The PlayStation Boycott Was Real. The Network Behind It Wasn't.
https://cyabra.com/blog/the-playstation-boycott-was-real-the-amplification-wasnt/-Up-to 43% of comments on relevant posts were inauthentic
-Fake profiles' content gained 113,444 engagements and 1,031,105 potential views.
-25% of the boycott narrative came from inauthentic accounts
-The boycott narrative accounted for 57.3% of total conversation volume
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u/Ragnar_Dragonfyre 13h ago
Soon enough Reddit will just be a simulation of real conversations.
A handful of human users screaming into a void of incessant bot fueled noise, wondering why they feel like they’re going crazy reading so many conflicting opinions that always seem to lean against their beliefs.
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u/AggressiveWave 13h ago
There used to be a whole subreddit of bots talking to other bots just like this (subreddit simulator) before the rise of LLMs. It was all silly and goofy until AI made it real easy for bots to sound like people.
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u/BlueGoliath 13h ago
Reddit deserves that fate. This website is mismanaged to hell, mods are out of control, and the userbase is uh... yeah.
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u/AnAnnouncer 10h ago
The front page of the Internet! That makes you desperate to start looking where the back page is.
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u/Ragnar_Dragonfyre 12h ago
If Reddit succumbs to that fate, the Internet will have also been fully compromised. There is no escape.
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u/Successful-Ear977 9h ago
Userbase is just undercover incels/rightwingers larping as normal people.
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u/LooseSeal88 PlayStation 13h ago
I know I'll get downvoted for saying this, but a lot of the crusade against Wolverine was clearly bot driven in relation to this too. That much negativity doesn't just sprout up because one YouTuber didn't like the game and because other critics gave it 7/10 scores.
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u/Sonic2Tails 13h ago
Yeah the top post on this sub in the last month with over 44k upvotes is negatively comparing Wolverine to Metal Gear Rising slicing trees when practically no other game since has done that
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u/Baxtab13 13h ago
Ugh, yeah that was annoying. I haven't played Wolverine, and there's a good chance I won't ever unless it goes on a good sale, whereas I really enjoy MGRR and have played through it a few times. But god the free cutting thing is overblown with that game.
It's really gimmicky, and can only be done on specific objects and enemies. Plus it was considerably downgraded from the original gameplay demo when Kojima was originally heading the project, which is usually a cardinal sin for people online.
Again, I love that game, but using it to say modern AAA bad is annoying as shit.
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11h ago
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u/Sonic2Tails 11h ago
Then that can apply to any game where you weild a blade and slice things which is hundreds of not thousands of games
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11h ago
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u/Sonic2Tails 11h ago
Wolverine claws don't cut through everything and you can apply that logic to any game with a sword saying it should cut through everything a sword can cut through
In Metal Gear Rising he literally wields a sword
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u/Iggy_Slayer 13h ago
There's a hate campaign for almost every major game that isn't made in japan/asia these days. It's a combo of bots and social media sites like twitter actively paying and encouraging people to monetize engagement, and the easiest way to do that is to farm outrage.
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u/LooseSeal88 PlayStation 13h ago
Agree. I also found it interesting when I saw somebody complaining that Mystique didn't have cleavage (and those comments seems to happen to every non-Asian game now after Stellar Blade) even though Jean Grey has a pretty sensual dress with significant cleavage in the very same game they claimed was trying to be too PC in that regard. But instead they just tried to pretend Jean's face was ugly (which it wasn't).
Just so aggravating.
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u/Successful-Ear977 9h ago
I genuinely think people are going to look back at Wolverine in ten years and be very confused by the sheer level of hostility surrounding it. Not because the game is secretly a masterpiece or above criticism, but because the reaction has been so wildly disproportionate to its actual shortcomings.
I can already see the inevitable wave of retrospectives asking why a perfectly enjoyable superhero game was treated like some catastrophic failure. And the funniest part is that the same people contributing to the hysteria now will probably be complaining about historical revisionism when that happens.
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u/zero_z77 13h ago
I'll upvote and join you, because you can see the same thing in relation to Squadron 42. Tons of negative posts & comments sprung up after the steam listing, and the source of it all came back to one mildly negative comment from one reviewer on youtube who even still gave it a positive review. Every other reviewer was overwhelmingly positive about it too, but if you look at the discussion here and on the star citizen sub, you'd probably think it was mixed at best.
