 months ago

I would really like to see a comparison of how many bots started with the cracker barrel news story vs other news stories.

Personally, I find most of the crap on the news to be utterly meaningless and I have no idea why they talk about it and just assume its because all content creators need content to fill their 24 hour news channel, huge newspaper, consistent YouTube or social media posting schedule, etc.

That’s why the original daily show was so great, because it made fun of the lengths that the media goes to to fill their schedule.

zelias• 10 months ago

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.

daemoens• 10 months ago

It was mostly children. Every child is on the internet and uses the same social medias adults use.

water-data-dude• 10 months ago

The thing that would get me to actually go to Cracker Barrel would be if they brought back rosin potatoes. It's a weird method of cooking potatoes where you throw them in a CAULDRON OF BOILING ROSIN, and apparently it's quite good.

Idk, I read about them and I'm super curious now - but it's not like you can go to the store, grab a cauldron of rosin, and do them at home.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41991352

ClearDay• 10 months ago

For me, the tone of this article is off-putting. "Doesn't that make more sense than ..." "Did something feel…off ..."? " A little ironic, given ..." This signals that what I'm reading is not journalism, and therefore nothing in the article is reliable or credible.

All that aside: What would really be helpful: some recommendations as to bloggers or other sources in this field whom people here find reliable and credible.

pogue• 10 months ago

Out of curiosity as to how PeakMetrics was getting access to Twitter's APIs after all the talk of Elon Musk turning off the tap & making it prohibitively expensive to even pull data off them, I wanted to see how they were doing it.

But, I stumbled onto a different rabbit hole. On their website, PeakMetrics has an article about the Cracker Barrel logo debacle and in it, they don't use the term 'bot' once.

So, is Gizmodo framing this completely wrong? Did the article PeakMetrics put up change after Gizmodo put up their article? What's going on here?

https://www.peakmetrics.com/insights/the-politics-of-the-cra...

Cracker Barrel Outrage Was Almost Certainly Driven by Bots, Researchers Say

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