Used Reddit for years. There's no way the percentage is that low.
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
A chronic compulsive content-stealer creature like gallowboob might have encompassed that 15% all by himself.
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
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.
Right!? At least on Lemmy I can drink my Pepsiยฎ in peace. Like for real, there's nothing better than scrolling through some funny memes with a delicious can of ice cold Pepsiยฎ, my fellow [insert slang term; plural]!
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.
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.
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.
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
Looked for their email addressโฆ
(links to ๐)
Yeah reddit totally respects deletion requests
Does deleting our old helpful comments only hurt our fellow web surfers?
The same thing that happened to Digg
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!!
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 safety^TM^, but it may have also gone the same way. I don't keep up with the place)
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.
Lemmy wouldn't have that problem because we're all too busy enjoying an ice cold Coca-Cola.
Please drink verification can now.
"McDonald's!"
Omg the amount of sneaky coke ads I saw on that site was insane
Absolutely disgusting that someone would sell out like that. Not me, my integrity is strong like the legal protection I get from litigatenow.com, where you can sign up for a free consultation today, if you use my referral code #loveads2024
Ha, I've discovered your hidden advertising like I discovered the great taste of a crunchy Big Kahuna Burger.
Let's check out some random customer opinions:
Jules W.: "Mm-hmm! This is a tasty burger!"
Makes me miss the wild west days of the internet. Everything felt more... human. Now it feels like a soulless corporate husk. It's wild that covid babies won't know what those days were like.
Agreed, but Lemmy feels like the old Internet for the most part. I suspect that 90% ish of comments here are actual humans. The remaining 10% is pushing some kind of agenda.
I agree. There's also a pervasive feeling that lemmy is unaffected by manipulation and misinformation.
If Lemmy continues to grow sooner or later it will become a large enough target for manipulation, and I wonder how federation will fare at that time.
Idk, hexbear content comes up in my feed and I feel thatโs all manipulation and misinformation
Alright. I been afraid to ask for fear of getting banned from other communities hosted on their instance, but what is the deal with hexbear? The chat community seems like satire, but it gives off the same kind of vibes as the_donald, just far-left instead of far right.
Like, I consider myself a lefty, but their community just seems self-destructive and toxic. Maybe that's the point, though? Honestly unsure, and afraid to ask on their instance cuz I don't wanna get accused of "just asking questions" and banned.
It really does feel like the_donald doesnโt it? I have no idea what they're about. They claim to far left but when you look at what theyโre actually saying itโs all hate for any position on the left. Even the word โleftโ is a dirty word there. They're probably trolls trying to muddy the water. Maybe itโs some astroturfing or a space to experiment and generate new misinformation content. Idk, it sucks though, it feels all so toxic.
It's a bunch lonely people who got hypnotized by a podcast and now that podcast informs all their opinions.
That's why I'm glad, that my instance defederated from those. I saw some of that content from another instance and I don't miss it.
Yeah, I feel the same, but I don't really know enough about it to make that assertion.
Lemmy is too polite for that. Thank gawd.
Definitely more than 10%. The only really unbiased info I'm finding here is related to obscure coding stuff, or Linux tips.
Reddit has a lot of shills, but that's their business model and they guard access cuz they want to get paid. Lemmy has no moat, and no filter outside of individual mods
For me, it was AIM chatrooms and ebaums forums, maybe the super early days of Skype (before being sold to Microsoft obviously). Shit did feel more real, and while content maybe didn't come out at the same frequency, and there sure was shit, you just knew you were talking about it with other people. Made some good friends back then, would've been cool to stay in touch, but 20+ years is a long time.
You're right in that it will never be like it was, but there are still fringes and niche communities that have that human feel. The thing is they're much less engaging without algorithms and UX driving engagement, we're not drawn to them in the same way.
wild west days of the internet
What age would that be? The time around 2014? 2010? 1990?
Nostalgia fallacy
People are certainly susceptible to Rosy Retrospection, but letโs not forget that 2023โs word of the year was enshittification for a reason!
A two word rebuttal naming the argument type someone is using, does not constitute a valid argument.