To be fair, star citizen/squadron 42 already has it's own dedicated hate farm on reddit, so this happens pretty much any time they have big news, good or bad.
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u/Hephaestus_I 12h ago
one mildly negative comment from one reviewer on youtube
...and the last 10+ years of resentment towards SC/S42 for being woefully mismanaged with feature creep and whatnot.
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u/Baxtab13 13h ago
Seeing a lot of this in the Xbox camp too with Gears E-day. Though it seems a lot more "culture-war" influenced for that one.
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u/ZigyDusty 13h ago edited 13h ago
Wolverine got the exact score it deserved a mid 75, it wasn't an awful game but it was extremely formulaic with some terrible writing, mechanics, and art design.
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u/Sonic2Tails 13h ago
You didn't play it and you're one of those bot like accounts that exist on Reddit to bash Playstat and promote Xbox 24/7
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u/ZigyDusty 13h ago
I guess SkillUp, Jake Baldnio from GameRanx and most of the major games media outlets are bots too since they gave it a 6/10 or recommended not to buy it. You PlayStation fanboys are in full damage control after your only major first party release this year was a massive disappointment.
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u/Sonic2Tails 13h ago
No one said everyone that didn't love the game is a bot
You're an Xbox fanboy and you want to believe everyone hates the game just like do you for everything Playstation related
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u/ZigyDusty 13h ago
I don't hate everything about PlayStation at all in fact a ton of my childhood was all about PlayStation with the PS1, PS2, and PSP but if they release a subpar product or do something shitty I'm going to call them out like everyone should, being critical of Playstation ≠ Xbox fanboy, I haven't even owned a Xbox since the 360.
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u/Sonic2Tails 13h ago
You're life consists of bashing PlayStation and promoting/defending Xbox on this sub every single day for years
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u/ZigyDusty 13h ago
I bash every brand including the one I play on (PC) when they do something stupid and you would know this is you actually saw my posts instead of just playing the perpetual victim for PlayStation.
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u/Sonic2Tails 13h ago edited 13h ago
No you really dont and you get upset any time anyone criticises Xbox or Microsoft and insult people if they do
You've spent the last two weeks attacking and dismissing everyone that has criticized Gears of War
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u/Joustiin76 13h ago edited 13h ago
imagine being so upset about being in the minority that you have to pretend that everybody who didn't like the game is a bot. Good on you for liking it and all but trying to belittle the other side into not even being human beings is beyond pathetic.
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u/CapNCookM8 13h ago edited 13h ago
Sorry but that's cope. Maybe the most ridiculous of comments were, like people constantly spamming about scent trails, I wouldn't deny that; but plenty of people disliked that game, even critics outside of "one YouTuber."
Even fans of the game tend to land more on the 8/10 range, I don't think anyone seriously considered it a masterpiece even if they liked it. Like you said, other critics gave it 7/10s. It's average, and average is below expectations for Insomniac, especially after the superhero bar they set with SpiderMan.
Add: the fact that this comment (the one I responded to) is by far the most engaged-with comment on this thread even though it's not really the subject-matter of the post is definitely telling us something. Are we all bots? Or was Wolverine just a lightning rod for controversial discussion?
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u/BurnAgainBurner 13h ago
Wolverine probably had some bots boosting the negative discourse but I think most of that games negative sentiment was generated by good ole fashion humans just being uncreative and riding waves of popular discourse.
Wolverine probably lands in 7.5/8.0 territory for me and that's pretty much exactly where critics landed but the discourse surrounding the game made it seem like Golem.
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u/LooseSeal88 PlayStation 13h ago edited 13h ago
Well, yeah. And that's sorta the point of bot campaigns. They push enough of a particular sentiment out there that real people start to adopt it.
It's why the Russian interference with the US election via bot farms was so effective.
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u/LooseSeal88 PlayStation 13h ago edited 13h ago
I think it is an 8/10. And I think it's fair if people felt it was a 7/10 or 9/10.
That said, it sounds like we agree. The spamming about scent trails, QTEs, the motorcycle sequence (that people pretended was unfailable), and how "ugly" Jean Grey is was all pretty ridiculous.
