Paranoid Thought of the Day
There 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.
(Dreamwidth crosspost:
comments)
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.
(Dreamwidth crosspost:
comments)