People are literally defenceless vs propaganda. Me too. It takes extraordinary effort to decipher the fake from true and whether the true is a full truth or some small piece on silver platter.
At this point I gave up and I just try to find out motives of every… player and align myself with these that best serve my interests.
I don’t read much news because it’s all leftist or alt right propaganda drivel and while I align myself with the left because it serves my interests the best I won’t waste my time listening to their whatever narrative they crafted last week…
Just observe their actions and try to find out the motives and then ask if their motives align with yours. Their words or narrative are worthless drivel at this point, mostly.
Alt right drivel however is especially toxic and insulting but that is specifically done to evoke emotions. Anti gay propaganda crafted by closeted bisexual priests that want a piece from the table. It’s a bit like these email scammers who filter out less naive by making lots of grammar errors on purpose. You are supposed to be enraged either way.
Have you ever seen Adam Curtis’s “Century of the Self”? Super long, but it goes on about how marketing and politics intertwined.
I think it’s on YouTube for free
I don’t have a Medium account. Could someone post a link to the study?
Archival link: https://archive.is/D60ep
Link to the study: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2017/03/29/the-future-of-free-speech-trolls-anonymity-and-fake-news-online/Thank you
Lol. I guess it’s hard to tell when you haven’t seen the site change over time but… yeah?
It uses to be “argumentless” discussions on esoteric tech and philosophy issues… then a few years later it was people commenting the same 9 memes for 9,000 comments… then a few years later suddenly everyone’s anecdotes are praising China, or capitalism, or offhandedly mentioning some product or influencer.
Tbh tho, most of Reddit now just reads like Subreddit Simulator. All of the site’s value regarding sincere, unique, and detailed user content… yeah, that’s gone. They’re just coasting on past laurels, will be fun to watch the wheels fall off as the data stays locked in 2023, before the LLM Ouroboros.
The same thing that happened to Digg
then a few years later suddenly everyone’s anecdotes are praising China, or capitalism, or offhandedly mentioning some product or influencer.
There used to be a satire sub called Church of the Current Thing that made fun of this phenomenon. It eventually got banned around 2022 thanks to a cohort of bad faith actors mass-filing dubious reports of subs they didn’t like.
(I believe there was also a sub devoted to cataloging all such subs that got paved over in the name of le brand safetyTM, but it may have also gone the same way. I don’t keep up with the place)
I watched it happen while drinking a refreshing Coca Cola. I’ve never felt so sad and refreshed at the same time.
Maybe they’ll do a Behind the Bastards podcasts on the corporate influences that ruined the internet. I look forward to that listen while enjoying some delicious Cool Ranch Doritos.
Looked for their email address…
(links to 👇)
Yeah reddit totally respects deletion requests
Does deleting our old helpful comments only hurt our fellow web surfers?
Lol, that’d be awesome. I can enjoy it while watching my girlfriend spend time on her OnlyFans (link in bio).
As a strong believer in online privacy I’ll be using Nord VPN to view your girlfriend’s content. Nord lets me browse securely with peace of mind I won’t be tracked. Plus I can stream region locked content. I started using it recently and let me tell you Nord has really changed my online experience for the better
Is your girlfriend single?
no but there are hot single milfs in your area
I mean you can see it happening here. How many cyber armies do you think are starting to pop up on Lemmy, from the US, from China, from Russia. How many corporate astroturfers do you think are coming on here, apple dicksuckers, etc. shit, mainstream media is trying to dip it’s toes into federated spaces.
Edit: a word, added an -ing
Addendum: Do you guys think that defederation campaigns can be weaponized? Isolate and destroy type stuff? Creating bubbles that can be easily analyzed and manipulated?
They will certainly come here, but as a defederated website we don’t have to defend against them with one approach, everyone can take a different approach, see what frustrates them the most, then mass adopt that. I see this as the ideal… no idea how it will unfold in practice.
A few very niche subs appear unaffected, but mostly the questions are all like someone shook a magic 8 ball and the same crap pops up over and over and over.
You know how your brain feels after being assaulted by a commercial? Reddit feels more like that now.
That’s the part that people don’t get and is intentionally hard to find numbers on. The entire appeal was on it not being an influencer centric space. The entire value was always at odds with monetizing that value beyond it’s upkeep and paying the people (who apparently aren’t that many) a reasonable salary. It is the worst growth case you could have ever had.
Reddit is going to end up just being trolls arguing with bots and corporate shills… if it isn’t already. I haven’t been there in a long time, but I’m fairly confident in that assessment.
What i really wonder about is how long a site can profit off of the majority of activity coming from bots. I’m not tech savvy enough to know if the analytics can tell the difference between a bot posting and a person. How long can that go on before the site stops being profitable via ads? Will companies pay to advertise to bots? Would they even know? It’s kinda funny to think about honestly.
It’ll be really interesting to see how reddit’s downfall comes to be though.
What’s damning is how the most harmless subreddits is now full of astroturfing. Television subreddit? Suddenly the top article is praising some show you never heard of. Meme subreddit? Here’s a meme about some music video or hot new product. Game subreddit? Here’s some random cosplay girl that’s only here to advertise her social media.
