Each time it gets retold, the sriracha cartoon villain's mustache grows longer and more twirled.
Somehow, Underwood Ranches' competing product never gets failed to get mentioned in a top comment, along with all the places you can buy it, how much better/hotter it tastes, and how superior its ingredients are.
I've never seen something so obviously and clumsily astroturfed, yet be so effective. Their entire growth strategy is enemy positioning on social media. You gotta hand it to the COO (who according to the story he's crafted is the loyal and virtuous hero) as he's running circles around the incompetent and out-of-touch management at sriricha who likely have no idea what's going on.
It appears sheer spite and vengeance is what brought Underwood Ranches back from the brink of bankruptcy. Now that's a genuine American success story.
The shortage caused by the dispute between Underwood and Huy Fong was huge news at the time, there are millions of customers loyal to the brand and millions of customers saddened by the fall in quality. I don’t know if Underwood are astroturfing, maybe they are, but this is one of the few stories where this coverage could be entirely organic. If Coca Cola had a similar dispute that led to the flavor of Coke changing, you’d see even more posts like this from real people.
There’s also the slopification of the internet to consider. The human centipede style pass through of a story across platform after platform means the same story appears again and again and again. And that’s happening more and more as time goes on. One YouTube video that generates a few hundred thousand views can spawn hundreds of other videos, posts, tweets, podcasts… all across the internet.
Don’t know what it is about geek culture that leans so conspiratorial.
Sometimes I play a game; before clicking to read comments I try to come up with what the conspiracies will be. This one was obvious (since I’m familiar with the story).
No? I have recommended Freestyle sugar free soda as a way to replace heavy CocaCola consumption. Here in Mexico it's a big problem, and I helped me get out of the addiction. ( add Allulose to the soda to add the sweet)
It's a dopamine hit. It's addicting. The medium of the internet seems to add to this where most interactions are conversationally broken, because a thread is a bunch of people airdropping thoughts and never really coming back to back up their arguments or admit something was wrong.
The brain wants things to be simple so rewards you for simple solutions that are "better" and totally ignores complexity and nuance and reality because those are energetically expensive things to pay attention to.
probably because the most obvious "it's exactly as described" is the most boring and uninteresting conclusion, thus you make it more interesting by proposing that it's a big conspiracy
Same as any other conspiratorial thinking: they hold themselves in too high a regard and want to think they’re privy to some secret knowledge that the rubes have missed.
>Don’t know what it is about geek culture that leans so conspiratorial.
The #1 goal one needs to accomplish to render an environment safe for the execution of conspiratorial activity, is to inure the occupants of said environment to the possibility of conspiratorial action taking place. Apriori dismissal shuts down game theoretic behavioral modeling in the operational loop, rendering concerted acts of manipulation near invisible. It's why Hanlon's Razor is both a heuristic for organizational productivity and alignment, and one of the greatest foundational psyops of all time. Assuming benevolent intent of other actors makes it easier to get things done, but makes it nigh impossible to defend oneself against actual malicious intent. Geekdom is one of the few niches where most participants routinely value depth first vs. breadth first knowledge. Deep understanding of behavior, and the nature of motivated reasoning and modelling asymmetry of information with regards to intent quickly makes assumption of benevolent intent a realistically untenable posture to maintain unconditionally. In big business or contexts that tend toward near zero-sum anyway. Is it exhausting? Absolutely. Does it keep you safe from people? Hell yes. Does it make life fun? That depends on the general character of the people you're generally surrounded by I suppose.
I think its naive to think capitalism doesnt lead to dirty tricks. There's tons of PR and stealth marketing out there. The idea that our system is all "honest good guys" doesn't fit in with the facts.
> Don’t know what it is about geek culture that leans so conspiratorial.
It’s much wider. This is why QAnon and contemporary fascism spread. People love a story.
The QAA podcast deep-dives explaining conspiratorial thinking. They started with QAnon and then expanded. The episodes on the Queen of Canada (Romana Didulo) were especially interesting. She’s a dangerous person and so are her followers. Sovereign citizens, too (though they’ve abandoned that term). Think Freemen in Montana in the 90s.
It would be interesting if google or some agent with enough frequent crawls of most social media could make visualizations over the years of certain viral stories and how they propagate in waves across the internet over time and how those waves interact. Would be a cool research project. Similar to Google Trends but internet-wide with some graph visualizations.
It wouldn't surprise me if something similar is happening with social media and indeed a lot of the news is astroturfed to some extent, though I agree we shouldn't discount the extent to which people are willing to participate in this by reposting popular content for a quick ego/karma boost. And increasingly that reposting is done by bots.
I don’t know if Underwood are astroturfing, maybe they are, but this is one of the few stories where this coverage could be entirely organic.
There are a few competing products on my supermarket's shelf (FWIW, Underwood's is not among them), but only Underwood's gets mentioned in the post. Where there's smoke, there's fire.
You can't buy it through Amazon or Costco or HEB (their main outlets, apparently) at the moment, and there's a rumor that they've gone out of business.
They started making the hot sauce years after the main events referred to in the lawsuit.
Their socials are silent and the website is a godaddy landing page with just their logo.
I don't think these people are savvy submarine astroturfers.
If they did go out of business it's a shame, I buy their sauce by the boxful every year or so. It is legitimately better quality. Chili garlic sauce and sambal are also great.
I promise you I am not on the Underwood payroll, but it is definitely one of the better Sriracha alternatives. That it gives you a feel-good of supporting a sort-of-underdog, of course people are going to be drawn to it.
I think you are underestimating the love of the original Sriracha.
Nothing stopping both from being true. The court judgements[0] aren't faked. It genuinely appears Underwood really was screwed over. That said, it doesn't take much for a CMO to look at the situation and figure out how to market the product from there. Something something lemonade.
Only reason I mention that is that is you're not really faking the grassroots part if you really do have a good origin story--you just got... lucky?
Additionally, it's not like this necessarily got posted out of the blue. There's another Huy Fong sriracha shortage due to a Mexican crop failure driven by climate change. So anyone wondering why they can't buy it will naturally encounter this story.
And as you mentioned, that lawsuit has pretty convincing evidence of a multi-year plan to really screw the supplier in order to get even more fantastically wealthy. Amazing greed combined with profound stupidity about the difficulty of reliably sourcing 2 _thousand_ acres of ripe chilies. There's been a decade of rolling shortages.
A note of caution on this line of thinking. Pretty much every story you'll ever hear about a commercial subject is going to a) be incomplete and inaccurate, and b) seem beneficial to one party in the story. That's just how stories work.
You can spend your entire online life seeing ghosts of astroturfing in everything you read. Like, how do we know that Huy Fong didn't pay you to come here on HN to neg the Reddit story that makes them look bad? You're stuck trying to prove a negative: impossible.
There is a reason accusations of astroturfing are against the HN guidelines, and it's this: in the absence of evidence, anything opinionated could be astroturfing... or it could not. Which makes it completely useless as a heuristic. It feels like smart skepticism, but it does not actually add any substance to the conversation.
To be fair, if I had a company and won a lawsuit like that... a lawsuit which makes for a good underdog story, I'd let my PR team use it as much as they desire! That lawsuit is a golden asset for them now.
A lot of reddit does not seem to be aware that a huge amount of the content is totally fake, astroturfing, etc. Soon, the "product site:reddit.com" will be just as useless as Amazon reviews.
Been that way a long time, maybe always was. Bad behavior is often rewarded, compelling lies gain more upvotes than truth and there's little consequence for shitposting.
I think it's gotten a bit worse as the platform has grown since there's more reward, astroturfing gets more eyes and is more effective, posts in general can get more karma so more fake internet points.
It was pretty amazing in the early days. It has been bad for a while. The current era is definitely something new, though. Popular subreddits are mostly worthless, and the platform both cannot control all the bots and astroturfing, but also their attempts to do so have degraded the experience for the average user.
"You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain."
Was active on Reddit a long time ago, there's a liminal band of popularity in which a service tends to offer the best experience. Enough interest to be good, not enough interest to make it shitty or incentivize abuse.
It's difficult to remain in that band particularly because at some point you have to actively fight growth, not sure HN is all that immune either. I think HN tries to stay in that band via it's archaic UI and somewhat intimidating culture.
Yep, I think that's right. Even if reddit, its company, and its moderators were all perfect, it might still crumble and become awful under the weight of its popularity. Too many bad actors, too many companies astroturfing, not enough monetization to solve these problems. And of course the site, the company, and the moderators are far from perfect.
A lot don't care if it is. I've had friends share things and I stopped replying with "you know this isn't a true story/fact/real image, right?". Their response is always "idk i thought it was funny/interesting" which is valid. I felt like I was raining on parades so now I usually just respond with an emoji.
The problem is though that even if they "just think it's funny", over time it gets built into their worldview.
It's like people who only consume TV shows and movies, they know it's all fiction, but if you talk to them about how the world works, you realize that all their mental structures are based on Hollywood tropes.
This even tracks to reddit, where everyone knows it's bullshit and reddit is dumb, but their entire perception of the world is still reddit's dumb views anyway.
'Everything is astroturf' is such a boring and cynical worldview. Its good to be suspicious, but not at the cost of joy. Underwood sauce is good. They got screwed over. Sometimes a story is just a story.
Reading some the comments on this thread reveals one of the main reasons why a campaign like this is necessary if you're Underwood. Huy Fong has achieved "category king" status in this space; most people don't know what Huy Fong is, that red sauce is called "Sriracha". Huy Fong knows quite well that as long as the sauce still comes in that bottle and tastes like chilis, 99% of their customers will still buy it. Making a dent in this segment beyond foodies and hot-sauce enthusiasts requires some guerrilla marketing and and public education.
I do this kind of marketing on reddit. It's so incredibly easy.
Upvotes cost nothing, and even if someone figures out the astroturfing, you just spend a dollar or two and bury them in downvotes.
One of my favorite tactics is just to use throwaway accounts to keep repeatedly asking variations of the same question "What x should I get for y?" and then consistently replying from my main shilling account with variations of "Hey, this gets posted ALL THE TIME but here is what I suggested previously and people seemed to like it ...". This way I can just keep recycling the same high-effort copy endlessly.
The reddit shills you spot are either lazy or idiots. There's no chance you'd ever suspect any of my biggest earning posts, simply because they're entirely consistent with the other content in the community and could have naturally achieved similar levels of upvotes had I just been lucky. But with bots I don't have to be lucky.
People on HN won't like that you do this but at least you're honest, and showing that this does actually happen, it's just that others are not so loud (at least sometimes, see the link below). This sort of thing is very common on reddit, there are even articles and studies about said astroturfing.
Due to the cyclical nature of posts and the exhausted moderators trying to mod all of them, it's quite effective for "organic" growth. Many companies use these methods to grow, because it's way cheaper than paying for ads and users online are simply too gullible to catch on. And even if they did, you can just delete the thread and make a new one later on.
It's the same strategy used in TikTok where the influencer subtly hints at the product rather than overtly talking about it (perhaps as one slide in a slideshow), and then when a commenter asks what they used, the influencer replies with the name of the product.
For example [0], there have been large scale astroturfing campaigns for things like games, posting large numbers of comments to influence users.
Yes I should've said, people on HN don't like that they do that, or that it happens at all, but the reality is that it does and especially for people on a forum run by a startup accelerator in particular (with tons of Ask HN questions on how to grow their product via marketing), posting on social media is one of the most effective ways to grow, whether people like it or not.
If this is true, it implies that such marketing on Reddit is not worth much. Because if a marketing tactic is easy and effective, intense competition will drive up the price of doing so.