The Internet gained steam through hobbyists and is now that corporate shell as described. In my opinion it absolutely was a better place 25 years ago. Today the internet is filled with social engineering everyone's trying to influence something and it's terrible.
The Internet started as this kinda long-haired hippy fella who thought it would be great if everyone could share knowledge and have conversations with everyone else regardless of where they are geographically. Then the corpos made him cut his hair, put on a suit and tie and get a damn job! And 25 years later, he's a yuppie corpo slave. I want my hippy back!
those are some low numbers. between corporate, state, and anonymous shills and trolls, I wholly believe at least 50% of all reddit content is paid for or manipulative for agenda based groups. the sheer number of repetitve posts with repetitve comments constantly being on the front page is pure propaganda. Of course I rmemebr back in the old days when the reddit feed was in (almost) real time where you couldliterally wait every 10 minutes and refresh for an almost completely new front page. Now it's all about repetivie agendas and narratives operating in cycles to manipulate public opinions. the same lame post will sit on the front page for entire days.
I'd say there is a huge amount of bots, then the smart bots, then the actual shills. The smarter ones run complex operations and are able to use their own power to self propel their own stories. And there are a lot of similar 'power users' who are not wholly paid for by someone but would do work for the highest bidder.
I'd bet that yes, 50% of what's on the front page of major things is reputation management or Hail Corporate stuff, then I'd wager the mostly less popular stuff is actual people, with a ton of bad posts from all sides at the low popularity
I've said this before, but we also need to be cautious about this on lemmy and devise ways to empower mods and the community to fight back against this, I'm not entirely sure how since it's a very complex problem
I am convinced this is already happening. One example is the endless new accounts posting ibtimes links.
There are also propoganda websites posted regularly by new accounts (especially sowing disinformation about Russia's war on Ukraine).
Basically be wary of anything posted where it's their first post. Often they make accounts and don't use them for months so they look older.
I also think astroturfing is happening but at lower rate than reddit.
Like you, I have no idea how we can counter this at scale.
The same critical thinking should apply as all other platforms.
A link posted to an article on a company's public blog published in the last 24hrs? Almost certainly viral marketing.
It might help if a poster's number of posts and signup date were listed at the top of each post or comment. Would't be a fix but might help weed out upsprouting autotrolls.
There are a lot of subreddits which routinely award hundreds or thousands of upvotes for repetitive low value posts. ... This is a cog in the well-tuned machine of new-accounts being created and matured to look 'real' for when they are later used for advertising / manipulation later down the line.
In the early months of a new account, it is easier to spot. Eg. If you see a post on a game subreddit with a title like "Exciting to try this game, any tips get started?", you might click the profile and see that their entire history is a bunch of low-effort discussion starters. "Name a band from the 80s that everyone has forgotten"; "What's the most misunderstood concept in maths?"; "What's the most underrated (movie / band / drug / car / tourist attraction / whatever suits the topic of the subreddit)?"
A heap of threads like that, on a new account with a very generic name (adjective-noun-numbers is a common pattern); posting on a variety of subredits... is highly suspicious. But it gets harder to recognise as the account gets older and has a longer history - at which point it is ready to be sold / used for its next purpose.
Yes, definitely. Perhaps highlighted if it's one of their first few posts or the account is new.
It's bloody difficult.
I used to mod on /r/videos years and years back. We had this one guy who was not very active as a mod in the day to day stuff, but was respected because he'd basically disappear for a few months and then reappear with a huge post in our modding sub basically going "so these are all spammers/malicious actors, here's their profiles, the accounts were created in these waves, here's where they've copied existing posts / the identical generic comments and things they use to get around our posting requirements, the targets they've been promoting, etc". Just huge pages of thoroughly researched proof.
This was well before we had huge awareness of situations like Russia manipulating social media - it was usually those viral video places that buy up rights to videos and handle licensing and promotion. It's why for a long time any licensed videos from places like viralhog etc were outright banned - they were constantly trying to manipulate reddit postings in bad faith, and even trying to socially engineer the mod team in modmail, so any videos that mentioned a licensing deal in the description were automatically banned from posting.
