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Sure, I acknowledge that bots/shills exist; my point is that people are really bad at identifying them, and more likely to throw “bot” or “shill” out as insults or ways to dismiss an opponent, with little to no regard for the truth.
For product reviews, there is a clear incentive for the seller to prop up their listing with fake reviews, while legitimately happy customers often have little incentive to leave a review: if you buy a ream of printer paper, a set of kitchen towels or a box of pencils, how excited can you possibly be about your purchase? If the product is subpar, I could imagine leaving a negative review, as a form of revenge and a warning to others (I've done that myself). But for mundane products that basically meet expectations, you'd have to be exceedingly bored to leave a detailed 5 star review praising the subtle off-white coloring and the tasteful thickness of a sheet of printer paper. Consequently, I can imagine for those type of products, a relatively high fraction of rave reviews were left by shills.
For political discussions, the opposite is true. Lots of people like to waste their time online arguing about stuff that even politicians don't care that much about. These people are real humans. Take the presidential election, for example, where it was shown that Harris hired people (it's not clear if they were paid) to post positive stories on reddit in an attempt to generate buzz/get people to show up at the polls. Even knowing that that was a thing, I believe the majority of Harris supporters on reddit were genuine believers, not (un)paid shills.
This is based on the observation that reddit has millions of leftist users who would support Harris by default, versus only a handful of shills. That means the prior probability of any Harris-supporter being a paid shill is just very low, and I definitely wouldn't feel confident about identifying the shills. That can either mean I'm a terrible judge of character, or the people who confidently claim they can sniff out shills are just overconfident; the latter seems more plausible to me.
To give an example I saw today on reddit: this (re)post about Shell (the oil company) emitting orders of magnitude more CO2 than an average person has many people crying “shill”:
Someone reasonably replies to the last comment:
And yeah, I agree. These are just normal people deviating from the “oil company bad—upvotes to the left” playbook. I tried looking at the history of some of the top commenters and they seemed to have normal histories with no clear indication of paid shilling. That doesn't prove they aren't shilling, of course, but given that none of the shill-accusers give evidence to support their beliefs, I conclude that they were making those accussations baselessly.
I've seen this so many times now that I've come to believe that on reddit and spaces like it, words like “bot” and “shill” aren't used to identify actual bots or actual shills, but they are terms used to dismiss real people who express unwelcome opinions.
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