Conversely if Reddit astroturfing was actually valuable, "upvotes cost nothing" could not be true. Like, we know that Meta and Google ads are effective, and those cost something. Not because they're hard to do, but because everyone is trying to do them at once.
> Because if a marketing tactic is easy and effective, intense competition will drive up the price of doing so.
will it? who is occupying and competing in that space, in a business sense? and are they using reddit? if so, which subs and who are they targeted at?
the various build-a-PC subs are a great example -- they have ones for high end GPUs -- literally, r/gpu -- and others for more generic uses. you can shill all-day on r/buildapcsales and do well without having to battle on the more general buildapc
in a broader sense, building consensus is critical, and plenty of businesses or political entities are willing to take huge losses to completely corral public perception -- most notably the purchase of Paramount by everyone's least favorite villian Larry E
You think GPU manufacturers are paying people to post fake positive comments all day in /r/buildapcsales in the hopes of materially increasing their revenue?
I've thought about this same thing a lot, and the only explanation for the current state of affairs I can come up with is that marketers that have a good enough understanding of these communities are hard to come by.
It's also likely that many businesses are simply too risk averse to engage in things like purchasing farmed reddit accounts and upvotes.
Oh, there’s risk? Somehow you forgot to mention that in your post about how incredibly easy it is.
I’m sure it’s possible to make small amounts of money with Reddit bots, just like it’s possible to make small amounts of money with email spam, and posting AI slop to Facebook and X, and SMS scams.
The idea that major brands do this habitually, is what I’m objecting to.
>I’m sure it’s possible to make small amounts of money with Reddit bots, just like it’s possible to make small amounts of money with email spam, and posting AI slop to Facebook and X, and SMS scams.
I'm getting clients who are each spending a minimum of 500k USD pa on services.
There's a very wide variety of eyeballs you can reach on reddit. It's everything from people inserting impressively large items in their body to people trading eye-wateringly expensive jewelry from cult brands like Chrome Hearts and nerds discussing enterprise telco equipment and EDR platforms.
But sure, I don't think it scales.
>The idea that major brands do this habitually, is what I’m objecting to.
I doubt major brands do this habitually. There are countless smaller players who do.
If someone reads the reddit post and decides to buy the Sriracha competitor then who has been ripped off? It's a win-win, competitor has gotten business and the customer has bought a product they now perceive to be superior.
People should probably be more aware that the social media they use is astroturfed to hell and back but marketing and advertising is far too demonized.
In a sense? Yes, and I don't care because other people are posting AI garbage everywhere and genuinely ruining things.
In another sense? Not really, because the one thing I've learned is that if the content couldn't work without the botted upvotes, it's not good worth posting.
The marketing posts I make are easily in top 1% of reddit content. That's not a hard bar to meet when you have more than an hour or two to spend on a single comment!
It's called Tragedy of the Commons, and it is just how things are unfortunately. I don't like it either, but if it wasn't this guy it would be someone else.
Well, it wouldn't be me, and it wouldn't be a lot of other people, so maybe it's not "just how it is", maybe some people are more willing to abuse the commons than others and we should be quicker to identify and condemn antisocial behavior instead of just shrugging and saying "Oh well, it's society's fault for failing to plug every possible profit motive for bad behavior"
I mod a couple subs on reddit, and one that is fairly famous. I see this stuff all the time, even if this person is lying. Its a real phenomenon. Usually its messy like "haha, my husband just loves these cookies" and with a link to the site and its obvious its spam, but stuff like this happens too.
I take some supplements for health reasons and its pretty obvious in that space too. I remember one day one brand of a certain something (which came from a no-name company and over-priced compared to competitors) was near everywhere in comments. In fact, people just referred to the product by the brand name, not the actual chemical. Eventually people got wise to it, and you'd see a "hey this is astroturfing," but the comments remain and if you google or reddit search this supplement, the top results are people raving about this one specific brand still. This stuff works and I imagine it works very well because it keeps happening.
Its also especially bad in women's spaces because there's so many competing brands of fashion or makeup or whatever. Much of it using stealth advertising, relationships with influencers who won't disclose its a paid partnership, etc. A lot of makeup brands get big almost soley because of internet engagement, so there's a strong incentive to try.
You can see this happening in realtime almost. Suddenly this face cream or this mascara is big on reddit, with new-ish accounts raving about them. I've noticed lately that they've been buying old accounts and repurposing them. I've dug into people's posting histories (a mod can see this if youre on their sub even if private) and the account is 5 years old that went silent 3 years ago and now is suddenly back but this time its someone purporting to be a woman, when the previous posting history is very male-coded and even may call himself a man in comments. I don't think we fully appreciate how fake this all is and how little will there is to fight it. This is also done politically too, especially around election season, but is generally happening all the time.
I remember tracking this stuff for a while when Stellar Blade came out, which had some fair accusations of male gaze-y marketing and graphics. There was no shortage of "I'm a woman gamer/developer, and Stellar Blade is actually not sexist, its empowering," posts and comments on a popular women's gaming sub. It was really incredible to see this and again, a lot of these accounts were recently awakened accounts from someone who did not fit the profile. There is so much bot PR. I won't even go into the Depp-Heard case because its a huge topic, but wow, that was a great example of bots controlling the narrative almost entirely.
And then it's picked up by LLMs as a fairly trusted organic source. It slightly peeves me how often LLM cites random reddit post as an authoritative trust worthy data point :-/
Why? It's not like I'm claiming some eight figure marketing contracts here.
This is totally accessible for even the smallest businesses. If you already understand how sites like reddit work, literally all you need to do is google "buy reddit upvotes" to get started.
I might as well lie about being a uber driver, the barrier to entry is higher.
Hello - it's me, the OP from the Reddit post. I saw the discussion here and felt I had to respond, because you've gone after my integrity and honesty - you have basically accused me of being a shill for Underwood, a clumsy astroturfer who makes things up. So, I would like to say a few things in reply.
First, I want to be absolutely clear that I am in no way, shape or form affiliated with Underwood. I have no relationship whatsoever with them or any other hot sauce company, for that matter. I do not work in marketing at all - I am actually a disputes lawyer. I knew about this whole fiasco because I had read about/summarized this particular issue for my brother (a Sriracha fan) years ago when it first came to light, as he wanted to know what happened. The reason why I posted that writeup is because there was a viral post on the KitchenConfidential subreddit the day before about Huy Fong using green chili peppers due to supply issues, and I saw a bunch of comments that were all over the place with approx a dozen different narratives regarding what happened that weren't based in anything tangible. I wanted to write something to set the record straight.
Second, the details are drawn from the court case itself. They were not cut from whole cloth. Underwood had a unanimous jury verdict in their favor that decided that the facts I listed were what actually happened. What that means is that a group of (I believe 12, in this case) people sat down, heard testimony from both sides, looked at all the evidence, and found, to a man, that that was what happened. You can try to wriggle out of this as much as you want and deny it, which you appear to be doing by expressing some pretty strong skepticism about the whole thing, but we have court processes for a reason. Juries tend to be pretty good at fact-finding. Also, I would highlight that the jury awarded punitive damages - you do NOT get those unless the conduct on behalf of one side has been truly reprehensible, reprehensibility literally being a criterion for awarding punitive damages. The fact is, Huy Fong was held liable for fraud/breach of contract and had to pay damages accordingly. They appealed and got publicly eviscerated by the Court of Appeal. Those are the facts. I repackaged them into a more user-friendly, non-legalese story. You are entitled to have an opinion on those facts, but you are not entitled to just handwave them away.
Third, it is patently obvious why Underwood sriracha gets mentioned every time this is brought up. Huy Fong screwed Underwood - Underwood suffered quite a bit, but came back and launched a competing product. People generally want to support the underdog. It's that simple. People don't mention Flying Goose or whatever because Huy Fong didn't screw over Flying Goose. If they did, then they would.
Uhm. What are you suggesting exactly? That Underwood somehow manipulated Huy Fong into screwing them over and then suing them, just so that they could get a good story out of it?
Do you think it's fabricated? You can read the exact same thing in the court judgement. It's barely any longer than the reddit comment.
It is a shame reddit lets people hide their post and comment history now so there can be no identifying signals about astro-turfing or bots. I'm sure this is ostensibly about preventing harassment, and in actuality about disguising bot behavior driving engagement. Or maybe I'm just extra cynical this morning.
Me in 2090 BC, “Seems like people keep retelling this Gilgamesh tale and embellishing it each time! I’m really smart so it must people trying to convince me to buy something.”
Why would the Epic of Gilgamesh want to sell you something? In contrast this Sriracha story clearly does want to sell you something. If you want to use an analogy at least use one that makes sense.
Maybe that's a post facto rationalized reason, as I'm sure it did draw in more tributes, but that's like saying folk tales across the world's sole purpose is to have sacrifices when in reality people just like making up and telling stories. It's like saying the apostles of Christ only spread his message to raise money for the Catholic Church, no doubt that was a side effect but it wasn't the "point" by any means, especially early on where there was no church.
Yes, the fact that I can even think so makes a case that it's possible to astroturf it. The same cannot be said of a folk tale, unless somehow it had its own interstitial ads between every chapter.
I wish there was a wall of shame blacklist for CEOs who pull unethical shit off. With reviews and ratings from everyone around them. Kind of like yelp, but for CEOs. Then, anyone who wants to start a new venture or giving them any money, can then go look em up there before signing a contract with these trash CEOs. Right now, they only get away with all this because it all happens under the table and not enough people know.
>The site was taken offline for two days in August 2002; Ford Motor Company law firm Howard Phillips & Andersen had threatened litigation against FC's upstream provider HostGator as a means of silencing a discussion of a series of layoffs entitled "Ford, where finding a job is job one." Ford claimed that it infringed a trademark slogan "Ford, where quality is job one," discontinued after widespread use from 1980 to 1997. The site eventually returned minus the news of the Ford layoffs.
Anybody remember that? How damaging were those threads to Ford, I wonder. Hurt executive pride the most?
It would be nice to aggregate all that and put it under a "profile". Kind of like facebook, but your entire profile feed is just the long list of court records, assholery and screw overs for other people. I actually saw a version that someone did for Jack (Twitter's ex founder) a few years ago and it was hilarious but cleverly informative. That's honestly where I got this idea from.
The most insane part of that is all the generally "normal" businesses who signed contracts with him despite this well publicized history. People like law firms with long histories.
Trump has always preferred dragging out a court battle to actually signing a small check for services rendered, and outright brags about it. He explicitly believes stiffing your contractors is what "Good business" means. Because he is a selfish child and getting stuff for free is his worldview.
But utter morons still line up to get shafted. I just don't understand.
I couldn't get a car loan because I have no credit history even though I had enough cash in the bank to buy the car yet people will still line up to suck the toe of someone with a known history of successfully screwing all their business partners.
Same with how his administration is full of people who don't recognize he will happily throw them under the bus for any reason even though that's all he has done for the past decade.
There is just a shocking inability for the common person to connect people to their history in the USA. The guy who started a trade war and caused prices to increase was voted in because prices were too high.
arguably is the reason why his business kept failing. you can only screw over suppliers a couple of times before the word gets out and no one wants to do business with you.
now they want the cash up front, and with sizable markups to CYA.
a reasonable person would try to unfuck that perception; instead Trump double-down on the grift
At one of my previous jobs, we were acquired by a company whose CEO had been caught for something involving bank fraud and was under a gag order not to talk about it. As far as I know they're still in business.
