We were watching Wednesday, partially cause I like goths, but 90% because I'd like to fuck Jenna Ortega. Even though I knew in my bones it would have some hamfisted woke junk in it. My wife expressed surprise and that it hadn't been on her radar at all.
As we watched, she continually dished out factoids.
This dance was choreographed by Jenna!
Christina Ricci was in the original and was really happy to return.
Gwendoline Christie said this was the first show she's felt beautiful in.
I asked: "Wait a second. You didn't even want to watch this show. Did you watch an interview with the creators or something?"
No. Instead she'd been served all this in Tik Toks about supposedly different topics from supposedly non-affiliated users/fans. Obviously not organic. The scope of it astonished me. She does spend too much time on Tik Tok, but not enough for something like this to be absorbed naturally. It was a massive coordinated campaign.
I was "pleasantly" surprised how little there was: even in universe when she talked about the "patriarchy" seemed some kind of parody and the other characters replied like "are you a retard?".
They built up the Lati heritage of the Addams family, despite them all being very white-coded
The climax is literally a black woman and a latinx woman tag-teaming an old white guy
I could go on but my eyes were rolling. They sacrificed world-building and feel for these things too IMO, everything past episode 3 was like kids running around hogwarts in jeans.
Those were annoying and eye-rolling but were so overt and ridiculous that I actually thought about parody. Is that Poe's law in action?
The climax is literally a black woman and a latinx woman tag-teaming an old white guy
I live in a whiter than average European country: I've met only 2 black people and zero Latinos so I didn't really noticed. For me every US tv shows since the "colorblind" 90s is exotic.
They built up the Lati heritage of the Addams family, despite them all being very white-coded
Now that I noticed I agree. Catherine Zeta Jones was seriously miscast and Gomez was supposed to be only half Latino (they could have at least chose an attractive Gomez though.)
FWIW hearing that you're not American makes this click a bit. Our race fetish is stronger than anywhere else, and there's a huge focus on the treatment of natives. Honestly this isn't the thread for CW but it was stunningly obvious, and I don't think that it's meant to be a parody. This is just the state of mainstream entertainment.
Regarding CZJ.... she's so hot I didn't even think about her being miscast.
Speaking as a non-American myself, the woke themes in Wednesday are so strong that I'm still surprised that someone can not notice them. Not only is the entire plot's message very clearly "Look at how the evil pilgrims have historically persecuted natives, why is no one talking about this!" with "outcasts" being used as a stand-in for natives, there is almost constant progressive messaging about gender relations from Wednesday and only once do I remember someone even slightly pushing back against her on that (Xavier, after he saves her life and she accuses him of upholding the patriarchy through his chivalry). I feel like it's far too charitable to interpret these things as satire, woke talking points are not only sprinkled throughout the show but are in fact woven into its very narrative, and they are never really significantly contested in any way.
I will say nobody's really missing much by giving it a pass. There's other problems I have with the show, like the character writing - Wednesday is 1) an I'm-14-and-this-is-deep quote generator and 2) an incredibly atrocious and overconfident detective who is wrong almost all of the time in spite of the show's best attempts to portray her as capable. Additionally, her friends and two potential love interests somehow stick around her despite her treating everyone quite terribly for most of the show, which does not come off as realistic, but I'm getting a bit into the weeds here.
Your second paragraph exactly matches my thoughts as well. While I understand the personality is who the character is to an extent, by the end of 8 episodes there wasn't much of a reason for anyone to like her. I could have been productive or watched a good show, I would definitely call it a skip.
I don't follow a lot of popular media in the way of movies music tv, so rather about fashion sports or cars.
Percentage that is human in the sense that real human fingers typed words that the human brain attached to them would tell you he genuinely believed? 85-90%+
Percentage that is organically human, in the sense that at no point has a paid marketing campaign influenced that human opinion being typed? <10%.
Humans are basic and easily manipulated into parroting a narrative. Parroting the narrative is enjoyable; look how many people will go out of their way to call into a sports radio show just to say the same nonsense they heard another caller say about "Dak Prescott just can't win the big games" or "Defense wins championships" or "the trouble with arsenal is they always try to walk it in." It makes the reddit commenter feel like a big boy to give the big narrative. Other posters with brains the size of navel oranges upvote the narrative, reprocess the meme, and turn it into homoerotic copypasta.
So I'd say it's less about real grassroots versus fake grass AstroTurf; it's more about organic native grasses versus GMO seeded chemical fertilized drought resistant MegaGrass. Once upon a time one could be sure a plant in your garden was native if it was ugly and thorny, but we're so far down the process of hipster recursion that most of those ugly thorny opinions are just dollars flowing to some substack or some podcast advertising Athletic Greens.
Percentage that is organically human, in the sense that at no point has a paid marketing campaign influenced that human opinion being typed? <10%.
