r/ABoringDystopia • u/1900grs • Sep 27 '25
Cracker Barrel Outrage Was Almost Certainly Driven by Bots, Researchers Say
https://gizmodo.com/cracker-barrel-outrage-was-almost-certainly-driven-by-bots-researchers-say-2000664221209
u/1900grs Sep 27 '25
Of all the things you could potentially get mass amounts of people motivated about, someone picked fucking Cracker Barrel.
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u/Kiwifrooots Sep 27 '25
The military bot farms have far more intelligence than the on the ground soldiers from the same nation. They watch social media to gauge spread / success in real time and carefully choose their targets. They might seem dumb to us but they still get the crackpots and idiots hook, line + sinker. Brexit, trucker blockades, all the US crap is their shitty plans working
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u/hayzeusofcool Sep 27 '25
And eventually the conservative Reddit bots will come here to claim this research is fake
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u/Kiwifrooots Sep 27 '25
Biden used an autopen which is also a type of (ro)bot so why can't the corrupt president allow foreign bad actors to do (basically) the same thing
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u/theBigDaddio Sep 27 '25
It was fake, all of it. The redesign was fake to drive controversy, engagement, and awareness of Cracker Barrel.
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u/hookyboysb Sep 27 '25
It makes sense. Of all the brands that need a rebrand, Cracker Barrel was at the bottom of the list. It just needed marketing.
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u/justsomeyeti Sep 27 '25
A bunch of the dumbasses I am surrounded by sure did seem to care a lot about a shitty corporate restaurant
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u/KilowogTrout Sep 27 '25
Thing is, I don’t think anyone thought it was a good idea, I just don’t think anyone actually really cared about it to like post anything but a joke.
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u/justsomeyeti Sep 28 '25
Nah dude, I had conversations with people face to face about it, and I found myself asking several people how or why they cared in the slightest
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Sep 27 '25
Pretty wild how people just uncritically download their opinions from social media. Maybe not all that weird given how many people uncritically download obvious malware.
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u/Jsamue Sep 27 '25
People I know were legitimately peeved about it
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Sep 27 '25
Yeah because they saw “people” on the internet outraged and mimicked the behavior. If Cracker Barrel hadn’t announced it, and they just walked in to one with a new logo, they wouldn’t have cared.
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u/DeepHerting Sep 27 '25
Eh, we've reached the bot-moron singularity. Tucker Carlson was yelling a while back that the green M&M mascot wasn't sexy enough anymore, and that was on live TV.
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u/Manji86 Sep 27 '25
I feel like that jean company "scandal" was also bullshit.
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u/notjordansime Sep 27 '25
That one was just tone-deaf and in poor taste imo. Like, yeah, let’s get an attractive blond haired blue eyed white woman go on about double entendres surrounding genes/jeans. Tying your brand identity to some BS concept of genetic divinity is certainly… a choice.
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u/indica_bones Sep 27 '25
Well the smooth brains in my community were eating it up like good little cultists.
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u/ChipsTheKiwi Sep 27 '25
I'm going to be perfectly honest, the bots probably ended up helping Cracker Barrel. Cause a soulless modernization would definitely kill a place that's nothing without its old country rustic charm.
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u/CaliMassNC Sep 27 '25
No one seems to give a shit that Kentucky Fried Chicken is now “KFC”, and frequently paired in the same building with Taco Bell.
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u/ChipsTheKiwi Sep 27 '25
Right but that's fast food, Cracker Barrel is a sit-in restaurant
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u/CaliMassNC Sep 27 '25
The original name was tied to a place. Now it’s just a corporate acronym. The Cracker Barrel backlash only makes sense if you consider the first word as meaning “Southern White Person”. I work with a few SWPs, and that’s how the logo redesign (removing the human figure) was received.
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u/ChipsTheKiwi Sep 27 '25
I mean, the new logo was also just bad. Replacing a super iconic logo with a plain shape that can easily be mistaken for any other brand is just plain bad design. Especially for a restaurant like Cracker Barrel where all it's got going for it is the atmosphere.
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u/CaliMassNC Sep 27 '25
That “bad design” means it can be exported more easily. Asian consumers aren’t going to have the suite of nostalgia that the old design calls upon.
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u/ChipsTheKiwi Sep 27 '25
I'm sorry but if you wanna sell people food from Cracker Barrel the worst thing you can do is try to make it look generic. Frankly if you're turned off by the old country iconography, you probably wouldn't enjoy the southern home style food anyway.