I knew this response would come up. Would you be okay to give Sam Bankman-Fried a leadership position? How about Martin Shkreli? Elizabeth Holmes? It's one thing to give someone that made a few minor mistakes a 2nd chance. It's another let a convicted child molester work at a kindergarden. Executives that committed fraud shouldn't be executives again.
I sympathize, and also tend to the left, but please, I beg of you, redefine violence to include long term, intentional creation and operation of fraudulent or harmful enterprise. It takes energy to keep doing things wrong to that degree, and without real signs of behavioral modification that stick, the safest damn thing to do is keep them the hell away.
Not just CEOs, but we also need it for investors. For example when startups screw over employees on equity, the founders, board members, and their firms, should all be on a public blacklist.
If someone is known to be a ghoster, a gaslighter, a bullshitter, or someone who isn't serious and wants to waste the time of founders, it should be known.
As a bolshie type myself, very quick to moan at higher-ups, I think we need to be realistic that often we grunts don't have the big picture (especially the politics) and unfortunately that won't stop somebody lowdown move from merely internal letting off steam to anonymous public borderline slander.
There is Glassdoor etc though for people who want to have their say; that all these platforms will be gamed and manipulated is a given.
Nah, nah, nah. Let me help you there. You don't have the big picture because you either haven't asked, or it hasn't been shared with you. If you ask, and you still don't have it, it's being intentionally hidden, or the person doesn't know/can't articulate the connection. One of these is a problem for the org. The other is potentially structurally beneficial for the org, but a massive problem for you. Feel free to guess which is which. I leave it as an exercise to the student.
Well, this kind of data actually exists. The key is to maintain anonymity. Glassdoor does it. You will see a lot of employees actually complain about management and seniors by name on there.
I wish there would just be laws against this type of behaviour, but we all know who is in control of which laws are getting passed. So short of that social shaming will have to do. A CEO that treated humans and/or the planet like dirt, should for example be unable to go to a restaurant, a bar, a park, down a road, onto a beach without getting thrown out or ridiculed, heckled or just called out by others. Behave like scum? Get treated like scum. Fuck with the tribe? Get thrown out. It is one of the oldest correctives for shit behavior any society has ever used in the history of humanity. The problem is they have created a world in which they have too many spaces to avoid this type of consequences.
Now of course within the rules of our society everyone should get a fair process. But these people are the ones who ignore and bend the rules the most and even have them rewritten. At some point when you play a game and you constantly have the other guy break the rules and bribe the referee to make ever more elaborate exceptions for them, at some point you just have to cancel the game and ensure it is never again played with that person on the field. They can watch from the sideline, but playing? Nope.
Now this should not target the occasional ethically neutral or even ethically responsible CEO, but I am afraid by that point it will be hard to have people see that difference anymore. It will come crashing down one way or another.
I think this Fortune story has a decent timeline of events and explains the perspective of both sides:
> At first, Underwood recalls, he was confused and hurt. “We were trying to figure out what the hell’s going on,” he tells me when I visit his offices in Camarillo, Calif., in December. “Because we were really vulnerable, both in the percentage of our business that he commanded—and I guess our belief that we were going to have a long-term relationship.” But he soon became convinced, Underwood tells me, that Tran’s intentions were bad, and had been for some time. “Basically, he really was out to destroy me,” he says. “He didn’t give a damn about me or our family or all that we’d done together.”
> Over at Huy Fong, feelings were similarly raw. Tran felt betrayed, and blindsided by accusations that he had been underhanded. For most of three decades, he had remained loyal to Underwood as his only pepper producer, and each year he had handed over millions on the promise of a harvest, a gesture that he saw as an act of faith. Now all that trust had collapsed in a petty argument over money.
> Tran has come to believe that Underwood was trying to drive him to bankruptcy, then steal his sauce business. “I helped him because he grew chili for me,” he says. “He made money, he owned land. But it is not enough. He wanted to take over my business.” It felt like being “stabbed in the back,” adds Donna Lam, Tran’s sister-in-law and executive operations officer.
That story actually pretty bad.. Court findings are pretty clear on this [0]:
> When Roberts arrived, Tran told him that he was forming a new company. Lam was going to operate the company. Tran told Roberts that Roberts would be working for the new company.
> When Roberts declined the job offer, Tran was not happy. Tran told Roberts that Underwood would have to deliver peppers for $500 per ton to compete with Chinese pepper mash that sold for $300 per ton. [...] Underwood was suddenly facing imminent catastrophic financial consequences. It could not grow peppers for $500 a ton. Its costs averaged $610 a ton. [...] Tran refused to provide Underwood with prepayments needed to finance the crop. Tran also insisted that Underwood contract with Chilico rather than Huy Fong.
OK, 8 days after agreeing on contract (!), the Huy Fong man tried to hire away Underwood's COO (Roberts), pushes hard for price below cost, refuses to provide money for planting, and tries to offload responsibility to a shell company. This sounds about as evil as it gets, and Underwood was right to refuse.
And what does the journalist say about this? "He wanted to take over my business"? "It felt like being "stabbed in the back""? I am sorry, I think that story author was fed some BS by Tran, and did not bother to verify it.
(Alternatively, maybe Tran has a explanation that makes sense for him... I'd like to hear the thoughts of someone who walks back on contract few days after it's made, and how they justify it to themselves - but sadly that fortune story does not have this)
I remember when Sriracha disappeared from the market for a while (2022?).
The story I heard at the time was heavily positive, talking up the handshakes and relationship angle - suggesting the supplier had a bad harvest (drought) so the manufacturer had decided not to produce sauce rather than produce an inferior product.
Either rumours or more lies - and a good way to help the market forget the earlier flavour and be grateful for a sloppier solution to 'return'?
Yeah, I remember the two parties accusing each other of essentially the same thing -- destroying a 25-year business relationship over short-term greed, for no good reason.
It's good to see the result of the court case, now at least we know who tried to screw who over.
They are referring to Huy Fong's Sriracha sauce. It's the one that took the market by storm. Even in small towns where the "Asian" section was practically empty, you could see the red bottle with the green cap. It even escaped the small corner of the grocery store to be displayed next to Heinz ketchup. For many, it was their first experience with hot sauce, apart from Tabasco.
In the US, Huy Fong was the only Sriracha that I ever saw (and commonly only on the west coast), until the very early 2000s.
My understanding was/is that Huy Fong could have trademarked the name in the US back then, but they chose not to based on the founder's humiity and/or naivete.
Somewhere around 2003(?), Sriracha (still only Huy Fong) became an Internet sensation and then very quickly there were a dozen brands available, all calling themselves Sriracha (legally OK), and often imitating the Huy Fong trade dress in sort-of subtle ways. Huy Fong pushed back on some of those imitators.
And then Huy Fong stopped being able to produce marketable volumes ("bad harvest" was the explanation at the time), and then it started tasting far less good, but still less bad than the others. Presumably this corresponds to their supplier change, which gives me a new appreciation for terroir.
I have never found another Sriracha that is comparable to Y2K-era Huy Fong. Modern Huy Fong is just OK. I don't think it would have become an Internet sensation if the product was always thus. I've tried at least 25 other brands, searching for that taste. So much disappointment!
The sriracha sauces one you mentioned are effectively copies of the sauce made and popularized in the US by Huy Fong.
So it's not so much that "sriracha is like ketchup" but just that you don't know the origin of the sauce. It's like saying "we have a lot of cola products in France, what's so special about Coca Cola?"
Now, if you were Thai that would be different story, as "sriracha" means a completely different sauce (and place) in Thailand, and thus more "generic"
I don't know what tariffs you guys have put on foreign sauces these days but the Flying Goose brand made in Thailand is the only brand that tastes right to me.
If we’re talking alternatives, the Three Mountain Yellow Sriracha became our staple at home during the shortage. We still use red for a variety of sauces but rarely as a direct condiment.
I’m sure that in the Boston area we’d have had no trouble rustling up half a dozen or more.
We now live in Vermont. The options are pretty much limited to Huy Fong. Reese makes a vastly inferior product that doesn’t belong on the same shelf that can be found in some supermarkets. I know two Asian grocery stores (neither of which specializes on any particular country to my uninformed eye). They’re both small enough that they aren’t stocking hundreds of varieties of any single sauce.
So yeah. Credit to Huy Fong for capturing the mindshare with a quality product and getting available basically nationwide.
In places with Asian grocery stores, or cities with larger Asian isles, yes - we have tons of options. But sriracha is widely loved, many people have never heard of sambal but use sriracha all day.
I agree many Americans wouldn't have a clue if you just asked them for sambal but if you said "that spicy chili paste in the jar at Asian restaurants" they'd know exactly what you're talking about.
While similar I don't think sambal oelek and sriracha are the same. Sambal oelek is typically pretty chunky, sriracha is usually very smooth. Sambal oelek will be pretty much just vinegar, salt, and peppers while sriracha will be sweeter and have garlic.
In urban areas its not necessarily too hard to find a variety of both. Going further out it'll get harder, so the brand presence of sriracha will often win for the spot of the sole Asian-style spicy sauce on the store shelf. Asian restaurants will typically have one or the other. I think a lot of Americans prefer sriracha partially because of the brand presence but also because of its smoother texture. Americans have tended to use a squeeze bottle for condiments more, having a jar to spoon things out just isn't quite as popular. Even things like relish, jelly, and sour cream these days are moving towards squeeze packages instead of jars and tubs.
Americans don’t know anything besides name brands. We used to have a healthy diverse culture and small businesses that differed from state to state but our reliance on importing has killed any notion of that. When the rich invade cities the first thing to show up is a Starbucks and the first thing to close is the local diner.
Off-topic: After visiting a Reddit link via Hacker News on my phone, my Reddit layout is unusable. How do I get out of old Reddit and back to something usable?
Yes, I agree, but the old one is unusable on mobile, and visiting old.reddit.com forces me to keep using it until I logout and login again, which is also awful
That doesn’t work, but that’s not your fault! I think it’s setting some cookie or something, which makes this annoying to deal with. Anyway, thanks for the reply
Yep this was a very controversial thing when it happened. They tried to squeeze the farmer who supplied all their peppers from their earliest days - why would you do that unless you have no morality? And now the Huy Fong Sriracha tastes different, and Underwood’s own Sriracha is actually what tastes best.
I’m glad to hear there was a happy ending to the epic greediness and underhanded tactics of Huy Fong:
> Later, obviously, there's a lawsuit. Funnily enough, it wasn't actually Underwood who sued Huy Fong. It was Huy Fong who sued Underwood, seeking refunds for payments it had made earlier under their contracts. Underwood turned around and counterclaimed for breach of contract and fraud and a bunch of other shit. Underwood succeeded - there was a unanimous jury verdict in their favor - and got awarded about $13 million in compensatory damages, and another $10 million in punitive damages (these are only awarded where you've done something so outrageous that it's quasi-criminal; it's to deter other people from doing similar things).
On the Reddit thread it was said that underwood hasn’t quite exactly nailed the, I guess viscosity because “consistency” has other connotations and if anything they seem to be more consistent.
I love that they had to buy chilis on the open market because their supplier fired the customer. Mostly because I’ve hardly ever gotten to fire a customer. Even when they really should have.
It's weird that supposedly clever people cannot see beyond "this number goes down/up now" to "this is not immediately beneficial, but it keeps our company healthier in the long run".
Nothing against Underwood or Siracha in general, so buy what you want but $12 dollars per bottle is crazy, unless this is your favorite thing ever. So many other flavors to discover, and they wont be warehoused for months.
