I don't think it's "trolling" to say it doesn't work as advertised. I'm not trying to antagonize anyone, if I say it phantom brakes 5 times on a 20 mile drive. It wasn't this bad before they removed Radar.
Trolling: to antagonize (others) online by deliberately posting inflammatory, irrelevant, or offensive comments or other disruptive content
Um. I'm a refugee from the original Tesla.com forums. No question: We had trolls there. You know, the types that live in their Mom's basement and do stuff for the Yuks.
But we very definitely had much more serious visitors. Short sellers who would show up with a shiny new account, say something (usually extremely false) about Tesla, then disappear back to their Wall Street haunts.
And then.. we had the cases of the changing grammar. Look, somebody writes, they write in a certain style. So, we had a half-dozen or so posters. Each of these poster would change style a couple of times or more a day. With a consistent set of styles. And would post at least once an hour, or once every other hour, 24 hours a day, for days on end. Conclusion: Paid-for Beltway Bandit, probably with a three-ring binder. Likely funding: Oil companies, threatened ICE manufacturers.
These posters would reply to each other and simply
flood a forum with false information. Or, with some of them, come into a thread, post reasonable comments, then go right out the window with false information.
Telsa didn't really do moderation. Admittedly, they'd sometimes try. And the .. does one call these trolls?.. would look at whatever it was that Tesla was doing, then figure out what to do to fake Tesla out and make them do bad things. In one notable case, this gang of.. whatever you want to call them.. accused a serious regular of sex discrimination and got him booted from the forums, at which they chuckled madly about on-line. The regular did get back after a week or so of hiatus.
We had one poster/troll who not only plied his (well, we
thought it was a he) on the Tesla forums, we found identical madness on the
Ford MachE forums. From, apparently, the same poster. (Even the posted gifs were identical.)
So: nefarious types with multiple accounts. Entities posting under a single account with what appeared to be multiple users. But.. why? Why do all this?
Think about it: Tesla doesn't advertise. People look up users to see about their experiences. They go to forums.. like the ones at Tesla. Or here. That's one thing.
The next thing is that they search Google. Google indexes forums like this one. Post falsehoods and Google's going to pick them up.
Eventually, Telsa gave up on the forums, closed them down (except for archival purposes), and let it go.
Here, we have moderators. They do a decent job. But I've had this thought, in the back of my head, that if, in that collection of malefactors who worked to pollute the Tesla forums to the point of uselessness, there were companies that were being paid to do the job.. Why would they stop? Remember: These types played a very fine line: Disrupt things, but not so much as to get booted. They would change tactics as Tesla changed their moderating methods and were very adaptable in that regard.
So.. Yeah, I'm a little paranoid. We have a couple posters on teslamotorsclub.com that, with a squinty look, have the look and act of those tesla.com bad guys.
But it's kind of like the Bayesian anti-spam filter that I run on my mail clients. After a bit of training, any email hawking some illicit substance gets dumped into the Junk folder. It doesn't stop spammers from trying; they just keep on modifying the message until
something gets through. Although, if it does get through, it hardly resembles the spam of old. Likewise, the moderators toss the Really Evil ones out on their ears. Leaving ones that don't appear to be quite as evil.
But here we are in the FSD forums. No question, FSD is a work in progress, especially the Beta. It's of major importance to Tesla to get it working and they've stated numerous times that they need all the help with it that they can get. So people come here to find out what's going on. And.. that's when it's found out that to anybody not actually driving around with FSD, it's very difficult to tell when a poster claiming this-and-that is a horrible is stretching somethign that's actually a minor inconvenience.
So, I'm driving the Beta. Are there times it makes a mistake? Yep. a lot less now than, say, eight or ten months ago. In the past several months have I ever felt
threatened by the car's driving habits? Nope, there's
always been time to react and keep the car from doing something stupid. 10.69.2 has been doing pretty well, and I'm looking forward to the 11.x versions.
So, what does one think when somebody comes on this thread and says, "FSD is a long con from Musk/Tesla"? Um. I'm a-thinking that we've got ourselves a reject from the Tesla.com forums, that's what. Same as when we get a person stating, "I'm removing FSD-b from my car, it's makes just too many errors and is
dangerous!". Funny, I'm in my 60's, have nominally old-age reaction times, and, weirdly enough, I don't get the end-of-the-universe vibes from the car. Or from the SO, who, I'm sure, would be all over me if she thought I was taking risks.
Problem is, there's hundreds or thousands of posters on TMC. We do get sensitive individuals who are deeply disturbed by automation, or just FSD in particular. Doesn't mean they're evil or bad: Just human. Heck, there are people around here who can't fit their body comfortably into any Tesla; it's just human variation. And even if one of the Evil shows up and says something, we got moderators who Keep An Eye on Them and regular posters who call them out; and that's where the Bayes-equivalent of a spam filter does its bit around here.
So, we probably got some nefarious types around here. Honest, died-in-the-wool Trolls who are here for the yuks; but probably a sprinkling of paid-for Beltway Bandit influencers, attempting to run up against (but not past) whatever limits the moderators are keeping. So, keep on chugging: Call out the idiocy when it's posted, and just keep on going.