I don’t remember who said it but there’s a general rule that if your subreddit has over 500k subscribers, it’s already full of bots and dying. Any mainstream sub is insanely astroturfed.
And don’t get me fucking started on social media twitter accounts. HAHA GUYS CHECK OUT THIS FUNNY MEME SHARED BY #WENDY’S!!
And what percent is Russian psy-ops?
Lower than I expected
Key word: At least
Used Reddit for years. There’s no way the percentage is that low.
Right!? At least on Lemmy I can drink my Pepsi® in peace. Like for real, there’s nothing better than scrolling through some funny memes with a delicious can of ice cold Pepsi®, my fellow [insert slang term; plural]!
A chronic compulsive content-stealer creature like gallowboob might have encompassed that 15% all by himself.
A chronic compulsive content-stealer creature
Green___Cat?
We have our own version of him here on lemmy as well
We do? I see a few common posters, but no one acting like a content creator who is actually just ripping off stuff that didn’t get traction.
I’ve seen at least 2 usernames that submit A LOT, and if you search your feed i’m sure you’ll be able to spot them easily. They also comment on rising posts quite a lot and personally mod a few communities. I’ve not seen them repost content that doesn’t get traction, but they do repost content taken from reddit
Yeah the squid and Picard but they are not bots I think just ppl with no social life whatsoever or sacrificing it so we have shit to browse o7
I won’t ever post a thing cause Reddit convinced me that it is never a super good idea. There are roving human freaks out there circling the social media like vultures looking for prey. Ugly people hiding in the shadows of the web.
I’ll block them here as well.
You don’t need much content or many comments to achieve the goal, when you have thousands of votes behind it for the good placement.
You may only need a couple hundred though. Reddit’s algorithm is particularly broken and once a post is on hot it’s unstoppabe.
Looking for office equipment recommendations on Reddit recently, every single thread had fake suggestions that were clearly advertiser accounts. They sounded incredibly fake like bots that pulled descriptions from Amazon, all had similar links with tracking, and all were upvoted to the top.
That is probably correct. 15% of total content, but probably 70% of the content you see. Reddit has a tonne of content posted that almost nobody sees
15% of content and then fake upvoted to heaven. Could work
And this is why I use lemmy
What makes you think lemmy is immune?
I worry that if/when Lemmy becomes popular enough the larger communities will be targeted in the same way…
Shit you can get paid?
“At least…”
I feel like the 15% number is very, very low.
According to backlink.com there is 265,500,000 active users per week so 15% of those weekly users means there is 39,825,000 corporate whores per week. To have the corporate whores filled with real people you would need the entire population of the following cities to even come close:
New York, NY 8,258,035
Los Angeles, CA 3,820,914
Chicago, IL 2,664,452
Houston, TX 2,314,157
Phoenix, AZ 1,650,070
Philadelphia, PA 1,550,542
San Antonio TX 1,495,295
San Diego, CA 1,388,320
Dallas, TX 1,302,868
Jacksonville, FL 985,843
Austin, TX 979,882
Fort Worth, TX 978,468
San Jose, CA 969,655
Columbus, OH 913,175
Charlotte, NC 911,311
Indianapolis, IN 879,293
San Francisco, CA 808,988
Seattle, WA 755,078
Denver, CO 716,577
Oklahoma City, OK 702,767
Nashville, TN 687,788
Washington, DC 678,972
El Paso, TX 678,958
Las Vegas, NV 660,929
Boston, MA 653,833
Detroit, MI 633,218
Portland, OR 630,498
Louisville, KY 622,981
Memphis, TN 618,639
I have like 30 reddit accounts and I’m just trolling not-for-profit, so… maybe ~1,000,000? Seems legit
Yeah as I stated in the other reply I totally shit the bed and misread/mistook content as users. My b.
15% of content can easily come from under 1% of users.
Lol I shit the bed. Totally read 15% of users.
It’s behind a paywall
Y combinator discussion suggests this author posts completely made up garbage:
Lol nice, it’s 404’d now
Probably just an anecdote, but notice more sus medium content recently. Used to be niche Python tutorials.
The advent of ChatGPT has made those obsolete, since ChatGPT is probably trained on all of those.
Side note, it doesn’t always fuck up, but most of the time it’ll give just completely wrong matplot instructions. The recent tattoo post comes to mind.
It’s good for python stuff, specifically, potentially because python as a language is the closest we have to a natural, descriptive programming language, and as an LLM that might make connections between functional behavior and language easier. That said, it sometimes tells you to do things that won’t work because the libraries you’re using have some specific incompatibility issues between them and the only way you can find out is via github issue discussions.
I’m not surprised. I get paid good money to troll online
New study: my shock and surprise measured by a single slow blink.
Why is Medium conflating trolls and shills?
Paid propagandists are shills, not trolls.
Agreed. Trolls don’t conceal themselves
You got me. Sometimes revanced not having ads isn’t a good thing
Nice, glad to see concise and clear counterpoints!
True. For example I’m here for pleasure not for business.