AFAIK physical supermarkets and Costco that carry these usually sell them for $4-5 per 17oz/500g. This is just the classic distribution problem with ethnic foods.
Hot sauce is pretty easy to make if you're inclined to go that route. You only need a scale and a blender, and some basic kitchen skills. You get to explore a lot and control for flavour / heat with adding stuff to the mix. Plenty of good content on yt you can get inspiration from.
It's also something you can make into a hobby. You can go as low effort as buying fresh peppers from a market when in season, or start growing yourself. Growing can be anywhere from extremely low maintenance (i.e. just water them from time to time and leave them on a window sill) or get into advanced stuff like pruning, soil ph, cross pollination and all that stuff. Some peppers are prolific growers, and you get fresh peppers, pepper paste, chili flakes and sauce from a potentially low effort hobby. And they make some nice gifts as well.
Counter-argument: we're talking about saving a handful of bucks for something that lasts months. Do it if you find it fun - I tried it and didn't like the work nor spice under my fingernails, at all.
My preferences in cooking are like software: high level is fun (cooking dishes), low level is annoying (growing or producing ingredients).
I also like making cocktails. A brief try with homemade coffee licqueurs was disappointing - knowing a couple of good brands, I can buy and enjoy them, no hassle. Closest to preparing ingredients I do is occasionally doing batches of "super juice", where you squeeze a bunch of limes and add some conservatives and enhancers (and water), that increase the yield, flavor and shelf life by a lot. Then it's really practical to just use the juice like a normal ingredient, versus having the cytrus available having to squeeze them and having more stuff to clean.
I've tried getting started with this but my first attempt a habanero/mango sauce was _horrible_, must've used a slop recipe or something. Do you have a good base to recommend?
Depends on purchasing power, how much sauce you consume, value added/quality - $12 is often not much, cost of two sandwiches, or 4-pack of beer, half price of one lunch meal, 1/3rd of Netflix subscription, etc... What's crazy is $200 plain cotton white t-shirt, but i.e. $150 merino t-shirt isn't that crazy anymore.
I bought two bottles a few months back. It doesn’t taste good.
Meanwhile Huy Fong rooster sauce went from a nice red hue to a weird red green puke hue. If it was that color at the start, I’m not sure I would have tried it. The taste seems to be the same though. Regardless, it’s hard to support a company that’s lost so much good will. They should have just increased prices just like everyone else
I loved their dry seasoning [1]. Bought some when I visited the bay area several years back and used to use it on everything from toasts to pasta. Sadly, haven't visited US since to be able to pick up some more :-(
How much sauce are you putting on your food though? 17% sugar is bad in a drink where it adds up fast, but for a hot sauce where you're using maybe 2 teaspoons max (likely less), that's like 1-2 grams of sugar. Essentially a rounding error in your daily intake.
Sure, you can skip sugar entirely if you want to. But then you're getting a different flavor entirely. Southeast Asian stuff is often sweet and spicy and gets that flavor through sugar. No way around it, unless you're using artificial sweeteners.
It isn't hard to make your own hot sauce to your own tastes. I grow my own chillis, lacto ferment them with shop bought pineapple and add mango and vinegar. Tastes far better than most shop bought sauces IMHO.
There is a place for simple hot sauces, because you don't want to add additional flavours. Sometimes all you want is straight up chilis.
More complex hot sauces might include dried shrimp, fermented soy, lemon grass, dried mushrooms, but those flavours might not be desirable in some dishes. And some dishes require specific hot sauces because they are an integral part of the flavour profile (Mapo tofu, Tom Yum).
I would just like to interject for a moment. Mapo tofu does not use 'hot sauce' as understood in the common parlance. It uses doubanjiang, a very specific fermented paste of chilis and broad beans. It is not saucy; it's very thick like gochujang. I take issue with calling doubanjiang hot sauce and I really don't want anyone to try to make mapo tofu with normal hot sauce.
I’ve never really been a fan of it as a direct condiment so I’m inclined to agree.
I think the first time I tried it was about 15 years ago. Out to lunch at a bahn mi spot with coworkers and all the guys were drenching their sandwiches in the stuff. I think in that context it’s overpowering and awful and ruins a good sandwich. Preferentially, I love the Three Mountain Yellow Sriracha as a condiment for a lettuce wrap or a sandwich.
Where I feel red sriracha is a staple item is making sauces and marinades. Whenever I’m making vaguely Thai peanut sauces at home for a pad Thai or a satay it’s the #2 ingredient after the peanut butter itself and often at a 1:1 ratio. Combined with all the other ingredients it mellows out the harsh flavors and makes a wonderful layered sauce.
They have a spicy ketchup product that I liked, tho it has disappeared from my local stores. At the time I first noticed it at the store it was the hottest one that also matched the thick consistency I expect from ketchup.
> I don't know why people like Sriracha anyway. It just tastes of "hot" and vinegar.
Nope, also of garlic.
"I don't like $PopularThing" is always a boring take. Other people clearly like it if it's popular.
It is known since ancient times, De gustibus non est disputandum (1): Tastes differ, so it's pointless to dispute matters of taste as if there's a correct answer.
When I see a company this big screwing over their partner after 20 years of partnership for some lousy tens of millions of dollars (which is probably peanuts compared to worldwide profits), I immediately think that everything is not as simple as it seems.
In this post, Underwood is obviously a virtuous, hard working victim and the sriracha guys are the villains. I don’t believe that there are good and bad companies and I firmly believe that there is some underlying reason for this situation.
The court awarded $10M in punitive damages in addition to the $13M in compensatory damages. So the options are basically "Huy Fong's lawyers are criminally incompetent" or "Huy Fong absolutely screwed over their supplier".
By way of contrast, I've seen so many corporations led by deranged idiots who used to make good decisions within their realm of competence that I have no trouble believing that Huy Fong decided that they could completely dominate Underwood, and were very wrong.
The more power a person believes they have, the stupider they act.
Quoth wikipedia: "The jury unanimously ruled in favor of Underwood on the grounds of breach of contract and fraud."
This story and its retellings appear on Reddit's front page every two months like clockwork.
https://www.reddit.com/search/?q=huy+fong
Each time it gets retold, the sriracha cartoon villain's mustache grows longer and more twirled.
Somehow, Underwood Ranches' competing product never gets failed to get mentioned in a top comment, along with all the places you can buy it, how much better/hotter it tastes, and how superior its ingredients are.
I've never seen something so obviously and clumsily astroturfed, yet be so effective. Their entire growth strategy is enemy positioning on social media. You gotta hand it to the COO (who according to the story he's crafted is the loyal and virtuous hero) as he's running circles around the incompetent and out-of-touch management at sriricha who likely have no idea what's going on.
It appears sheer spite and vengeance is what brought Underwood Ranches back from the brink of bankruptcy. Now that's a genuine American success story.
The shortage caused by the dispute between Underwood and Huy Fong was huge news at the time, there are millions of customers loyal to the brand and millions of customers saddened by the fall in quality. I don’t know if Underwood are astroturfing, maybe they are, but this is one of the few stories where this coverage could be entirely organic. If Coca Cola had a similar dispute that led to the flavor of Coke changing, you’d see even more posts like this from real people.
There’s also the slopification of the internet to consider. The human centipede style pass through of a story across platform after platform means the same story appears again and again and again. And that’s happening more and more as time goes on. One YouTube video that generates a few hundred thousand views can spawn hundreds of other videos, posts, tweets, podcasts… all across the internet.
The keen cynics of Hacker News have unmasked seven of the last three major astroturfing campaigns.
Don’t know what it is about geek culture that leans so conspiratorial.
Sometimes I play a game; before clicking to read comments I try to come up with what the conspiracies will be. This one was obvious (since I’m familiar with the story).
> If Coca Cola had a similar dispute that led to the flavor of Coke changing, you’d see even more posts like this from real people.
similar to https://x.com/JenMsft/status/1381640311357628420/photo/1 : corporations need to understand that people don't have conversations where they randomly recommend carbonated beverages to each other
Actually people recommend products they like to friends all the time. For example, here's you recommending a random windows feature[1].
[1] https://x.com/JarekLupinski/status/1303766512541589504
No? I have recommended Freestyle sugar free soda as a way to replace heavy CocaCola consumption. Here in Mexico it's a big problem, and I helped me get out of the addiction. ( add Allulose to the soda to add the sweet)
It's about the "Um Acktually"
It's a dopamine hit. It's addicting. The medium of the internet seems to add to this where most interactions are conversationally broken, because a thread is a bunch of people airdropping thoughts and never really coming back to back up their arguments or admit something was wrong.
The brain wants things to be simple so rewards you for simple solutions that are "better" and totally ignores complexity and nuance and reality because those are energetically expensive things to pay attention to.
This comment is self demonstrating.
a sizable portion of the HN geek demographic are in the online change-what-people's-behavior-is line of work -- google, bing, etc.
when you are in the business of making money off of this, and you know how it works, it's not hard to see it.
probably because the most obvious "it's exactly as described" is the most boring and uninteresting conclusion, thus you make it more interesting by proposing that it's a big conspiracy
Same as any other conspiratorial thinking: they hold themselves in too high a regard and want to think they’re privy to some secret knowledge that the rubes have missed.
>Don’t know what it is about geek culture that leans so conspiratorial.
The #1 goal one needs to accomplish to render an environment safe for the execution of conspiratorial activity, is to inure the occupants of said environment to the possibility of conspiratorial action taking place. Apriori dismissal shuts down game theoretic behavioral modeling in the operational loop, rendering concerted acts of manipulation near invisible. It's why Hanlon's Razor is both a heuristic for organizational productivity and alignment, and one of the greatest foundational psyops of all time. Assuming benevolent intent of other actors makes it easier to get things done, but makes it nigh impossible to defend oneself against actual malicious intent. Geekdom is one of the few niches where most participants routinely value depth first vs. breadth first knowledge. Deep understanding of behavior, and the nature of motivated reasoning and modelling asymmetry of information with regards to intent quickly makes assumption of benevolent intent a realistically untenable posture to maintain unconditionally. In big business or contexts that tend toward near zero-sum anyway. Is it exhausting? Absolutely. Does it keep you safe from people? Hell yes. Does it make life fun? That depends on the general character of the people you're generally surrounded by I suppose.
I think its naive to think capitalism doesnt lead to dirty tricks. There's tons of PR and stealth marketing out there. The idea that our system is all "honest good guys" doesn't fit in with the facts.
like half of HN exists to stealthily market startup stuff -- its a link site run by a tech incubator.
> Don’t know what it is about geek culture that leans so conspiratorial.
It’s much wider. This is why QAnon and contemporary fascism spread. People love a story.
The QAA podcast deep-dives explaining conspiratorial thinking. They started with QAnon and then expanded. The episodes on the Queen of Canada (Romana Didulo) were especially interesting. She’s a dangerous person and so are her followers. Sovereign citizens, too (though they’ve abandoned that term). Think Freemen in Montana in the 90s.
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It would be interesting if google or some agent with enough frequent crawls of most social media could make visualizations over the years of certain viral stories and how they propagate in waves across the internet over time and how those waves interact. Would be a cool research project. Similar to Google Trends but internet-wide with some graph visualizations.
Paul Graham wrote about the entanglement of news and PR companies over 20 years ago: https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
It wouldn't surprise me if something similar is happening with social media and indeed a lot of the news is astroturfed to some extent, though I agree we shouldn't discount the extent to which people are willing to participate in this by reposting popular content for a quick ego/karma boost. And increasingly that reposting is done by bots.