If we didn't have that one guy spotting the patterns, most of it would have gotten by easily. Unfortunately he did eventually disappear for good. No clue what happened to him, hope he just cut out social media or something. But with the spamming and astroturfing stuff... Even after fighting it for years I can't tell you what to do to counter it besides "have more of that guy".
Very interesting
Most, if not all game reddits, product reddits, and company reddits are secretly or openly controlled by their respective corpos. Keeping communities as third party forums is a must have IMO.
I agree, this is a very complex issue. As a community we should come together and brainstorm ideas while quenching our thirst with a nice can of Diet Pepsi, the zero-sugar alternative to being thirsty!
Capitalism consumes everything.
Doesn't communism consume everything too?
No. The goal of capitalism is to turn all things into commodities to be bought and sold. It has the growth pattern of cancer. Communism is a moneyless, stateless, classless society where would be free to focus on human-centred objectives like feeding and housing all people, making our environment sustainable, pursuing scientific and academic goals without need for a profit to be generated just for the sake of endless commodification.
That is naive. People will still fight for power and exploit others to get it.
That is cynical. Been hearing this all my life as an excuse for why we can't have nice things. If you don't try, you don't get.
The Soviet Union threatened my parents and grandparents lives. My country did try it, we decided against it. All the issues that capitalism has, communism still has. Add centralized power, and human exploitation is worse. Communism will not solve your problems.
Yeah, only privileged people from Western countries who never knew struggle dream about communism. No one who went through communism will ever support that shit.
It had some of the same problems but not all of them. It had universal healthcare, better rights for women, faster increase of education and literacy, less homelessness, less problems with religion interfering with politics, or companies buying politicians, etc.
It also had some new problems we didn't have like lack of focus on small commodities or suppression of religion, but that's not fixable or required for communism, it's just a focus they had specifically. It also had of the same problems we have just from being human, like anti-LGBTQ attitudes, racism against certain groups, bureaucrats, and wars. But communism's implementation changes between countries, none of those problems are necessary, it's just stuff that has to be learned from. For example, Cuba is communist but has made great strides towards fixing LGBTQ and racist attitudes, and has eased up on religion. China is communist but has a bigger focus on small manufacturing and as a result has lots of small commodities.
Imagine if we abandoned democracy the first time it "failed" in Greece thousands of years ago or the republic in Rome. I don't doubt that you have some relatives that suffered, but by comparison, the US and it's capitalist allies destabilized basically all of South America and Africa. While most people who were alive in the former Soviet block would prefer to go back to when it existed because it caused a huge economic disaster when they sold the countries off for parts and privatized everything for the oligarchs.
The important part is that it's a system not focused on things like GDP, growth, or money made by corporations to determine success, but the happiness and well-being of all the humans as a collective. Just focusing on that would go a long way, no matter which implementation we used (but imo it probably has to be an implementation of socialism or communism, because capitalism can't imagine a society without those money and growth metrics).
We have universal healthcare and human rights everywhere in Europe. But we don't have authoritarian regimes which kill millions for ideology. Fuck communism!
You do, but you don't see it as that because the millions dying are in the Middle-East where you're getting your oil, Africa where you get your diamonds and coffee, South America where you get your minerals and oil, and Asia where they're assembling your manufacturing. And it took wars and imperialism and installed authoritarian puppet regimes to extract the wealth from all those places. Not to mention what do you think the monarchies of World War I and fascist regimes of World War 2 did? Give out puppies?
You guys are better than the US, but only because you're balanced by actual socialist and communist political parties and labor unions that are able to extract concessions like that universal healthcare. Looks like a few of those countries are turning fascist again, so just give it some time, and those human rights will be gone, too.
Lol ok
You can still bribe leaders in a communist system. Woman amd healthcare exist in lots of capalist systems.
While most people who were alive in the former Soviet block would prefer to go back to when it existed because it caused a huge economic disaster when they sold the countries off for parts and privatized everything for the oligarchs
Not even close to most. Make friends in Europe.
