MS allows its employees to comment on matters in a personal capacity with a disclaimer indicating such.
Apple employees are not supposed to comment at all, and can be terminated for doing so.
Both explicity forbid shilling, and there is no encouragement by the company to do anything like what you’re describing. This should be obvious if one considers how many lawyers they employ whose sole job it is to prevent them from being sued, charged, or investigated.
I know folks at both companies, and while everyone is unique, I noticed that many have a lot of pride in their employer, have a strong dislike for competitors, and would likely engage in expressing their disagreement voluntarily.
1. Are there any probable/plausible examples of such manipulation? I say this from a 100% naive standpoint - literally: I've never seen it myself, so it unfortunately does work. Not to say I doubt it exists; I've read about the concept enough times that I accept that it exists.
2. Regarding (3), do you think it would be possible to cultivate that mindset again, in a different setting/environment, or are these trends influenced by the contemporary status quo? :/
2a. If you _do_ think it might be possible, I'm very interested to absorb ideas on how to create constructive discussions online. People have had more than enough interactions with the current mainstream (twitter, facebook, reddit, here, etc) to probably have _some_ idea on how to massively improve tooling/UX/etc.
2) I do think it is possible, but it is much more difficult to gain those users back who have fled due to those issues. It would require a public shift in forum management style that openly acknowledges it's issues, which especially in a place like this would be hard because for the most part dang et al actually do a great job and the issues we are talking about are very nuanced...
2a) If you come to some conclusions on this I'd like to hear them too. Its something I think about often, and I'm yet to find some silver bullet. I tend to gravitate towards some mishmash of past techniques, for example, I really liked Slashdot mod system, where random users were given mod ability, and instead of just points, you could label something informative, funny, etc. I also think exclusivity can be a boon, so for example invite-only forums or some other exclusion method can naturally curate conversations, but on the flip side you will tend to keep otherwise good commentators silent that way. steemit's idea of monetization via crypto of good content is another approach... none of them alone seems to be enough...
One idea I've had that's technically challenging would be some sort of AI comment judge with preselected criteria, so let's say a commentor makes many logically fallacious comments, then that person gets a temp-ban.
Another has been just purely based on comment depth/length. If a user often goes in depth, a few one sentence quips would reduce their score-weight but they could still post, but another user who only does one line quips would get a temp-ban.
in short, I don't know, but whoever figures this out is going to be a big deal
Any suggestions on where to go next?
I also still enjoy irc, usenet, and deepnet sites (such as onion sites, etc) for the less mainstream, old school hacker vibe.