I don’t know if Underwood are astroturfing, maybe they are, but this is one of the few stories where this coverage could be entirely organic.
There are a few competing products on my supermarket's shelf (FWIW, Underwood's is not among them), but only Underwood's gets mentioned in the post. Where there's smoke, there's fire.
You can't buy it through Amazon or Costco or HEB (their main outlets, apparently) at the moment, and there's a rumor that they've gone out of business.
They started making the hot sauce years after the main events referred to in the lawsuit.
Their socials are silent and the website is a godaddy landing page with just their logo.
I don't think these people are savvy submarine astroturfers.
If they did go out of business it's a shame, I buy their sauce by the boxful every year or so. It is legitimately better quality. Chili garlic sauce and sambal are also great.
I promise you I am not on the Underwood payroll, but it is definitely one of the better Sriracha alternatives. That it gives you a feel-good of supporting a sort-of-underdog, of course people are going to be drawn to it.
I think you are underestimating the love of the original Sriracha.
Nothing stopping both from being true. The court judgements[0] aren't faked. It genuinely appears Underwood really was screwed over. That said, it doesn't take much for a CMO to look at the situation and figure out how to market the product from there. Something something lemonade.
Only reason I mention that is that is you're not really faking the grassroots part if you really do have a good origin story--you just got... lucky?
[0] https://cases.justia.com/california/court-of-appeal/2021-b30...
Additionally, it's not like this necessarily got posted out of the blue. There's another Huy Fong sriracha shortage due to a Mexican crop failure driven by climate change. So anyone wondering why they can't buy it will naturally encounter this story.
https://lacabaarodriguez.shop/news/127/2026-03-06-huy-fong-f...
And as you mentioned, that lawsuit has pretty convincing evidence of a multi-year plan to really screw the supplier in order to get even more fantastically wealthy. Amazing greed combined with profound stupidity about the difficulty of reliably sourcing 2 _thousand_ acres of ripe chilies. There's been a decade of rolling shortages.
A note of caution on this line of thinking. Pretty much every story you'll ever hear about a commercial subject is going to a) be incomplete and inaccurate, and b) seem beneficial to one party in the story. That's just how stories work.
You can spend your entire online life seeing ghosts of astroturfing in everything you read. Like, how do we know that Huy Fong didn't pay you to come here on HN to neg the Reddit story that makes them look bad? You're stuck trying to prove a negative: impossible.
There is a reason accusations of astroturfing are against the HN guidelines, and it's this: in the absence of evidence, anything opinionated could be astroturfing... or it could not. Which makes it completely useless as a heuristic. It feels like smart skepticism, but it does not actually add any substance to the conversation.
To be fair, if I had a company and won a lawsuit like that... a lawsuit which makes for a good underdog story, I'd let my PR team use it as much as they desire! That lawsuit is a golden asset for them now.
A lot of reddit does not seem to be aware that a huge amount of the content is totally fake, astroturfing, etc. Soon, the "product site:reddit.com" will be just as useless as Amazon reviews.
Been that way a long time, maybe always was. Bad behavior is often rewarded, compelling lies gain more upvotes than truth and there's little consequence for shitposting.
I think it's gotten a bit worse as the platform has grown since there's more reward, astroturfing gets more eyes and is more effective, posts in general can get more karma so more fake internet points.
It was pretty amazing in the early days. It has been bad for a while. The current era is definitely something new, though. Popular subreddits are mostly worthless, and the platform both cannot control all the bots and astroturfing, but also their attempts to do so have degraded the experience for the average user.
"You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain."
Was active on Reddit a long time ago, there's a liminal band of popularity in which a service tends to offer the best experience. Enough interest to be good, not enough interest to make it shitty or incentivize abuse.
It's difficult to remain in that band particularly because at some point you have to actively fight growth, not sure HN is all that immune either. I think HN tries to stay in that band via it's archaic UI and somewhat intimidating culture.
Yep, I think that's right. Even if reddit, its company, and its moderators were all perfect, it might still crumble and become awful under the weight of its popularity. Too many bad actors, too many companies astroturfing, not enough monetization to solve these problems. And of course the site, the company, and the moderators are far from perfect.
gotten worse since 2015, and you can see the big drop off after LLMs get big in ~2021
A lot don't care if it is. I've had friends share things and I stopped replying with "you know this isn't a true story/fact/real image, right?". Their response is always "idk i thought it was funny/interesting" which is valid. I felt like I was raining on parades so now I usually just respond with an emoji.
> "idk i thought it was funny/interesting" which is valid
Ha, I don't know your friends but in my experience that's like a textbook phrase people use to try to play off being duped when they're clued in
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The problem is though that even if they "just think it's funny", over time it gets built into their worldview.
It's like people who only consume TV shows and movies, they know it's all fiction, but if you talk to them about how the world works, you realize that all their mental structures are based on Hollywood tropes.
This even tracks to reddit, where everyone knows it's bullshit and reddit is dumb, but their entire perception of the world is still reddit's dumb views anyway.
They have a whole "That Happened" subreddit just for the rubbish that people post, let alone AIs.
'Everything is astroturf' is such a boring and cynical worldview. Its good to be suspicious, but not at the cost of joy. Underwood sauce is good. They got screwed over. Sometimes a story is just a story.
How many of the credulous responses are themselves bot-generated to make the original sound more believable?
Reading some the comments on this thread reveals one of the main reasons why a campaign like this is necessary if you're Underwood. Huy Fong has achieved "category king" status in this space; most people don't know what Huy Fong is, that red sauce is called "Sriracha". Huy Fong knows quite well that as long as the sauce still comes in that bottle and tastes like chilis, 99% of their customers will still buy it. Making a dent in this segment beyond foodies and hot-sauce enthusiasts requires some guerrilla marketing and and public education.
I do this kind of marketing on reddit. It's so incredibly easy.
Upvotes cost nothing, and even if someone figures out the astroturfing, you just spend a dollar or two and bury them in downvotes.
One of my favorite tactics is just to use throwaway accounts to keep repeatedly asking variations of the same question "What x should I get for y?" and then consistently replying from my main shilling account with variations of "Hey, this gets posted ALL THE TIME but here is what I suggested previously and people seemed to like it ...". This way I can just keep recycling the same high-effort copy endlessly.
The reddit shills you spot are either lazy or idiots. There's no chance you'd ever suspect any of my biggest earning posts, simply because they're entirely consistent with the other content in the community and could have naturally achieved similar levels of upvotes had I just been lucky. But with bots I don't have to be lucky.
People on HN won't like that you do this but at least you're honest, and showing that this does actually happen, it's just that others are not so loud (at least sometimes, see the link below). This sort of thing is very common on reddit, there are even articles and studies about said astroturfing.
Due to the cyclical nature of posts and the exhausted moderators trying to mod all of them, it's quite effective for "organic" growth. Many companies use these methods to grow, because it's way cheaper than paying for ads and users online are simply too gullible to catch on. And even if they did, you can just delete the thread and make a new one later on.
It's the same strategy used in TikTok where the influencer subtly hints at the product rather than overtly talking about it (perhaps as one slide in a slideshow), and then when a commenter asks what they used, the influencer replies with the name of the product.
For example [0], there have been large scale astroturfing campaigns for things like games, posting large numbers of comments to influence users.
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1ot0nvg/game_dev_adm...
Personally I don't like that they do that, not that they are pointing out that they do that.
Yes I should've said, people on HN don't like that they do that, or that it happens at all, but the reality is that it does and especially for people on a forum run by a startup accelerator in particular (with tons of Ask HN questions on how to grow their product via marketing), posting on social media is one of the most effective ways to grow, whether people like it or not.
If this is true, it implies that such marketing on Reddit is not worth much. Because if a marketing tactic is easy and effective, intense competition will drive up the price of doing so.
Conversely if Reddit astroturfing was actually valuable, "upvotes cost nothing" could not be true. Like, we know that Meta and Google ads are effective, and those cost something. Not because they're hard to do, but because everyone is trying to do them at once.
> Because if a marketing tactic is easy and effective, intense competition will drive up the price of doing so.
will it? who is occupying and competing in that space, in a business sense? and are they using reddit? if so, which subs and who are they targeted at?
the various build-a-PC subs are a great example -- they have ones for high end GPUs -- literally, r/gpu -- and others for more generic uses. you can shill all-day on r/buildapcsales and do well without having to battle on the more general buildapc
in a broader sense, building consensus is critical, and plenty of businesses or political entities are willing to take huge losses to completely corral public perception -- most notably the purchase of Paramount by everyone's least favorite villian Larry E
You think GPU manufacturers are paying people to post fake positive comments all day in /r/buildapcsales in the hopes of materially increasing their revenue?
I've thought about this same thing a lot, and the only explanation for the current state of affairs I can come up with is that marketers that have a good enough understanding of these communities are hard to come by.
It's also likely that many businesses are simply too risk averse to engage in things like purchasing farmed reddit accounts and upvotes.
Oh, there’s risk? Somehow you forgot to mention that in your post about how incredibly easy it is.
I’m sure it’s possible to make small amounts of money with Reddit bots, just like it’s possible to make small amounts of money with email spam, and posting AI slop to Facebook and X, and SMS scams.
The idea that major brands do this habitually, is what I’m objecting to.
>I’m sure it’s possible to make small amounts of money with Reddit bots, just like it’s possible to make small amounts of money with email spam, and posting AI slop to Facebook and X, and SMS scams.
I'm getting clients who are each spending a minimum of 500k USD pa on services.
There's a very wide variety of eyeballs you can reach on reddit. It's everything from people inserting impressively large items in their body to people trading eye-wateringly expensive jewelry from cult brands like Chrome Hearts and nerds discussing enterprise telco equipment and EDR platforms.
But sure, I don't think it scales.
>The idea that major brands do this habitually, is what I’m objecting to.
I doubt major brands do this habitually. There are countless smaller players who do.
You should be ashamed of manipulating people for profit, not proud of it.
If someone reads the reddit post and decides to buy the Sriracha competitor then who has been ripped off? It's a win-win, competitor has gotten business and the customer has bought a product they now perceive to be superior.
People should probably be more aware that the social media they use is astroturfed to hell and back but marketing and advertising is far too demonized.
Advertising without disclosing to sponsorship is literally illegal because we as a society have decided that it's a social ill.
Yeah whatever.
I'm largely indifferent, but the products I promote are good and the customers spending 500k+ pa on the services I sell are not unsophisticated.
So you're one of the reasons everything is shit. Got it.
In a sense? Yes, and I don't care because other people are posting AI garbage everywhere and genuinely ruining things.
In another sense? Not really, because the one thing I've learned is that if the content couldn't work without the botted upvotes, it's not good worth posting.
The marketing posts I make are easily in top 1% of reddit content. That's not a hard bar to meet when you have more than an hour or two to spend on a single comment!
It's called Tragedy of the Commons, and it is just how things are unfortunately. I don't like it either, but if it wasn't this guy it would be someone else.
Well, it wouldn't be me, and it wouldn't be a lot of other people, so maybe it's not "just how it is", maybe some people are more willing to abuse the commons than others and we should be quicker to identify and condemn antisocial behavior instead of just shrugging and saying "Oh well, it's society's fault for failing to plug every possible profit motive for bad behavior"
GP is from a long line of enshittificators: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47218815
I mod a couple subs on reddit, and one that is fairly famous. I see this stuff all the time, even if this person is lying. Its a real phenomenon. Usually its messy like "haha, my husband just loves these cookies" and with a link to the site and its obvious its spam, but stuff like this happens too.