Another aspect of this to keep in mind is that a vanishingly small amount of opinions are original. And the seed comments on a matter are much more likely to become consensus.
I'm not a big football watcher, but I watched all the World Cup games for the fuck of it. An interesting dynamic I noticed in online discussions is that the earliest or most common opinions of a specific play or decision became the consensus, and this was seemingly random and often totally wrong.
The average "fan" is probably just parrotting an opinion someone else said earlier somewhere else.
I'd guess not much strict astroturfing (as in "let's keep this about RAMPART"). We're probably at a point where AI-assisted astroturf could have an effect, but would it be efficient? More importantly, would the ad industry think it's efficient?
The state-of-the-art in manufactured consensus is probably what Amazon deployed on a certain insanely expensive venture. Ratings manipulation, review skewing, and probably a few more subtle things for various niches. Frankly, it was not a very impressive campaign.
Does it count as astroturfed if a publisher sends a prerelease copy to a media outlet, and the media outlet reviews it? When a PR firm markets a nice story to the media?
So, on /r/television - at least 50%, probably more, of popular posts/comments that advertise a particular show are 'organic', as in made by actual users OR content-agnostic repost bots. Some of those posts are links to news sites publishing PR material, though. And no doubt some posts/comments are explicit 'astroturfing'/advertising, although what the proportion is. You have to keep in mind, hundreds of millions of people watch television, and a solid 5% of those want to discuss that on the internet, and will enthusiastically post/upvote/comment - 'astroturfing' has to either have a lot of volume and subtlety to beat that, or function in a less direct and less "astroturfed" way. The same goes for politics, and the accusations of 'russian bots' or 'liberal bots' - they aren't bots, they are the millions of politics-obsessed normal 100iq people.
My feeling is that there are a ton of people "working" as trend setters, writing early posts on topics trying to set the tone for further engagement.
These "people" are a small minority but since they are aware of when things are released they can be first on the ball, kind of like pre-release copies are sent out to favourably inclined reviewers.
How much of this niche is captured by “influencers”? I get the impression that advertisers try to leverage existing following, maybe openly (sponsorships) or maybe not.
I think these are slightly different things. There are the influencers lending their real name to a product to give the impression that "high status" people are interested/like the product, and then there are the staff/bots etc who are instantly there cheering on various (semi)pseudonymous platforms, trying to give the impression that the masses are positive/excited about the product, that the conversations about the product is positive/excited and that there is a conversation/engagement.
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Notes -
What percentage do you think of conversation about newly released media is organic/astroturfed/fans trying to drum up interest?
Let's say a relevant thread for a new episode of a tvshow on Reddit.
What about foreign language media?
I had a striking incidence of this recently.
We were watching Wednesday, partially cause I like goths, but 90% because I'd like to fuck Jenna Ortega. Even though I knew in my bones it would have some hamfisted woke junk in it. My wife expressed surprise and that it hadn't been on her radar at all.
As we watched, she continually dished out factoids.
I asked: "Wait a second. You didn't even want to watch this show. Did you watch an interview with the creators or something?"
No. Instead she'd been served all this in Tik Toks about supposedly different topics from supposedly non-affiliated users/fans. Obviously not organic. The scope of it astonished me. She does spend too much time on Tik Tok, but not enough for something like this to be absorbed naturally. It was a massive coordinated campaign.
I was "pleasantly" surprised how little there was: even in universe when she talked about the "patriarchy" seemed some kind of parody and the other characters replied like "are you a retard?".
Ah wow, that wasn't my take at all.
I could go on but my eyes were rolling. They sacrificed world-building and feel for these things too IMO, everything past episode 3 was like kids running around hogwarts in jeans.
Mmm... Maybe it's because I am not American and I do not notice this thing as heavily.
Those were annoying and eye-rolling but were so overt and ridiculous that I actually thought about parody. Is that Poe's law in action?
I live in a whiter than average European country: I've met only 2 black people and zero Latinos so I didn't really noticed. For me every US tv shows since the "colorblind" 90s is exotic.
Now that I noticed I agree. Catherine Zeta Jones was seriously miscast and Gomez was supposed to be only half Latino (they could have at least chose an attractive Gomez though.)
FWIW hearing that you're not American makes this click a bit. Our race fetish is stronger than anywhere else, and there's a huge focus on the treatment of natives. Honestly this isn't the thread for CW but it was stunningly obvious, and I don't think that it's meant to be a parody. This is just the state of mainstream entertainment.
Regarding CZJ.... she's so hot I didn't even think about her being miscast.