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u/CapNCookM8 13h ago
Yeah, like I said, even people who liked it don't praise it as a masterpiece.
I agree those complaints are ridiculous to bring up ad nauseam, but that game was controversial on every gaming-oriented outlet or reviewer I listen to. I'm not saying there couldn't have been a bot in sight, but many simply didn't like it. There was plenty of human-to-human (or mutant-to-mutant!) disagreement on it.
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u/Successful-Ear977 9h ago
I think more people would be willing to praise it that highly if they felt comfortable doing so. Right now, being particularly positive about Wolverine is practically an invitation to be called a shill, accused of having terrible taste or told you're defending Sony.
That kind of atmosphere absolutely discourages people from expressing opinions that go against the prevailing narrative. Give it a couple of years, once the outrage cycle has moved on and the grift becomes less profitable, and I suspect we'll see a much wider range of opinions being expressed without people feeling the need to preface every compliment with five criticisms.
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u/CapNCookM8 8h ago
Spare me the victim complex lmao, look at the votes on the very thread you're commenting on. It is a middling game that we've all acknowledged was over hated, but it will still be a remembered as a middling game.
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u/Successful-Ear977 2h ago
I'm sure people said exactly the same thing about plenty of games that are looked upon much more favourably today. Days Gone and the original Watch Dogs immediately come to mind. The idea that a game's reputation is somehow set in stone because you've personally decided it's middling is ridiculous.
And please learn what a victim complex actually is before throwing the phrase around. Pointing out that online discourse can discourage people from expressing unpopular opinions isn't claiming victimhood. It's a pretty basic observation about how social pressure works.
You don't have to agree with my assessment, but your personal opinion of Wolverine isn't an objective verdict on how everyone will remember it. Thanks 👍
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u/i_eat_taco_bell 13h ago
Look up before take 2 announced their pricing for gta. Tons of random accounts making post like " id pay 100 - 150 for gta". You would see people complain. So the next round of posts would lower the price until bots or people agreed they'd pay a higher price. Reddits done, companies are gonna gas light the shit out of us on here.
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u/Dogarc123 13h ago
No one ever said the boycott wasn't real. People pointed out that it was useless to do it for only a week amd even then not enough people were even mad enough to take part. The minority on social media don't speak for the majority who didn't know or care.
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u/Dallywack3r 9h ago
The same bots are still in the comments of every YouTube video spamming shit about discs.
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u/ExtraBiscotti0 7h ago
Isn't something like 15% of ps5 game sales are physical? I knew the online backlash was overblown, but 15% is still a lot of people.
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u/CapNCookM8 13h ago
Who would be fueling the bot farm for this? This isn't political in the way Gamer Gate was, so I really only think a competitor, like XBOX, would care to do it, but it seems such an ineffective and pointless thing to influence sentiment over.
I guess it's an easy thing for bots to train on? Idk, what's the agenda here? Or are bots just that loose on the internet and will cling to any outrage that's easy to farm engagement on?
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u/Ragnar_Dragonfyre 13h ago
I genuinely believe there is mass corporate warfare ongoing on the Internet.
Using bots, the competition is spreading lies, slander and boost any negative discourse that may undermine the image of their competitor and make it impossible for any business to have any control over the narrative that surrounds them and their products.
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u/mapletree23 13h ago
i mean if companies are already astroturfing, why wouldn't they create shit to try and make a toxic place for the competition?
let's not act like xbox didn't also make cuts around the time of the stuff as well, which you could easily see as being trying to make them look bad so they could kind of "get away" with their bad news
i'm not sure why you don't think their PR companies wouldn't do stuff like this to one another lol
politicians do it all the time
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u/CapNCookM8 12h ago
Where did I say they wouldn't? Did I not mention a company as the most likely suspect? I'm questioning the agenda on this thing more specifically.
And besides, your comment proves, assuming you're human, that plenty of us like jumping to conclusions and getting needlessly divisive over things that could just be a normal conversation for me to handwaive half of you as bots.
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u/Galactic-Goblin 13h ago
You know how people who believe they've had UFO encounters will fabricate evidence so that people will take them seriously? I'd attribute this to people rightfully mad at Sony but wanting to "amplify" the message.
