Snippet: Something Stinks ☇

Philip Elmer-DeWitt shares some odd behavior that happened after a Fortune article yesterday that Samsung paid people to post negative comments about Apple publicly (via The Loop):

The post drew more that the usual number of comments. Twenty six hours later, we’re up to 343 messages and counting. Some readers supported the thesis. Some ridiculed it. Some attacked Apple. Some attacked me.

That kind of thing comes with the territory, although not usually in such numbers or with such vehemence. But what happened at about 2 a.m. EST — Sunday afternoon in Seoul, South Korea — was new.

In the space of a few hours, more than a thousand votes were cast on the DISQUS feedback system, voting down any comment remotely anti-Samsung and voting up anything — no matter how inane, in-artful or wrong — that disparaged Apple, the thesis, or me.

Seems a bit suspicious to me, especially the spike at certain odd hours of the night (at least in the United States).