DISH Network Wants To Comment On Your Story

When you are a small operation, you tend to do a little bit of everything. My workday can run the gamut from writing reviews and reporting to encoding video and cropping pictures. I even do a fair amount of moderating comments posted on this site's various posts. Luckily we don't get a lot of spam, but I did notice this comment posted on a story last night.

I've seen a few comments like this in the past few weeks. In some of them the person posting mentions they work at Dish Network. In some cases they just say they have a friend who works at Dish or simply a friend who subscribes to Dish Network. The comments are related directly to the story on which they're posted. But like the example shown below, they always come around to talking about some aspect of the Dish Network's wonderful technology. More often that not, they're hyping Dish's controversial Hopper DVR.



I traced the IP address of the person posting last night's comment to the Dish Network and after examining a couple of other similar posts, was able to do the same with those. So it's appears that at least a couple of people working at Dish are posting comments to threads, hoping I suppose to create the sense that everyone is talking about Dish.

I ran a search for the email address used on last night's post and discovered similar comment posts on an impressive range of web sites. The comments all seemed to follow the same format. A sentence or two directly relevant to the story before the pitch for Dish Network. The comments seemed to come in clumps, with a group of three or four comments on one day and then nothing for a couple of months. That was also the case with a couple of other email addresses used on comments I could trace back to a Dish Network IP address.



Now there's nothing technically wrong with a Dish Network employee reading an article and thinking "Hey, I think this person would like to know more about one of our fine projects." But given the frequency and variety of these comments, it seems much more likely that one or more people at Dish are posting comments under a group of email addresses, hoping to spark some viral talk about the company. If the person posting mentions they work at Dish, the comments don't cross any sort of ethical boundary. But it's interesting behavior, especially if any employees are being tasked with the job of posting comments.



I've reached out to Dish and asked about these comment posts, but at the time this piece was published, have not yet gotten a response.