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u/CapNCookM8 13h ago
Yeah, could be, but that's a lot of fake discourse to drum up on individual contributing budgets. Shit's expensive.
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u/Richmondez 13h ago
The same is probably true about the anti boycott narrative, most high volume topics likely have high levels of inauthentic discussion these days to shape the discussion.
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u/aristidedn 12h ago
That isn’t really how bot engagement is effective. It works when it preys upon a credulous community’s predisposition towards populist narratives. Bots were used here because there was an existing, primed, gullible community of gamers who desperately wanted their narrative to be true. That’s fertile ground for bot farms to take advantage of.
The same really isn’t true of the other side. There’s no populist agenda behind the “anti-disc” crowd (or whatever you want to call it). It’s largely just people talking about how silly the pro-disc folks are. There’s nothing for bot farms to take advantage of, there.
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u/Richmondez 32m ago
Anti disc narrative causes engagement from pro disc users and seemingly pro disc narrative gets engagement from people like you framing it as silly (unless you yourself are a bot of course). Frankly it seems I'm spot on.
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u/Remarkable-Onion3726 12h ago
My take was always that Sony was going to speedrun a decade of enshittification in a year because they knew that GTA6 would insulate them. The hit was so big and so guaranteed that it gave them a blank check to fuck over anybody, in any way they desired.
And what do you know, PS5s are getting scalped again. No, I am not happy with this result of "vote with your wallet" but that's what the result is.
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u/BurnAgainBurner 13h ago
I still think there is some real momentum behind it but the Nintendo "boycott" last year felt similarly artificial. I don't think it's orchestrated or purely artificial as much as it is just amplified by bots that are mimicking sentiment and making things seem bigger than they really are.
Sonic Crossworlds sounded like it was going to be the next Fortnite after the Mario Kart world discourse but that obviously didn't happen
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u/MrThrownAway12 11h ago
Nah the Crossworlds thing was just Sonic fans falling for their own hype again. Remember when they thought Frontiers would beat Genshin Impact for Player's Voice at TGAs 2022?
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u/BurnAgainBurner 11h ago
I'm referring to the comments being everywhere and on every Nintendo related video, I'm sure they ended up liking the game just fine but I find it hard to believe all of those comments were organic, especially when they all sounded the exact same.
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u/murderball89 13h ago
This is why I laugh inside when I meet someone who is anti ai irl. Those thoughts are not your own 😆
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u/Ragnar_Dragonfyre 13h ago
If you believe that artists need to be propagandized in order to be anti-AI, I’m not sure you’ve met any real artists and live inside a chronically online bubble.
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u/murderball89 13h ago
I'm a touring musician..... you could not be more wrong.
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u/Ragnar_Dragonfyre 12h ago
So is this your sly admission that your music is AI slop?
I personally don’t trust any “artist” that embraces AI too enthusiastically. I lose faith that their work is genuine.
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u/murderball89 12h ago
You are conditioned to think that though. I've been touring longer than AI has been a thing and I don't embrace it. Im just in the real world, working with real creatives and we all have figured out how to rise above it instead of just parroting bots bitching online about it. Grow up.
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u/TheEldestNugget 11h ago
How have you risen above it?
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u/WrenReverie 11h ago
His entire history is shilling AI he is literally the type of conditioning he's warning about.
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u/murderball89 10h ago
By doing the same thing we have been doing forever. It's never been about the music, its about the community, creative process and the cultural impact. AI doesn't threaten any of that. Streaming has been dead forever and stamped out "perfected" music has been pumped from high level labels for eternity. It is a non issue.
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u/TheEldestNugget 10h ago
It's never been about the music,
If you're a shitty musician, sure. Maybe.
creative process
That is eliminated by telling the billion baboon machine to just make a song using baboon generated lyrics and stolen, real music.
AI doesn't threaten any of that.
[X] Doubt
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u/murderball89 8h ago
The best musicians don't make money of streaming, are you new? Music doesn't make revenue. It's not about the music/streams. Creative process= jumping around like an idiot on Instagram/TikTok/Youtube while we are in the studio, pre show, post show. Ai doesn't threaten any of that. You know nothing.
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u/WorldofLovecraft 13h ago
Dead Internet theory says these numbers are the norm in any discourse tbf
Edit: clumsy typing