The important part is that it's a system not focused on things like GDP, growth, or money made by corporations to determine success, but the happiness and well-being of all the humans as a collective
Don't I have the power over my happiness in capitalism because I can work towards higher wealth extraction to achieve my own goals?.
Sure you can bribe people, but it's a harder when the wealth isn't concentrated in a few people, and the companies are owned by the people instead of private interests. USSR politicians weren't known for being rich, but compare that to modern Russian oligarchs, or even US Congressmen. A majority of the US Congressman are millionaires, not at all true for the common populace.
I'm going off statistics and surveys, not anecdotal evidence.
Don't I have the power over my happiness in capitalism because I can work towards higher wealth extraction to achieve my own goals?.
If you're lucky, but you can't work your way to being billionaire without exploiting people on the way. So, chances are, no. Statistically you're probably one of the people having wealth extracted than the other way around unless you have a supportive network, friendly investors or parents loaning you money. If not, chances are you're making it harder for other people, either who work for you, work with you, act as a reserve army of labor, or are victims of your country's imperialism. It requires some people to suffer as part of the system, but that's not sustainable. There's a reason the US has a shrinking middle class, and a growing fascism problem, and economic crises every 10 years. The UK and Canada aren't far behind, with some groups trying to privatize their health services and such. Europe will be next, with the democratic socialist Scandinavian countries probably last. So it may seem fine where you live now, but give it some years and you'll be right where we are, with someone trying to sell off your health services or other state assets. I'd be willing to bet.
Mate, I was born in USSR, stop spreading lies.
This is what people don't seem to get. Human nature is when things are bad we band together, when things are good, we compete against each other. Capitalism leverages the latter while communism just tries to ignore that it exists.
Capitalism certainly has its flaws, but it's a far better starting point.
Well, while Marx does call for a "winnowing of the State" after the workers seize the means, a problem we saw, in countries such as the USSR, once some of these revolutionaries got their hands on the levers of power, they found they rather liked it, and would not have let go willingly.
I maintain that the issue is that they keep trying to have someone like a president. That doesn't work. You need a council that has executive power, that way if one person starts getting corrupted, they can be winnowed out. If you really want it to work, you need to outlaw political parties from day one, and require that no one that wants to hold political office is eligible to do so.
So, more like a sortition system, like how most Western courts select people for jury duty. Now that I think about it, it probably could work. We have wonders of technology that were once the realm of science fiction. These technologies could be leveraged positively in a communist system, I believe. AI in particular could solve things like the Numbers Problem. In a moneyless society, resources are allocated according to what is most necessary. I once watched a video where a problem was asked of the viewer. The scenario is as follows:
You are now the leader of a communist country. All markets and prices and money have been abolished. You want to build a train between City A and City B. There is a mountain between the two cities. You have two options. Option 1: Build a tunnel through the mountain, and Option 2: Build the track around the mountain.
1 will require less steel, but will take more manpower, as you will need more engineers to design and construct the tunnel.
Option 2 will require less manpower, but far more steel. That steel may be needed for other things, like appliances, medical equipment, homes and hospitals.
So, how do you prioritize resources? How do you know what your fellow citizens value more as a society?
You could do a survey, but then you run into the Numbers Problem. Your country has a lot of people. That's a lot of survey responses. You'll need nearly all of the available manpower in your country to sort them all. But with AI, that might not be necessary. The algorithm could collect all the responses and then output solutions to resource allocation based on those responses. To do this would require a massive surveillance network, though. People would no longer have much in the way of privacy.
The answer is you want to build a train route through a mountain. You don't need it, thus we don't have to build it.
But the nation does need a robust transportation system for people and resources. Both people and things have places they need to go. What's your solution? Unless you can build Star Trek-style matter-energy transporters, rail and road are your best options.
I was under the impression that the nation state should be dissolved and everyone forms communes that reflect their values.
Direct democracy can work way better with smaller communities.
The problem is, you would need a large federation of these communes to band together to defeat a hostile nation state level threat.
The federation! Oh shit
We tried many times, millions were killed each time.
I meant try for utopia. What you refer to isn't that.
