My mechanical keyboard people haven’t really migrated over to Lemmy, so I after I stopped posting to Reddit (I still lurk… sue me) I signed onto a couple of legacy forums. A few months ago, one forum had a poster ask about a sketchy email he got from a vendor asking them to mention their keyboard X number of times, and didn’t even have to be uniformly positive, as long as he didn’t completely shit on them. They needed the visibility. He seemed iffy and I think decided against it, not least of which was that the payment was, IIRC, a free keyboard.

Not two days later, a veteran poster on the other forum magically mentions this obscure and unremarkable vendor, and while they’re qualified in their praise, they sure spent a lot of time talking about them. I was about to call it out, but then I just thought, “well hell, at least the company’s still using real people as shills. This is life now.”