General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Has Daily Kos been overrun by xenophobic racist trolls? [View all]muriel_volestrangler
(101,502 posts)It's generally an indication they regard themselves as so important that someone has to be paid to disagree with them, which is very silly.
There are situations where it's feasible that someone is paid to post somewhere - fake endorsements of products, for instance, where there is a profit to be made. It might be believable that in a close situation where the decisions of the readers of a site can make a bit of a difference, one faction might pay people to post a certain opinion (or, more likely, to encourage people already on their side to post, without payment). On a partisan site like DKos or DU, that's pretty much limited to Democratic primaries (and the obvious product spamming that gets quickly deleted). But you're not going to be able to tell the difference between genuine enthusiasm for a candidate (or denigration of one) and fake opinions that are paid for. No-one ever tries to show the analysis they've done to tell the difference, anyway. They just assert that people from another faction are 'paid'.
That someone would pay to get people to disagree with Democrats Ramshield's diary entry (a pompous claim that Europeans are far more educated than Americans, and can tell Americans everything they should do about race relations) is ridiculous.
It's a 'tired old whine' because it turns up on all kinds of sites where people have highly inflated opinions of themselves. It's common enough here.