It is exactly that. Otherwise Marx wouldn't praise the Taiping massacre, which led to tens of millions of deaths.
No shit. Thatโs why itโs a constant ongoing effort to build communism. The current system is leading us to certain annihilation.
Why wouldn't communism lead to cancer like growth? Wouldn't political leaders be incentivized by the masses for never ending quality of life improvements?
Money is not the problem, it's people. If replace the system, nothing changes. If we want sustainability, that needs to be desired by the masses, and that is achievable without communism.
Because once you reach a certain level, growth isn't required, you just divide the resources you have to give everyone a happy life. People don't need infinite money to be happy, but they do a need a minimum amount, studies have shown that. Capitalism denies that minimum amount to a lot of people because of its focus on accumulating and concentrating that wealth.
Who decides when growth isn't required?
The people probably.
So wouldnt a sugnificant number of people want more than they have?
โPeopleโ are not the problem. Thatโs Malthusian garbage. Capitalism is the problem.
Human beings use complex language and are capable of learning and developing culture.
Capitalism is a system that teaches and enforces greed, competition and exploitation. Capitalism is a system that demands infinite growth for the sake of growth. Itโs nonsensical, and obvious that such a system leads to over-exploitation and collapse. We are currently the way we are because weโve been forced to under this system.
We are capable of change, and learning to build communities and societies based on mutual aid, cooperation, and living in harmony with the world we live in.
If we start to build such communities we will learn to cooperate just as the capitalist system has taught us to be greedy and exploit each other for fear of ending up without the means to house and feed ourselves.
Why wouldnโt communism lead to cancer like growth? Because the objective isnโt endless expansion to make some imaginary line go up and hand over all the wealth to a small number of people. Itโs to manage our world based on good science and achieving objectives that lead to a sustainable world in which all peopleโs basic needs are met.
There are countless ways of building communism, and all of them require constant work. And yes itโs true that if implemented in an authoritarian manner it would lead to a bad outcome (still not as bad as our certain extinction under any capitalist system). Anarchism (and there are many schools of thought within anarchism) gives us many tools to build communism in a libertarian manner where we keep each other in check, ensuring that no one person gains power over others.
Look at Rojava, revolutionary Catalonia, the Ukrainian Free Territory, the Shinmin Autonomous Region. These societies can work, expanded, and built upon if given half a chance.
No, communism is an authoritarian regime fuelled by a never ending genocide. Because there are always enemies of communism and they all must be killed.
Utopias don't exist and never will, that's why Marxism, and by extension communism, is such a colossal failure.
Just because reaching a true utopia is not possible, it doesn't mean we should settle for an economic system that is literally destroying the planet.
Despite what both conservatives and tankies want everyone to believe, marxism and comunism are not the same thing.
All marxists are communist, but not all forms of comunism are marxist, there's also anarchism, democratic confederalism and libertarian socialism.
If you have something better than suggest it, otherwise regulated capitalism is the best economic system we have. Marxism is as shitty as Fascism, it's not an alternative.
Wtf are you talking about? Communism is literally a Marxist idea. It is the utopia end zone that Marx envisioned for his ideology. Listing off a bunching of other fantasy based ideologies doesn't give this utopia any more credibility. It'll never happen. There's a reason why all the attempts at communism lead to collapse or tyranny.
Ok, boomer.
Truth hurts
No, communism kills everyone. That's a big difference.
Yes, which is why a delicate mixture of both is best because they spend their efforts fighting each other rather than fighting your freedom.
Sounds like capitalism.
Marxist subscribe to such a shitty ideology that they literally cannot defend it with the most brain dead whataboutisms known to man.
One thing I've noticed over the years is that in terms of marketing, reddit has a disproportionately high level of return in interaction relative to its size, while Twitter has traditionally had a low level of return relative to its size.
For some reason, comments on reddit has always been viewed as more trustworthy relative to other social media platform, despite reddit or's general reputation for being confidently incorrect on many subjects.
There are certain people whose entire career was made by their reddit posts, yet, it was always odd to me that reddit never managed to effectively capitalize on this other than making their platform worse with every update.