I take some supplements for health reasons and its pretty obvious in that space too. I remember one day one brand of a certain something (which came from a no-name company and over-priced compared to competitors) was near everywhere in comments. In fact, people just referred to the product by the brand name, not the actual chemical. Eventually people got wise to it, and you'd see a "hey this is astroturfing," but the comments remain and if you google or reddit search this supplement, the top results are people raving about this one specific brand still. This stuff works and I imagine it works very well because it keeps happening.
Its also especially bad in women's spaces because there's so many competing brands of fashion or makeup or whatever. Much of it using stealth advertising, relationships with influencers who won't disclose its a paid partnership, etc. A lot of makeup brands get big almost soley because of internet engagement, so there's a strong incentive to try.
You can see this happening in realtime almost. Suddenly this face cream or this mascara is big on reddit, with new-ish accounts raving about them. I've noticed lately that they've been buying old accounts and repurposing them. I've dug into people's posting histories (a mod can see this if youre on their sub even if private) and the account is 5 years old that went silent 3 years ago and now is suddenly back but this time its someone purporting to be a woman, when the previous posting history is very male-coded and even may call himself a man in comments. I don't think we fully appreciate how fake this all is and how little will there is to fight it. This is also done politically too, especially around election season, but is generally happening all the time.
I remember tracking this stuff for a while when Stellar Blade came out, which had some fair accusations of male gaze-y marketing and graphics. There was no shortage of "I'm a woman gamer/developer, and Stellar Blade is actually not sexist, its empowering," posts and comments on a popular women's gaming sub. It was really incredible to see this and again, a lot of these accounts were recently awakened accounts from someone who did not fit the profile. There is so much bot PR. I won't even go into the Depp-Heard case because its a huge topic, but wow, that was a great example of bots controlling the narrative almost entirely.
And then it's picked up by LLMs as a fairly trusted organic source. It slightly peeves me how often LLM cites random reddit post as an authoritative trust worthy data point :-/
[flagged]
Why? It's not like I'm claiming some eight figure marketing contracts here.
This is totally accessible for even the smallest businesses. If you already understand how sites like reddit work, literally all you need to do is google "buy reddit upvotes" to get started.
I might as well lie about being a uber driver, the barrier to entry is higher.
That's Reddit for you. I wonder how few topics you could condense the most posts into?
Hello - it's me, the OP from the Reddit post. I saw the discussion here and felt I had to respond, because you've gone after my integrity and honesty - you have basically accused me of being a shill for Underwood, a clumsy astroturfer who makes things up. So, I would like to say a few things in reply.
First, I want to be absolutely clear that I am in no way, shape or form affiliated with Underwood. I have no relationship whatsoever with them or any other hot sauce company, for that matter. I do not work in marketing at all - I am actually a disputes lawyer. I knew about this whole fiasco because I had read about/summarized this particular issue for my brother (a Sriracha fan) years ago when it first came to light, as he wanted to know what happened. The reason why I posted that writeup is because there was a viral post on the KitchenConfidential subreddit the day before about Huy Fong using green chili peppers due to supply issues, and I saw a bunch of comments that were all over the place with approx a dozen different narratives regarding what happened that weren't based in anything tangible. I wanted to write something to set the record straight.
Second, the details are drawn from the court case itself. They were not cut from whole cloth. Underwood had a unanimous jury verdict in their favor that decided that the facts I listed were what actually happened. What that means is that a group of (I believe 12, in this case) people sat down, heard testimony from both sides, looked at all the evidence, and found, to a man, that that was what happened. You can try to wriggle out of this as much as you want and deny it, which you appear to be doing by expressing some pretty strong skepticism about the whole thing, but we have court processes for a reason. Juries tend to be pretty good at fact-finding. Also, I would highlight that the jury awarded punitive damages - you do NOT get those unless the conduct on behalf of one side has been truly reprehensible, reprehensibility literally being a criterion for awarding punitive damages. The fact is, Huy Fong was held liable for fraud/breach of contract and had to pay damages accordingly. They appealed and got publicly eviscerated by the Court of Appeal. Those are the facts. I repackaged them into a more user-friendly, non-legalese story. You are entitled to have an opinion on those facts, but you are not entitled to just handwave them away.
Third, it is patently obvious why Underwood sriracha gets mentioned every time this is brought up. Huy Fong screwed Underwood - Underwood suffered quite a bit, but came back and launched a competing product. People generally want to support the underdog. It's that simple. People don't mention Flying Goose or whatever because Huy Fong didn't screw over Flying Goose. If they did, then they would.
That's basically what I wanted to communicate.
Uhm. What are you suggesting exactly? That Underwood somehow manipulated Huy Fong into screwing them over and then suing them, just so that they could get a good story out of it?
Do you think it's fabricated? You can read the exact same thing in the court judgement. It's barely any longer than the reddit comment.
They are clearly suggesting that the story recurring every two months is Astro-turfed, not that the story itself is false?
It is a shame reddit lets people hide their post and comment history now so there can be no identifying signals about astro-turfing or bots. I'm sure this is ostensibly about preventing harassment, and in actuality about disguising bot behavior driving engagement. Or maybe I'm just extra cynical this morning.
Just go to the profile in question and search their profile with an empty query; that'll show all the hidden comments and posts.
Edit: at least on the web variant, it looks like they finally blocked that ability.
IIRC you just have to use an asterisk or something now, and I think the search is broken on OldReddit…
Here I was foolishly thinking AstroTurf meant false grass
Well, it implies that the "grassroots" element of it is fake, the message itself being false is optional.
Huh, I didn't realise it was that specific, I thought it just meant/came from 'covering everything with crap'.
Me in 2090 BC, “Seems like people keep retelling this Gilgamesh tale and embellishing it each time! I’m really smart so it must people trying to convince me to buy something.”
Why would the Epic of Gilgamesh want to sell you something? In contrast this Sriracha story clearly does want to sell you something. If you want to use an analogy at least use one that makes sense.
The point of heroic tales such as Gilgamesh was to draw tribute and sacrifices to the temple of Ishtar. The analogy makes perfect sense.
Maybe that's a post facto rationalized reason, as I'm sure it did draw in more tributes, but that's like saying folk tales across the world's sole purpose is to have sacrifices when in reality people just like making up and telling stories. It's like saying the apostles of Christ only spread his message to raise money for the Catholic Church, no doubt that was a side effect but it wasn't the "point" by any means, especially early on where there was no church.
> Maybe that's a post facto rationalized reason
Isn't this what you're doing with the idea that the Sri Racha story is obviously meant to sell?
One is plausible as the primary reason, with documented instances of it happening, as I had linked before, while the other is mere conjecture.
You think this Sriracha story wants to sell you something.
Yes, the fact that I can even think so makes a case that it's possible to astroturf it. The same cannot be said of a folk tale, unless somehow it had its own interstitial ads between every chapter.
It was all about Shamhat's OnlyFans clay tablet.
People sell things by telling stories. Sometimes those stories are interstitial ads and sometimes they are not.
If you can't tell the difference between an ancient poem and an astroturfing reddit post then I'm not sure how to convince you there is one.
I wish there was a wall of shame blacklist for CEOs who pull unethical shit off. With reviews and ratings from everyone around them. Kind of like yelp, but for CEOs. Then, anyone who wants to start a new venture or giving them any money, can then go look em up there before signing a contract with these trash CEOs. Right now, they only get away with all this because it all happens under the table and not enough people know.
Well there used to be fuckedcompany.com that served a similar purpose. Of course it was litigated into history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company
>The site was taken offline for two days in August 2002; Ford Motor Company law firm Howard Phillips & Andersen had threatened litigation against FC's upstream provider HostGator as a means of silencing a discussion of a series of layoffs entitled "Ford, where finding a job is job one." Ford claimed that it infringed a trademark slogan "Ford, where quality is job one," discontinued after widespread use from 1980 to 1997. The site eventually returned minus the news of the Ford layoffs.
Anybody remember that? How damaging were those threads to Ford, I wonder. Hurt executive pride the most?
That's an awesome domain name, tbh.
Polite warning for anyone trying to Google the name. "Fucked company" results in porn listings (but I should have seen this coming tbh)
:')
FC wasn't litigated into history, it just had its moment and then passed and pud moved on to do other things.
I suppose court records can function as such a list.
If you also want 'alledged assholery' on that list, the list will just turn into a list of CEOs, due to false reports.
It would be nice to aggregate all that and put it under a "profile". Kind of like facebook, but your entire profile feed is just the long list of court records, assholery and screw overs for other people. I actually saw a version that someone did for Jack (Twitter's ex founder) a few years ago and it was hilarious but cleverly informative. That's honestly where I got this idea from.
Why stop at CEOs?? If you implement this for everybody then I will know who to sell my used car to and who is an unworthy jerk!
Given the vast over representation of sociopathy and malignant narcissism in CEOs it’s going to be most CEOs even if you filter out false claims.
But if you’re gonna hate someone it’s good if you have a real reason to do so instead of bullshit and rumors.
> false reports.
Are you sure they're false?
Are we sure that some reports of every person are false? Of course we are.
It won’t help. At my second job the president hired a VP with a white collar criminal record and told everyone not to bring it up
The POTUS is well known for screwing over contractors and lenders. It clearly didn't damage his reputation enough.
The most insane part of that is all the generally "normal" businesses who signed contracts with him despite this well publicized history. People like law firms with long histories.
Trump has always preferred dragging out a court battle to actually signing a small check for services rendered, and outright brags about it. He explicitly believes stiffing your contractors is what "Good business" means. Because he is a selfish child and getting stuff for free is his worldview.
But utter morons still line up to get shafted. I just don't understand.
I couldn't get a car loan because I have no credit history even though I had enough cash in the bank to buy the car yet people will still line up to suck the toe of someone with a known history of successfully screwing all their business partners.
Same with how his administration is full of people who don't recognize he will happily throw them under the bus for any reason even though that's all he has done for the past decade.
There is just a shocking inability for the common person to connect people to their history in the USA. The guy who started a trade war and caused prices to increase was voted in because prices were too high.
The math don't math.
arguably is the reason why his business kept failing. you can only screw over suppliers a couple of times before the word gets out and no one wants to do business with you.
now they want the cash up front, and with sizable markups to CYA.
a reasonable person would try to unfuck that perception; instead Trump double-down on the grift
At one of my previous jobs, we were acquired by a company whose CEO had been caught for something involving bank fraud and was under a gag order not to talk about it. As far as I know they're still in business.
I never have thought about it but I guess if the gag order applies to everyone in the case it's kind of convenient.
In your mind should people with criminal record be barred from holding jobs forever? At that point why not just exile them?
I knew this response would come up. Would you be okay to give Sam Bankman-Fried a leadership position? How about Martin Shkreli? Elizabeth Holmes? It's one thing to give someone that made a few minor mistakes a 2nd chance. It's another let a convicted child molester work at a kindergarden. Executives that committed fraud shouldn't be executives again.
I don’t agree because I’m somewhat left leaning and believe in reform (except for violent crime).
I sympathize, and also tend to the left, but please, I beg of you, redefine violence to include long term, intentional creation and operation of fraudulent or harmful enterprise. It takes energy to keep doing things wrong to that degree, and without real signs of behavioral modification that stick, the safest damn thing to do is keep them the hell away.
plenty of jobs for them to hold.
they can drive uber, clean toilets, work at a starbucks, etc
There is such wall. Usually published by Fortune.
Not just CEOs, but we also need it for investors. For example when startups screw over employees on equity, the founders, board members, and their firms, should all be on a public blacklist.
