So there's direct shills and then second-hand shills who have already had their opinion changed and are now out to spread the message (like a virus). Obviously there will be a lot of second-hand shills as we are all exposed to so much mind control (like ads). But it seems very reasonable to me that Voat is already crawling with direct shills.
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Marijuana_Merlin ago
what is a shill?
photonasty ago
Undercover marketers, PR people, or astroturfers. ("Astroturfing" is "fake grass roots," basically.)
These people pose as normal users, so that they can attempt to inject certain ideas, opinions, and viewpoints into the discussion. This could involve, for example, posting something positive about a product. It could also include seeding certain viewpoints in political discussions, or trying to dispel unpleasant opinions about a corporation.
The thing with Reddit and Voat is that they're not good places for direct advertising. They're designed for users to aggregate interesting content in an unbiased way, not for content marketers to promote products. However, Reddit (and to some extent, Voat) provides information that helps marketers to further laser-focus their audience targeting. For example, if you're advertising a brick-and-mortar video game store in Ontario, you could filter and display your ads to users whose subreddit subscriptions indicate that they both live in Ontario, and are interested in video gaming. This analytics potential does make Reddit (and to a less extent at this point, Voat) appealing for advertisers, but there isn't a lot of room on there for blatant ads. So many of us suspect that marketers (as well as possibly political lobbyists) may be posing as users to very subtly promote brands or even ideologies.
solzyx ago
such an in-depth response. the only thing i would add is that i regard the idea that there are shills amongst us as more than a suspicion. rather, i think there is pretty strong evidence for it, for both marketers and political operatives. this evidence is of two sorts: first, from the side of the shill-employer (ie we have official reports of agencies both private and public spending significant money on this kind of thing and hiring people to do this), and second, local evidence from the behavior of certain users.