Testing out this theory has been interesting.
Reddit's strategy is genuinely brain dead. Just think of the shit they've been up to:
Jacking up API prices to unreasonable levels and killing off third party apps that brought millions of users on to your platform
Continuously make the UI shittier and shittier to the point where it's unusable
Do the same with the app
Kill off old Reddit which is the sole reason millions of users still use the site
Add awards and expand the feature to basically become paid reaction emojis
Remove awards even though they were one of the biggest revenue streams
Announce it was a mistake and add the awards again
Add avatars that nobody asked for and make some of them paid
Add a premium subscription that does nothing and do absolutely nothing to improve it
Add a bunch of useless features that nobody uses like Reddit live
Truly the works of geniuses.
Old Reddit still works.
For now, but they've been chipping away at it slowly but surely.
I worked at startups and I'm not going to deny that I was absolutely horking my company as a solution for years on Reddit. Especially with niche products.
This was from 2014-2018, and then I left startups and worked in corps.
When Google has plans to slurp reddit comments, I bet I could gamify reddit even more.
Only 15% ๐คจ
at least
Uh, no, not "only"
"Only at least 15%"
As in one could expect the study to yield a higher low bound.
Up to 15% or more.
A good chunk of the rest is morons parroting them.
The director of marketing at my company just got out of a meeting with reddit and is super hyped at funneling all our Facebook and Twitter dollars into reddit instead. I didn't have the heart to tell him he's five years too late.
Is fb or twitter really any more useful for ads though?
lol. Thatโs funny as hell. Might as well shift some money to it for a different market penetration but not all of it
I scoped out reddit as a marketer for a few companies over the years. It's just a standard brand awareness piece. Unless their targeting has got better, I recall you had to dump a minimum of $10k/month and your ad just "got shown" to whomever
I assume they let you target by subreddit and user interest now, but it still can't be that accurate
Y combinator discussion suggests this author posts completely made up garbage:
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.
Not surprising at all.
In other news, GTA Online is awesome! I am definitely not a plant or anything like that, go check out GTA Online!
Or something like that.
lol
I remember when /r/HailCorporate was a trending sub and then it just sort of got strangled to death.
Also remember the periodic waves of "Hillary is bae! Mother of dragons! Yas Queen!" and "I love Mayor Pete" and "KHive ftw!" and even a smattering of Mitt Romney fanboi-ism on /r/politics, as their campaigns rose and fell.
Nevermind the absolutely sycophantic corporate ghoul AMAs. Bill Gates, Ann Coulter, and Don Lemon all leap to mind. Just the absolute worst moderation imaginable for these guys. Then there was the Elon Musk AMA. Jesus fucking Christ.
oh yah, I remember the absolute torrent of crypto shills that started spamming the place when crypto shill posts from other subs started getting posted there.
They were proper angry that they got called out.
I remember one specific account that spammed everything pro Tulsi into the politics subreddit. It was glaringly obvious that they were paid.
Just checked on him, 5 months ago he was posting to sports subreddits... which also feels like a red flag.
Is it a possibility that shill accounts are using sports subreddits to obfuscate the fact that they are still accounts? Like "Hey there fellow citizens, I'm totally a normal poster and a red blooded American who really likes sports!".
The only subreddit I still check is /r/cfb because itโs by far the best college football specific part of the internet and my Fanactus account seems to have been deleted. Iโm not disclosing what my old account was but I was a upper mid level account there for about 7 years, not bragging just framing, it has gotten really fucking shilly in comparison to even last year although itd been happening for a while. It crescendoed with the release of the new college football madden analog, which does make logical sense for why, but there was some hard corporate dick riding. I donโt care for sports video games that donโt involve Mario or have the word Jam in the title so I donโt know if the game is any good but it was obviously paid
Those of us who noticed when HailCorporate first got shadowbanned could see that particular train a coming. Reddit was always going to strangle its own content to death in order to make it more advertiser friendly. I'm honestly surprised it took as long as it did.