ITT we recreate public filing rules
Same goes for prospective investors, too!
If someone is known to be a ghoster, a gaslighter, a bullshitter, or someone who isn't serious and wants to waste the time of founders, it should be known.
As a bolshie type myself, very quick to moan at higher-ups, I think we need to be realistic that often we grunts don't have the big picture (especially the politics) and unfortunately that won't stop somebody lowdown move from merely internal letting off steam to anonymous public borderline slander.
There is Glassdoor etc though for people who want to have their say; that all these platforms will be gamed and manipulated is a given.
Nah, nah, nah. Let me help you there. You don't have the big picture because you either haven't asked, or it hasn't been shared with you. If you ask, and you still don't have it, it's being intentionally hidden, or the person doesn't know/can't articulate the connection. One of these is a problem for the org. The other is potentially structurally beneficial for the org, but a massive problem for you. Feel free to guess which is which. I leave it as an exercise to the student.
That only works for poor people because CEOs will sue immediately. Someone with a lot of money for legal insurance would have to run it.
Well, this kind of data actually exists. The key is to maintain anonymity. Glassdoor does it. You will see a lot of employees actually complain about management and seniors by name on there.
Glassdoor, as big as it is, allows for deleting bad reviews.
I wish there would just be laws against this type of behaviour, but we all know who is in control of which laws are getting passed. So short of that social shaming will have to do. A CEO that treated humans and/or the planet like dirt, should for example be unable to go to a restaurant, a bar, a park, down a road, onto a beach without getting thrown out or ridiculed, heckled or just called out by others. Behave like scum? Get treated like scum. Fuck with the tribe? Get thrown out. It is one of the oldest correctives for shit behavior any society has ever used in the history of humanity. The problem is they have created a world in which they have too many spaces to avoid this type of consequences.
Now of course within the rules of our society everyone should get a fair process. But these people are the ones who ignore and bend the rules the most and even have them rewritten. At some point when you play a game and you constantly have the other guy break the rules and bribe the referee to make ever more elaborate exceptions for them, at some point you just have to cancel the game and ensure it is never again played with that person on the field. They can watch from the sideline, but playing? Nope.
Now this should not target the occasional ethically neutral or even ethically responsible CEO, but I am afraid by that point it will be hard to have people see that difference anymore. It will come crashing down one way or another.
I think this Fortune story has a decent timeline of events and explains the perspective of both sides:
> At first, Underwood recalls, he was confused and hurt. “We were trying to figure out what the hell’s going on,” he tells me when I visit his offices in Camarillo, Calif., in December. “Because we were really vulnerable, both in the percentage of our business that he commanded—and I guess our belief that we were going to have a long-term relationship.” But he soon became convinced, Underwood tells me, that Tran’s intentions were bad, and had been for some time. “Basically, he really was out to destroy me,” he says. “He didn’t give a damn about me or our family or all that we’d done together.”
> Over at Huy Fong, feelings were similarly raw. Tran felt betrayed, and blindsided by accusations that he had been underhanded. For most of three decades, he had remained loyal to Underwood as his only pepper producer, and each year he had handed over millions on the promise of a harvest, a gesture that he saw as an act of faith. Now all that trust had collapsed in a petty argument over money.
> Tran has come to believe that Underwood was trying to drive him to bankruptcy, then steal his sauce business. “I helped him because he grew chili for me,” he says. “He made money, he owned land. But it is not enough. He wanted to take over my business.” It felt like being “stabbed in the back,” adds Donna Lam, Tran’s sister-in-law and executive operations officer.
* https://archive.is/https://fortune.com/2024/01/30/sriracha-s...
That story actually pretty bad.. Court findings are pretty clear on this [0]:
> When Roberts arrived, Tran told him that he was forming a new company. Lam was going to operate the company. Tran told Roberts that Roberts would be working for the new company.
> When Roberts declined the job offer, Tran was not happy. Tran told Roberts that Underwood would have to deliver peppers for $500 per ton to compete with Chinese pepper mash that sold for $300 per ton. [...] Underwood was suddenly facing imminent catastrophic financial consequences. It could not grow peppers for $500 a ton. Its costs averaged $610 a ton. [...] Tran refused to provide Underwood with prepayments needed to finance the crop. Tran also insisted that Underwood contract with Chilico rather than Huy Fong.
OK, 8 days after agreeing on contract (!), the Huy Fong man tried to hire away Underwood's COO (Roberts), pushes hard for price below cost, refuses to provide money for planting, and tries to offload responsibility to a shell company. This sounds about as evil as it gets, and Underwood was right to refuse.
And what does the journalist say about this? "He wanted to take over my business"? "It felt like being "stabbed in the back""? I am sorry, I think that story author was fed some BS by Tran, and did not bother to verify it.
(Alternatively, maybe Tran has a explanation that makes sense for him... I'd like to hear the thoughts of someone who walks back on contract few days after it's made, and how they justify it to themselves - but sadly that fortune story does not have this)
[0] https://cases.justia.com/california/court-of-appeal/2021-b30...
I remember when Sriracha disappeared from the market for a while (2022?).
The story I heard at the time was heavily positive, talking up the handshakes and relationship angle - suggesting the supplier had a bad harvest (drought) so the manufacturer had decided not to produce sauce rather than produce an inferior product.
Either rumours or more lies - and a good way to help the market forget the earlier flavour and be grateful for a sloppier solution to 'return'?
Yeah, I remember the two parties accusing each other of essentially the same thing -- destroying a 25-year business relationship over short-term greed, for no good reason.
It's good to see the result of the court case, now at least we know who tried to screw who over.
As someone from outside the US, it's really confusing.
To me "Sriracha" is like "ketchup", it's a common name, not a brand.
Never heard of the names cited on Reddit.
We find this sauce everywhere here in France, Go-Tan being the most popular but there's also some smaller brands or products imported by "Tang Frères"
They are referring to Huy Fong's Sriracha sauce. It's the one that took the market by storm. Even in small towns where the "Asian" section was practically empty, you could see the red bottle with the green cap. It even escaped the small corner of the grocery store to be displayed next to Heinz ketchup. For many, it was their first experience with hot sauce, apart from Tabasco.
In the US, Huy Fong was the only Sriracha that I ever saw (and commonly only on the west coast), until the very early 2000s.
My understanding was/is that Huy Fong could have trademarked the name in the US back then, but they chose not to based on the founder's humiity and/or naivete.
Somewhere around 2003(?), Sriracha (still only Huy Fong) became an Internet sensation and then very quickly there were a dozen brands available, all calling themselves Sriracha (legally OK), and often imitating the Huy Fong trade dress in sort-of subtle ways. Huy Fong pushed back on some of those imitators.
And then Huy Fong stopped being able to produce marketable volumes ("bad harvest" was the explanation at the time), and then it started tasting far less good, but still less bad than the others. Presumably this corresponds to their supplier change, which gives me a new appreciation for terroir.
I have never found another Sriracha that is comparable to Y2K-era Huy Fong. Modern Huy Fong is just OK. I don't think it would have become an Internet sensation if the product was always thus. I've tried at least 25 other brands, searching for that taste. So much disappointment!
The sriracha sauces one you mentioned are effectively copies of the sauce made and popularized in the US by Huy Fong.
So it's not so much that "sriracha is like ketchup" but just that you don't know the origin of the sauce. It's like saying "we have a lot of cola products in France, what's so special about Coca Cola?"
Now, if you were Thai that would be different story, as "sriracha" means a completely different sauce (and place) in Thailand, and thus more "generic"
I don't know what tariffs you guys have put on foreign sauces these days but the Flying Goose brand made in Thailand is the only brand that tastes right to me.
I also never heard of Huy Fong until now. Flying Goose is the one that you find to buy in Europe. Also, very tasty!
If we’re talking alternatives, the Three Mountain Yellow Sriracha became our staple at home during the shortage. We still use red for a variety of sauces but rarely as a direct condiment.
Flying Goose is good, my favourite is Ox brand. It's very punchy, heavy on the garlic.
Oh there's another Sriracha Sauce?
Sriracha sauce originates from Si Racha, Thailand. So yes, lots of them.
In the spirit of HN, I humbly submit the FOSS (Free and Open Source Sauce) alternative to Siracha:
https://github.com/aweijnitz/recipe-el_fuego_viviente
I don’t understand the sriracha “thing” in North America. Don’t you guys have 100’s of sambal oleks from SE Asia to choose from?
In short: no.
I’m sure that in the Boston area we’d have had no trouble rustling up half a dozen or more.
We now live in Vermont. The options are pretty much limited to Huy Fong. Reese makes a vastly inferior product that doesn’t belong on the same shelf that can be found in some supermarkets. I know two Asian grocery stores (neither of which specializes on any particular country to my uninformed eye). They’re both small enough that they aren’t stocking hundreds of varieties of any single sauce.
So yeah. Credit to Huy Fong for capturing the mindshare with a quality product and getting available basically nationwide.
Why move to a colder place?
In places with Asian grocery stores, or cities with larger Asian isles, yes - we have tons of options. But sriracha is widely loved, many people have never heard of sambal but use sriracha all day.
I agree many Americans wouldn't have a clue if you just asked them for sambal but if you said "that spicy chili paste in the jar at Asian restaurants" they'd know exactly what you're talking about.
We can buy it, but its not common. Sriracha is in most restaurants, I keep a bottle in my fridge, it's in every grocery store, etc.
While similar I don't think sambal oelek and sriracha are the same. Sambal oelek is typically pretty chunky, sriracha is usually very smooth. Sambal oelek will be pretty much just vinegar, salt, and peppers while sriracha will be sweeter and have garlic.
In urban areas its not necessarily too hard to find a variety of both. Going further out it'll get harder, so the brand presence of sriracha will often win for the spot of the sole Asian-style spicy sauce on the store shelf. Asian restaurants will typically have one or the other. I think a lot of Americans prefer sriracha partially because of the brand presence but also because of its smoother texture. Americans have tended to use a squeeze bottle for condiments more, having a jar to spoon things out just isn't quite as popular. Even things like relish, jelly, and sour cream these days are moving towards squeeze packages instead of jars and tubs.
Americans don’t know anything besides name brands. We used to have a healthy diverse culture and small businesses that differed from state to state but our reliance on importing has killed any notion of that. When the rich invade cities the first thing to show up is a Starbucks and the first thing to close is the local diner.
The same hand that you make a handshake deal can stab you in the back. Always get it in a contract. https://youtu.be/jVkLVRt6c1U?si=tOVgGrLqbcWzL8A9
Off-topic: After visiting a Reddit link via Hacker News on my phone, my Reddit layout is unusable. How do I get out of old Reddit and back to something usable?
Related: why does HN always link to old.reddit?
Because the "new" layout is awful.
Yes, I agree, but the old one is unusable on mobile, and visiting old.reddit.com forces me to keep using it until I logout and login again, which is also awful
The new layout is awful on desktop. Change "old" to "www" and you'll be all set on mobile.
That doesn’t work, but that’s not your fault! I think it’s setting some cookie or something, which makes this annoying to deal with. Anyway, thanks for the reply
The option to change it is buried in the settings.
Yep this was a very controversial thing when it happened. They tried to squeeze the farmer who supplied all their peppers from their earliest days - why would you do that unless you have no morality? And now the Huy Fong Sriracha tastes different, and Underwood’s own Sriracha is actually what tastes best.
