Comment by kace91

Message boards and niche sites worked really well for me in the early 2000. What made them useful though was that astroturfing was non existing at the time.

There was a very famous case in my country of a preppy kid who took the whole rap world by storm getting stupid numbers in a niche site, and only after he had gotten big contracts with multinational labels it came out that he had just set a bot to download the music and inflate numbers, that’s how trust based the system was.