Also remember the periodic waves of โHillary is bae! Mother of dragons! Yas Queen!โ and โI love Mayor Peteโ and โKHive ftw!โ and even a smattering of Mitt Romney fanboi-ism on /r/politics, as their campaigns rose and fell.
Literally no, I was there and I don't recall that at all.
Perhaps the record was corrected after you left.
Remember to ShareBlue!
My eyes were opened that election.
"At least" doing a lot of lifting here.
Well, you've gotta leave enough of a percentage for all the Russian and CCP sockpuppets.
Yeah I was surprised the state propagandists left the corpos that much market share.
The next 65% are political trolls
Uh, this post is a bummer and I don't even know if I actually believe the premise... Whatever I guess, lett's all actually just get out of here and go get some Spriteยฎ brand family products, you guys.
But 7upโข is made with natural ingredients, less sugar and is more limey!
My family prefers Brawndo. It has what plants crave.
Remember the_donald started out as a meme sub that got taken over? I fell victim to astroturfing that election season. Thankfully it has made me more skeptical about online interactions now.
"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
15% of content can easily come from under 1% of users.
Lol I shit the bed. Totally read 15% of users.
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.
And now imagine that companies paid reddit money to be enabled to train their AI on them...
Wonder what the percent of AI datasets being propaganda is
Yes.
15% only? Not bad Iโd say. I was expecting more like 30%+
"at least" 15%
Fair point.
I'm confused. So this is a study that shows that significant less content on reddit is bots and trolls than it seems? Like ONLY 15%?
I feel like 15% would have been a realistic number a few years ago, but nowadays you have a hard time comunicating with a real human. A bit like online customer service.
I was also surprised, then I read how this is based on two studies, one four and and the other six years old. Now it makes sense: this was during the good old days!
This 15% isn't inclusive of ALL bots and trolls. Just the corporate sponsored ones.
I remember writing a comment about invasive advertising by Instagram. Just shared some anecdotes about how a few extremely specific conversation topics soon became the topic for the ads I was seeing on Instagram, and pointed out that if they were in fact using background conversation to target ads, it would be extremely easy to automate with the voice recognition technology available at the time, so why would they ignore the opportunity if targeted ads are their main source of revenue?
It became one of my most down voted comments at the time, and I had about twice as many replies as downvotes, claiming all kinds of wild or easily disproven shit to disprove the idea that Instagram used such tactics. Was very fishy
And remember, if THEY have thousands of bots that each 'think independently' but still end up downvoting your post en masse, then that's totally fine. But if YOU try to upvote your post with one of your alts so it doesn't get buried, that's bannable.
To be fair mods did try to take action against that and they did have tools. How well they worked is not something I will pretend to even guess at.
You regularly see posts with 10k+ upvotes and about 5 comments. Even the users say it's scummy as hell.
Go to r/virtualreality and try to give a negative opinion about meta and the quest 3.
To be fair it's great value hardware if you don't care about privacy.
I prefer it when someone watches.
I like to watch
The Meta OnlyFans partnership you've always wanted.
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โฆor battery life, or comfort, or buying batteries for your controllersโฆ
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Actually that is not true your interactions are very authentic. Beep boop.
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That's alarmingly low - it suggests that it doesn't take much for any given influencing campaign. If there are fifteen discrete such campaigns in play, that's just 1/100 of everyone. Now imagine that there's tens of such campaigns, and the numbers look even more reasonable. Also, it's probably cost-effective at this scale since this has been with us a while, which is terrifying.
What I want to know is: what percentage are human users that ate the onionmetaphorical tequila worm^1^ and are now parroting these trolls?
1. Follow me here: drink a bottle and eat the worm inside. You're not thinking straight and did something you wouldn't do if you had your wits about you, or maybe a friend nearby that is thinking clearly. Propaganda has a way of forcing you into a phantasm by emotional manipulation, making it easy to jam all kinds of nonsense into your head. Extending the metaphor, said propaganda also lays out how to defend your worm eating habit as though it's totally normal to do.
It makes me feel weird when I try to recommend stuff I really like. I'll be so in favor of the things I like that it sounds like I'm selling it to you because I want you to like it too. I'm sure some people think I'm shilling the Steam Deck.