Speaking as a non-American myself, the woke themes in Wednesday are so strong that I'm still surprised that someone can not notice them. Not only is the entire plot's message very clearly "Look at how the evil pilgrims have historically persecuted natives, why is no one talking about this!" with "outcasts" being used as a stand-in for natives, there is almost constant progressive messaging about gender relations from Wednesday and only once do I remember someone even slightly pushing back against her on that (Xavier, after he saves her life and she accuses him of upholding the patriarchy through his chivalry). I feel like it's far too charitable to interpret these things as satire, woke talking points are not only sprinkled throughout the show but are in fact woven into its very narrative, and they are never really significantly contested in any way.
I will say nobody's really missing much by giving it a pass. There's other problems I have with the show, like the character writing - Wednesday is 1) an I'm-14-and-this-is-deep quote generator and 2) an incredibly atrocious and overconfident detective who is wrong almost all of the time in spite of the show's best attempts to portray her as capable. Additionally, her friends and two potential love interests somehow stick around her despite her treating everyone quite terribly for most of the show, which does not come off as realistic, but I'm getting a bit into the weeds here.
Your second paragraph exactly matches my thoughts as well. While I understand the personality is who the character is to an extent, by the end of 8 episodes there wasn't much of a reason for anyone to like her. I could have been productive or watched a good show, I would definitely call it a skip.
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I don't follow a lot of popular media in the way of movies music tv, so rather about fashion sports or cars.
Percentage that is human in the sense that real human fingers typed words that the human brain attached to them would tell you he genuinely believed? 85-90%+
Percentage that is organically human, in the sense that at no point has a paid marketing campaign influenced that human opinion being typed? <10%.
Humans are basic and easily manipulated into parroting a narrative. Parroting the narrative is enjoyable; look how many people will go out of their way to call into a sports radio show just to say the same nonsense they heard another caller say about "Dak Prescott just can't win the big games" or "Defense wins championships" or "the trouble with arsenal is they always try to walk it in." It makes the reddit commenter feel like a big boy to give the big narrative. Other posters with brains the size of navel oranges upvote the narrative, reprocess the meme, and turn it into homoerotic copypasta.
So I'd say it's less about real grassroots versus fake grass AstroTurf; it's more about organic native grasses versus GMO seeded chemical fertilized drought resistant MegaGrass. Once upon a time one could be sure a plant in your garden was native if it was ugly and thorny, but we're so far down the process of hipster recursion that most of those ugly thorny opinions are just dollars flowing to some substack or some podcast advertising Athletic Greens.
Another aspect of this to keep in mind is that a vanishingly small amount of opinions are original. And the seed comments on a matter are much more likely to become consensus.
I'm not a big football watcher, but I watched all the World Cup games for the fuck of it. An interesting dynamic I noticed in online discussions is that the earliest or most common opinions of a specific play or decision became the consensus, and this was seemingly random and often totally wrong.
The average "fan" is probably just parrotting an opinion someone else said earlier somewhere else.
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I'd guess not much strict astroturfing (as in "let's keep this about RAMPART"). We're probably at a point where AI-assisted astroturf could have an effect, but would it be efficient? More importantly, would the ad industry think it's efficient?
The state-of-the-art in manufactured consensus is probably what Amazon deployed on a certain insanely expensive venture. Ratings manipulation, review skewing, and probably a few more subtle things for various niches. Frankly, it was not a very impressive campaign.
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Does it count as astroturfed if a publisher sends a prerelease copy to a media outlet, and the media outlet reviews it? When a PR firm markets a nice story to the media?
So, on /r/television - at least 50%, probably more, of popular posts/comments that advertise a particular show are 'organic', as in made by actual users OR content-agnostic repost bots. Some of those posts are links to news sites publishing PR material, though. And no doubt some posts/comments are explicit 'astroturfing'/advertising, although what the proportion is. You have to keep in mind, hundreds of millions of people watch television, and a solid 5% of those want to discuss that on the internet, and will enthusiastically post/upvote/comment - 'astroturfing' has to either have a lot of volume and subtlety to beat that, or function in a less direct and less "astroturfed" way. The same goes for politics, and the accusations of 'russian bots' or 'liberal bots' - they aren't bots, they are the millions of politics-obsessed normal 100iq people.
My feeling is that there are a ton of people "working" as trend setters, writing early posts on topics trying to set the tone for further engagement.
These "people" are a small minority but since they are aware of when things are released they can be first on the ball, kind of like pre-release copies are sent out to favourably inclined reviewers.
How much of this niche is captured by “influencers”? I get the impression that advertisers try to leverage existing following, maybe openly (sponsorships) or maybe not.
I think these are slightly different things. There are the influencers lending their real name to a product to give the impression that "high status" people are interested/like the product, and then there are the staff/bots etc who are instantly there cheering on various (semi)pseudonymous platforms, trying to give the impression that the masses are positive/excited about the product, that the conversations about the product is positive/excited and that there is a conversation/engagement.
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Nowadays? 90%. 8 years ago, maybe 15%.
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