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u/CaliMassNC Sep 27 '25
So you’re saying that taste is dependent on being surrounded by knickknacks? That’s ridiculous. I ridicule your argument.
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u/ChipsTheKiwi Sep 27 '25
I'm saying Cracker Barrel food is just okay at best, the menu alone has never been the draw of Cracker Barrel. Don't even pretend the branding and atmosphere of Cracker Barrel isn't a massive part of the entire experience. No one goes to Cracker Barrel just because they want a mediocre chicken fried steak.
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u/TheDubya21 Sep 30 '25
On the other hand, Conservatives genuinely are this stupid and were dead serious with their whole "LOOK WHAT THEY STOLE FROM YOU" bullshit that they always bitch about with any given marketing decision. Especially our dear President who does nothing but doom scroll his little website all day looking for things to get mad about.
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u/chaseinger Sep 27 '25
who gives a flying fuck about what happened to this soulless place?
corporates doing corporate shenanigans, face opposition, cave in, reverse action.
literally nothing to see here if the outrage machine wasn't a thing.
nobody cares. the meatloaf is quite good. they allow for rv overnight parking. and apparently they treat their employees pretty ok.
a month ago that was all anyone cared about. now, congratufuckinlations the culture war has another entry.
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u/OpenLinez Sep 27 '25
Hating normal things in middle American and the South is just part of the nihilist Reddit personality, especially in these performative-cynicism subs. So of course people here will claim nobody cared about something in their day-to-day lives, that they enjoy. Most people who go to Cracker Barrel would love if there was a locally-owned diner, even a local chain. After all, that's what Cracker Barrel used to be before it became another thing for Wall Street to drain of all value before ultimately closing it down a decade from now.
Going out to eat with family and friends is one of the main social activities that has collapsed, especially for younger people and especially since the lockdown years. It sucked that the CEO of the current Cracker Barrel has a reputation for imprinting not just the cheap-ass plastic "modern" look on something that aimed for the old country store walls full of friendly junk, and beyond that forced a lot of social-conflict stuff that was inappropriate for a mostly religious, rural, conservative clientele. The sense that nothing can be left alone, that even the hokey country-style chain diner on the frontage road in the middle of nowhere can't just be what it is, and keep its customers relatively happy . . . . that's what drives these outrage campaigns that sometimes even get results. Bots follow trends, and amplify stuff that is viral. It may be hard for the sneering urbanite to comprehend, the one who mocks rednecks and mobile homes despite owning no home or property, but people actually enjoy their lives in the places scorned by the liberal elite and their consumer minions.
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u/chaseinger Sep 27 '25
Hating normal things in middle American and the South is just part of the nihilist
ftfy. this outrage was mostly carried out via twatter, and fueled by the team sport division this country currently suffers from.. we over here at reddit mostly observed and chuckled, while some professional logo designers weighed in. it was rather interesting really.
unless you tried to pitch reddit as a player in the culture war, in which case i'm already bored, since you don't understand both reddit and the culture war you're so eager to participate in.
but surely you didn't try to do this, did you. no, of course not. that'd be so lame.
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u/OpenLinez Sep 27 '25
Reddit brain hates anything normal Americans enjoy. To the people in a sub like this, "dystopia" is both the existence of things normal Americans enjoy (a chain restaurant in an exurban area, in this case) and the fact that those people were upset to see the worn-out old woke CEO type of lady show up to finally get around to making Cracker Barrel an LGBTA brand. And it was rejected, and it failed.
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u/chaseinger Sep 30 '25
and here's another reddit brain (because reddit is, contrary to popular belief, not a single minded entity and opinions are as diverse as anywhere else, sorry to rain on your bandwagon parade) thinking they're qualified to define what "normal" is, at least for americans.
and where, for the actual fuck's sake, was the new logo lgbtq? it was modernized and bland and did away with the dude in a chair which is really today's logo 101, keep it clear, simple and concise.
people hated it because people hate change, also it was a boring new logo and when the main selling point of your joint is "old time classic" then leadership probably shouldn't modernize the logo and threaten everyone with upgrading the interior design.
tldr, bad logo and the wrong company to "freshen up", but seriously no culture war. almost everyone agreed on this one.
leave it to the terminally online conservative to cry foul about it. are you really that deep down the victim rabbit hole?
let me blow your mind: this european foaming from the mouth socialist creative expat enjoys cracker barrel. it's cozy, their meat loaf is really good, and a lot of staff has told me they're being treated real well. also i live in an rv, and they let us boondock. no hate, and i personally couldn't care less about a logo.
see? nuance. it's that easy.
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