I’m glad to hear there was a happy ending to the epic greediness and underhanded tactics of Huy Fong:
> Later, obviously, there's a lawsuit. Funnily enough, it wasn't actually Underwood who sued Huy Fong. It was Huy Fong who sued Underwood, seeking refunds for payments it had made earlier under their contracts. Underwood turned around and counterclaimed for breach of contract and fraud and a bunch of other shit. Underwood succeeded - there was a unanimous jury verdict in their favor - and got awarded about $13 million in compensatory damages, and another $10 million in punitive damages (these are only awarded where you've done something so outrageous that it's quasi-criminal; it's to deter other people from doing similar things).
On the Reddit thread it was said that underwood hasn’t quite exactly nailed the, I guess viscosity because “consistency” has other connotations and if anything they seem to be more consistent.
I love that they had to buy chilis on the open market because their supplier fired the customer. Mostly because I’ve hardly ever gotten to fire a customer. Even when they really should have.
> I guess viscosity because “consistency” has other connotations and if anything they seem to be more consistent.
You're thinking of two different words.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/consistency
Sense 1: agreement of parts or features to one another or a whole
Sense 2: degree of firmness, density, or viscosity
Notably, sense 1 has a related adjective, consistent, and sense 2 does not.
he knows. that's why he said viscosity. reread it slowly
It's crazy. They kept expanding more and more already. Apparently they just weren't increasing the rate of increase enough.
Now HF sauce sucks, I wasn't paying attention to this and got a bottle after this whole debacle, and it's horrible.
> why would you do that unless you have no morality?
Since company leadership has a fiduciary duty to shareholders, profit-maxxing for shareholders is the only moral thing to do /s.
(Yes, I see your /s, just adding to your comment)
It's weird that supposedly clever people cannot see beyond "this number goes down/up now" to "this is not immediately beneficial, but it keeps our company healthier in the long run".
This is s privately owned company
Private companies also have shareholders and shares - they just don't trade publicly.
I refuse to eat Srirarcha due to its use of Xantan gum.
Using Xantan gum is a sign of ultra processing. It's used to change mouth-feel, which is basically lying to the body.
I always recommend people to read / listen to https://www.amazon.com/Ultra-Processed-People-Science-Behind... to understand these ingredients and what they do to our bodies.
Human greed knows no bounds
Now I know why the local dive bar stopped using a sriracha bottle for storing hand soap.
Now I know to buy the Underwood brand sriracha.
It looks like this:
https://a.co/d/06NNRslo
Nothing against Underwood or Siracha in general, so buy what you want but $12 dollars per bottle is crazy, unless this is your favorite thing ever. So many other flavors to discover, and they wont be warehoused for months.
I used to be all-in on Sriracha, used it on everything.
Then, can't remember where, I found out about Gochujang[0] and now it's my go-to fermented chili for everything
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gochujang
AFAIK physical supermarkets and Costco that carry these usually sell them for $4-5 per 17oz/500g. This is just the classic distribution problem with ethnic foods.
> $12 dollars per bottle is crazy
Hot sauce is pretty easy to make if you're inclined to go that route. You only need a scale and a blender, and some basic kitchen skills. You get to explore a lot and control for flavour / heat with adding stuff to the mix. Plenty of good content on yt you can get inspiration from.
It's also something you can make into a hobby. You can go as low effort as buying fresh peppers from a market when in season, or start growing yourself. Growing can be anywhere from extremely low maintenance (i.e. just water them from time to time and leave them on a window sill) or get into advanced stuff like pruning, soil ph, cross pollination and all that stuff. Some peppers are prolific growers, and you get fresh peppers, pepper paste, chili flakes and sauce from a potentially low effort hobby. And they make some nice gifts as well.
>leave them on a window sill
Ooooh anybody have a rec for the most idiot-proof hot thing to try to grow?
Rainbow tabasco required nothing but water, ime - if you have decent sun or a grow light.
These things: https://seedsbeeblooming.com/shop/ols/products/rainbow-tabas...
Can't vouch for that merchant though
Pepper plants are really easy to grow. Pick seeds that sound like they’ll yield the flavor you’re looking for.
Planted a few Jalapeno seeds in the soil in mom's greenhouse once and harvested buckets of chilies, more than I knew what to do with. Super rewarding.
Counter-argument: we're talking about saving a handful of bucks for something that lasts months. Do it if you find it fun - I tried it and didn't like the work nor spice under my fingernails, at all.
My preferences in cooking are like software: high level is fun (cooking dishes), low level is annoying (growing or producing ingredients).
I also like making cocktails. A brief try with homemade coffee licqueurs was disappointing - knowing a couple of good brands, I can buy and enjoy them, no hassle. Closest to preparing ingredients I do is occasionally doing batches of "super juice", where you squeeze a bunch of limes and add some conservatives and enhancers (and water), that increase the yield, flavor and shelf life by a lot. Then it's really practical to just use the juice like a normal ingredient, versus having the cytrus available having to squeeze them and having more stuff to clean.
>nor spice under my fingernails, at all.
Definitely wear gloves when chopping chillis!
Also, even if you wear gloves don't touch your eyes after you get done. Made that mistake as a teenager, never again.
I've tried getting started with this but my first attempt a habanero/mango sauce was _horrible_, must've used a slop recipe or something. Do you have a good base to recommend?
Depends on purchasing power, how much sauce you consume, value added/quality - $12 is often not much, cost of two sandwiches, or 4-pack of beer, half price of one lunch meal, 1/3rd of Netflix subscription, etc... What's crazy is $200 plain cotton white t-shirt, but i.e. $150 merino t-shirt isn't that crazy anymore.
That’s twice the price of a similar sized bottle of fancy ketchup and will last you four times as long.
I bought two bottles a few months back. It doesn’t taste good.
Meanwhile Huy Fong rooster sauce went from a nice red hue to a weird red green puke hue. If it was that color at the start, I’m not sure I would have tried it. The taste seems to be the same though. Regardless, it’s hard to support a company that’s lost so much good will. They should have just increased prices just like everyone else
https://www.amazon.com/Pepper-Plant-Sauce-Original-Pack/dp/B...
Best hot sauce ever
I loved their dry seasoning [1]. Bought some when I visited the bay area several years back and used to use it on everything from toasts to pasta. Sadly, haven't visited US since to be able to pick up some more :-(
1. https://www.amazon.com/Pepper-Plant-Seasoning-11-oz/dp/B01LY...
That list of ingredients is awful.
“Red jalapeno, sugar, water, salt acetic acid, garlic, natural flavor, xanthan gum, sodium metabisulfite, and/or sodium bisulfite (sulfiting agent / preservative), potassium sorbate (preservative).”
I’ve had sriracha in the past and it’s disgustingly sweet. Apparently it’s 17% sugar!
How much sauce are you putting on your food though? 17% sugar is bad in a drink where it adds up fast, but for a hot sauce where you're using maybe 2 teaspoons max (likely less), that's like 1-2 grams of sugar. Essentially a rounding error in your daily intake.
Sure, you can skip sugar entirely if you want to. But then you're getting a different flavor entirely. Southeast Asian stuff is often sweet and spicy and gets that flavor through sugar. No way around it, unless you're using artificial sweeteners.
I think GP was commenting about the taste, not the grams of sugar it adds to your daily intake.
And I agree. I like many varieties of hot sauce, but sriracha is just too sweet for me.
It's the same reason I am picky about Thai restaurants. So many of them lean hard on the sugar. Not to my taste! I like a more balanced flavor.
nothing about this ingredients list is awful, what are you talking about?
But it has chemicals in it...
i wouldn’t last a day as a food chemist
I don't know why people like Sriracha anyway. It just tastes of "hot" and vinegar.
There are far better hot sauces out there, available at your local Chinese, Pakistani, or Iranian supermarket.
It isn't hard to make your own hot sauce to your own tastes. I grow my own chillis, lacto ferment them with shop bought pineapple and add mango and vinegar. Tastes far better than most shop bought sauces IMHO.
Try it, it's fun!
https://successfulsoftware.net/2024/08/04/making-your-own-ho...
Sometimes hot and vinegar is all you want.
There is a place for simple hot sauces, because you don't want to add additional flavours. Sometimes all you want is straight up chilis.
More complex hot sauces might include dried shrimp, fermented soy, lemon grass, dried mushrooms, but those flavours might not be desirable in some dishes. And some dishes require specific hot sauces because they are an integral part of the flavour profile (Mapo tofu, Tom Yum).
I would just like to interject for a moment. Mapo tofu does not use 'hot sauce' as understood in the common parlance. It uses doubanjiang, a very specific fermented paste of chilis and broad beans. It is not saucy; it's very thick like gochujang. I take issue with calling doubanjiang hot sauce and I really don't want anyone to try to make mapo tofu with normal hot sauce.
I’ve never really been a fan of it as a direct condiment so I’m inclined to agree.
I think the first time I tried it was about 15 years ago. Out to lunch at a bahn mi spot with coworkers and all the guys were drenching their sandwiches in the stuff. I think in that context it’s overpowering and awful and ruins a good sandwich. Preferentially, I love the Three Mountain Yellow Sriracha as a condiment for a lettuce wrap or a sandwich.
Where I feel red sriracha is a staple item is making sauces and marinades. Whenever I’m making vaguely Thai peanut sauces at home for a pad Thai or a satay it’s the #2 ingredient after the peanut butter itself and often at a 1:1 ratio. Combined with all the other ingredients it mellows out the harsh flavors and makes a wonderful layered sauce.
It's just slightly spicey ketchup, pretty sweet.
There are definitely better things out there.
They have a spicy ketchup product that I liked, tho it has disappeared from my local stores. At the time I first noticed it at the store it was the hottest one that also matched the thick consistency I expect from ketchup.
Agreed, just tastes like chilli and vinegar to me and I never understood the appeal.
Which ones would you recommend?
I would love to tell you what it's called but the label is in Korean and I don't understand it.
I will find out for you.
> I don't know why people like Sriracha anyway. It just tastes of "hot" and vinegar.
Nope, also of garlic.
"I don't like $PopularThing" is always a boring take. Other people clearly like it if it's popular.
It is known since ancient times, De gustibus non est disputandum (1): Tastes differ, so it's pointless to dispute matters of taste as if there's a correct answer.
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_gustibus_non_est_disputandu...
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"$post is a boring take" is also such a boring and unecessary take. As is my reply to yours.
There are countless different (hot) sauces. And each one is liked by someone somewhere in the world. Shall we list them all?
David Tran goes down in history for one of the biggest CEO blunders ever made.
Imagine owning a money printing machine and then breaking it because you want it to print more money more quickly.
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This douchebag engineering manager used to tell everyone his dad was the founder of sriracha. He was a huge liar. Lying works some how
When I see a company this big screwing over their partner after 20 years of partnership for some lousy tens of millions of dollars (which is probably peanuts compared to worldwide profits), I immediately think that everything is not as simple as it seems.
In this post, Underwood is obviously a virtuous, hard working victim and the sriracha guys are the villains. I don’t believe that there are good and bad companies and I firmly believe that there is some underlying reason for this situation.
The court awarded $10M in punitive damages in addition to the $13M in compensatory damages. So the options are basically "Huy Fong's lawyers are criminally incompetent" or "Huy Fong absolutely screwed over their supplier".
By way of contrast, I've seen so many corporations led by deranged idiots who used to make good decisions within their realm of competence that I have no trouble believing that Huy Fong decided that they could completely dominate Underwood, and were very wrong.
The more power a person believes they have, the stupider they act.
Quoth wikipedia: "The jury unanimously ruled in favor of Underwood on the grounds of breach of contract and fraud."