Oct 29, 2026, 6:44 PM> “So go on there with your personal account and comment to set the record straight,” he wrote. “Perception is more important than truth, the truth doesn’t matter if you don’t win on perception.”
set the record straight by posting something other than the truth, right
Oct 29, 2026, 6:47 PMand like, the context for this is that someone was being threatened with being fired for not doing it
and I feel for the worker in this situation, I do
but also, the chances are very high that said worker, or another worker in the same situation, went on to spin up 1000+ accounts to make proton look better on reddit
there was probably a cash bonus in it for them if they used an LLM to troll critical threads
that’s what you should be reading into that quote
Oct 29, 2026, 6:48 PMI did love being accused of being paranoid when I pointed out this was happening, by the way
Oct 29, 2026, 6:57 PMI want you to do something for me
next time you’re in a thread about an organization being obviously corrupt, and it gets flooded with weird posts
look at the accounts. look at their profiles and their post history.
as you scroll through their posts, you may find that they only post in defense of the organization being criticized. they might boost random shit otherwise, or they might have generic bot-like replies to random popular threads. but always, their only detailed posts will be on one specific topic.
absorb what you’re seeing and then think of this quote:
> “So go on there with your personal account and comment to set the record straight,” he wrote. “Perception is more important than truth, the truth doesn’t matter if you don’t win on perception.”
and evaluate how you feel about an organization paying for dark PR, or threatening their employees into doing it
Oct 29, 2026, 6:59 PMand if you think mastodon and lemmy aren’t high value targets for this, you need to reflect on why proton had a tantrum and left mastodon and then came crawling back with memes, with the context you have now
Oct 29, 2026, 6:59 PMwe are the target market
and we fucking hate the product
@zzt https://expressional.social/@eldersea/117525766329125831
So many tech people and engineers on masto, and presumably a good percentage of proton's users as well, and yet...
@zzt I'm willing to bet that a look into Ecosia would find something very similar
Oct 29, 2026, 7:03 PM@fasterandworse ecosia, kagi, and the internet archive
Oct 29, 2026, 7:03 PM@fasterandworse kagi isn’t even subtle with it, but then again I didn’t think proton was subtle either
@zzt @fasterandworse I can't get over how the Kagi CEO spent like 25% of their money on t-shirts once. Dude is unhinged.
Correction: a t-shirt FACTORY*
>I am unsure what happened in all of this for this math to be true, but my point is that they did in fact reach at least 20,000 users, and to celebrate they set up a business entity in Germany (they are currently US based), in order to start a tiny little t-shirt printing company. And their goal was to print 20,000 t-shirts to give out, FOR FREE, to their first 20,000 users (with users paying only shipping costs). (2/4)
But I cannot stress enough, they did not just spend money on 20,000 tshirts to give out, they set up a whole new business entity in Germany to run their own t-shirt printing operation, with its own building and warehouse and employee(s? I get the sense it's one guy but I don't know). And this cost them 1/3 of their $670k funding round. One, fucking, third. For t-shirts. Did I mention that the t-shirts don't even have the Kagi name on them? (3/4)
Just the Kagi dog mascot, who is at this point the only thing I like about Kagi, to the point where if I wasn't worried people would try to talk to me about Kagi I'd opt for one of the shirts myself. Great artist, whoever did this. Terrible financial choice to start a whole t-shirt business to make 20,000 free t-shirts that do not even get your name out there. (4/4)
@theorangetheme A little better. Still unhinged.
@theorangetheme @dnkboston @zzt @fasterandworse ah yes, the famous “stay in line if your waiting for the Vlad, the Kagi CEO, to email you explaining why you’re wrong for not liking his search engine” story
@zzt @fasterandworse ecosia: for every tree we plant, we burn it thousandfold with our ai!
@zzt Those accounts tend to have three posts. Period
@zzt I usually check those. Some of the ones I've seen on the likes of arsebook are old and seemingly normal looking accounts - so also bear in mind these posts come from hacked accounts too.
Oct 29, 2026, 8:25 PM@zzt "truth doesn't matter if you don't win on perception" is kinda the resigned position of someone who has failed to sell people semantics enough times to see a pattern but either can't or won't understand what is actually going on.
Oct 29, 2026, 11:08 PM
@zzt The sad thing is that the 404 Media articles paint a picture of a very principled, genuinely passionate team of developers that rankles at what they are being forced into doing by their moron boss. They don't seem to want to manufacture consent and manipulate perception and turn their codebase into unmaintainable mush.
They just have no choice because they are alienated from their labor and must obey Andy Yen or lose their jobs. Proton's CEO is quite clearly *forcing* them into this against their objections. And that makes sense... they probably joined Proton because they believed in its stated mission, and now the rug is being pulled out from under them.
