Paranoid Thought of the Day
May. 9th, 2010 09:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snarpThere are probably a metric ton of shills running around on TV Tropes.
In a wiki environment, authorship has low visibility - you have to click into the history to find out who posted what, so you're not going to gradually come to realize there are an awful lot of similarly-phrased references to recent [insert studio name here] releases suddenly cropping up from people with generic names with a number after them. Or that every single reference to [insert webcomic name here] seems to be by the same user, who coincidentally talks an awful lot like the artist does on his blog.
Maybe frequent contributors will notice something, but consumer-only type users (whom I imagine account for most of them) never know who wrote what. Shill-type behavior just isn't going to be as obvious there as it is on Amazon or Yelp or someone's blog's comments, where a person's identity is clearly marked and expected to be persistent.
In a wiki environment, authorship has low visibility - you have to click into the history to find out who posted what, so you're not going to gradually come to realize there are an awful lot of similarly-phrased references to recent [insert studio name here] releases suddenly cropping up from people with generic names with a number after them. Or that every single reference to [insert webcomic name here] seems to be by the same user, who coincidentally talks an awful lot like the artist does on his blog.
Maybe frequent contributors will notice something, but consumer-only type users (whom I imagine account for most of them) never know who wrote what. Shill-type behavior just isn't going to be as obvious there as it is on Amazon or Yelp or someone's blog's comments, where a person's identity is clearly marked and expected to be persistent.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-10 10:04 am (UTC)I recall seeing someone make up two tropes (can't remember what they were, they were relationship-themed I think) named after features in a dating sim in development. Yes, development, as in, not released to the public yet. But it was so blatant, I wonder if he/she was being a shill or just waaaaaay too into TV Tropes.
For a while there, every fanfic-themed reference was so obscure and WTF-worthy I'm convinced they were all entered by the authors. Unless there's a huge Evangelion/Warhammer crossover fandom I'm as yet unaware of.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-11 11:48 pm (UTC)Whaaaat.
(...do you remember any details of this? Because it is so stupid as to be fascinating.)