Apparently, an advertising agency hired by Samsung is trying to buy people to post questions about the company on StackOverflow. This is what Delyan Kratunov was asked to do (he declined):
All we need you to do is talk about the SSAC (Samsung Smart App Challenge) and get the word out. How? We were thinking about 4 questions on Stackoverflow over the span of a month….. as well as replies to posts made by other members. Don’t worry about finding the questions to reply to because we will send you links.
Stay classy, Samsung.
I suppose this goes in the same category as the recent findings that Samsung is cheating in benchmarks: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/07/samsung-defends-benchmark-bo…
OOops, I first thought about nVidia…
Kochise
Thanks for bringing in a completely unrelated company into this. It shows your true colors, however.
I think what we really need is the corporate equivalent of dog shaming. Find out who is responsible for this, then put a sign around their neck that says, ‘I cheated on benchmark results for our flagship smartphone’. Then take a photo of that, and plaster it all over the blogosphere.
Hell I think they have ALL stepped up their shilling werecat, some of us on Slashdot were talking just the other day how suddenly companies that were looked at about as favorably as the Klan there (Monsanto, MSFT, Goldman Sachs, Apple, Samsung, Toshiba) are suddenly seeing anyone that says a single bad word about any of these companies downmodded to the basement and every. single. time. its followed by a VERY high UID that will put out some positive spin in defense of the corp, there was even one that said shotgunning insect DNA into plants was no different than “selective breeding”.
So I have to wonder if there is a new bunch offering shilling services to these big corps because normally you’d only see this high a level of shilling when there is gonna be a major product launch that they are “iffy” on, see Windows 8 for an example, but for the past 3 weeks or so its just been a constant stream of corporate apologists and modbombing.
To me the bigger question isn’t is Samsung paying to have this done, the answer to that is an obvious yes, the question is what company is offering a new shilling service that is obviously VERY enticing to the corps from the amount of business they are doing?
Marketing matters, people.
I know first hand of companies that do this on behalf of large clients… going back 5+ years.
Think about it – the web of comments reviews questions tweets etc has a significant influence on how products and companies are perceived. Many of us won’t buy a product if the online world isn’t positive about it – despite never having tried the product itself. So there’s a lot to gain or lose.
I am always suspicious of comments on sites – even this one – and do wonder if some posters are in fact .. er.. working for someone else.
Not a nice thought – but hey that’s the world we live in .. messages from avatars from people we know not.
Oh this happens a lot – in fact, I’m pretty sure out comment sections, too, are… Visited by people who are being paid to post.
It’s hard to prove, though.
Actually it goes deeper than that, certain supposedly independent industry or subject websites are actually run by just or for one company from that industry.
They might review products of different vendors or talk about tips. “what to look for in a X”, where X is a feature only very few vendors have support for in their products.
It doesn’t really matter, as long as you get the message out about the advantages of certain products from a certain company while still have a veil of independence.
It’s the same like certain industry magazines have articles written by and paid for (like an ad) by vendors.
Edited 2013-08-01 14:42 UTC
I find it scarier that the people you suspect are being paid are _not_ being paid.
Man I totally wish I was being paid to post comments.
My job entails me working with a large proprietary CMS built on .NET, there is nothing inheritantly bad with the technology itself but it is quite a complicated beast.
When searching google for Information, I come across blog posts from people that are either heavily involved (MVP) which are making a name for themselves to get more work or are blatently written by someone evangelising the tech.
I am a registered Samsung developer and tbh what really irritates me about this is that their developer docs are pretty poor and there is no clear app store policy.
Edited 2013-08-01 19:15 UTC
Seriously. Some of us use these technologies for a living and its our bread and butter. I honestly wish I could get paid to comment on a forum all day because it beats trying to herd the code monkeys at the office.
Platform evangelism seems like a fun job though, so long as its a declared title and not an Astroturf.
I am not saying that being an MVP is a bad thing or blogging about a particular tech.
What I don’t like is content about how someone loves <insert horrendously complicated tech that could be replaced by wordpress 95% of the time>, when I know that any sane programmer would say “I think this is far more than we need for this problem”.
Edited 2013-08-02 17:19 UTC
Haha yeah, like being a WCF MVP. Holy crap is WCF in indecipherable thicket of head scratching.
But I’m glad they cleaned ASP.NET up, I’m currently using WebAPI/SignalR (minus MVC) on Azure with Mongo.
I tried node for a while on another project and definitely walked away with a greater appreciation for JS than I once had and even grew to dislike the box that strong typing puts you in sometimes.
Strong types let you do things like declare a network serialization structure member as “big_endian_untrusted” and you know your code will never accidentally try to read an unverified 16-bit length value in reverse order.
But yeah, JS can be nifty.
By the way I posted this from a Samsung laptop on the net through a Samsung smart phone hotspot.
*evil grin*
I would almost like the whole thing to never hit the news sites or blogs as i imagine even with the negative aspect it’s still getting the word out about Samsung app contest.
Q: “My Q&A web page is spammed by something about Samsung something. What should I do?”
A: “You mean Samsung Smart App Challenge? I think it’s great, too.
for Google -> SAMSUNG SAMSUNG SMAC APP CHALLENGE WIN MONEY http://www.samsung.com“
One would think this agency would have looked into the relevant forum policies, as well as the kind of users that hang out there, before trying to buy them off this way. Now they’re facing embarrassment and are having to officially redact their communications. If I were Samsung’s chief of marketing, I’d be looking for a replacement agency asap as this puts Samsung in a bad light as well as this ad company.
Florian Mueller is a good example of someone who posts and is paid by one side or the other. I am not surprised it happens.
+ 1
He’s declared he’s consulted for various companies. That’s not the same thing.
Its like the people who are commissioned to write first party Windows Phone/Windows Apps. They’re paid consultants, mercenary developers who work off of billable hours. Its a lucrative business.
Edited 2013-08-02 11:36 UTC
He got people talking about the event.
Probably far more than would if he’d stuck to StackOverflow. Way to go OSNews for successfully being trolled into the mix.