Same. I try to steer people to ALDI for groceries cause they were the least fuckwadish the past few years about price gouging and I sometimes feel like I'm shilling. I only wish I were getting paid for it :\
Second, given that the author has hidden this in a paywall--you have to sign up in order to access the article and presumably any links--I'm going to immediately distrust the motives.
Third, Medium is a glorified blogging site; anyone can say anything on it.
The โauthorโ is citing a study. Idk why youโd indict the study because the media that is making you aware of the existence of said study is behind a paywall. Bizarre reasoning.
Hmmm, not necessarily all that bizarre. The title on the Lenny link states that 15% of ALL Reddit content is corporate trolls trying to sway public opinion - now that this gentleperson has kindly provided the link to a non-paywall version, I can see that this is 2 studies, one from 2018 and one from 2020, one of which states that 15% of the top 100 subreddits may have experienced corporate trolls and/or bots posting content at some point, but they donโt say how much.
Huge difference between the title and the substance of the article, they buried the lede in a somewhat clever way. Chances are the author (and editor) are well aware that most of their audience doesnโt have an account, and arenโt going to create an account - therefore, by posting a misleading title (or letting others exaggerate the claims in the title through links on other platforms) they can reach a far larger audience, and sway public opinion more effectively, by burying the actual context behind the paywall.
I mean, I donโt know that that is whatโs happening, but it makes a lot of sense and kind of rhymes with the whole point of the article, so yeah - I donโt trust their motives either, and I can definitely see the logic behind distrusting paywalls on principle.
Iโm going to immediately distrust the motives.
Additionally, the data is self-reported surveys with questions like "Have you ever been contacted by someone from a company or corporation?" and... yeah? This part shouldn't be surprising to any platform that allows private messages. And "Have you ever seen someone promoting a product?" and most people are going to either shrug or already have a strong opinion, it's not very scientific for actual data on the actual traffic from bots and corporate shills, more how the human users feel about the platform.
I would much rather see an independent investigation from a technical point-of-view, which tracks the comments and timing of user comments to determine how many are actually bots just quietly gaining karma with innocuous comments, or how many are just programmed to go to certain subreddits at certain times to push a narrative.
Glad they included "at least" because there's no way it's that low.
You can tell by the amount of reddit posts or comments that links you a paywalled article. Like what the fuck?! Is everyone paying for this shit?
Thanks for sharing
If it's not corporations then it's PACs astroturfing. It's nothing new.
Companies definitely astroturf on Reddit, but, they do it through third or even fourth parties. There is a whole micro industry of vote buying and comment spamming, ad firms or companies will pay such groups to add certain messaging to their comment spam. You can actually make a quick buck by selling any old Reddit accounts to such groups.
Especially the petrococksuckers.
I just want more people to LEAVE Reddit. To hell with corporate agendas, cowardly moderators, and incompetent admin. The internet needs an open source platform like Reddit where you can voice your opinion, no matter how flawed it may be, without concern you'll be "banned"...
Second, end users need to display more maturity and stop being so sensitive.....a BLOCK resolves 99.99% of ANY. "Moderator" involvement.
"****" words is about all they need to "censor" and even that's questionable. Mods should just focus on actual bots and sub organization not so much the content police, most stuff can be self regulated.....
Lemmy, albeit I don't think the name is good for brand recognition, the functionality is ok, similar, just needs the audience. Even YouTube and Facebook....."community guidelines " ....I "offended" the AI,.... this is dire times and sadly most are not even aware. Without US these platforms don't exist. Facebook wouldn't be Facebook if it weren't for the USERS so why are you micromanaging them..... YouTube videos have to say "unalive" "deleted" "no longer with us" instead of kill murder death... it's so cringe and I'm so upset that critical thinking, having an opinion, being an adult using "curse" words is problematic..... I look forward to Reddit crashing. I look forward to mods crashing as well. They ruined the open space to speak freely.... but again the massess go along to get along and they continue to win.......
Shit you can get paid?
The word "troll" just kinda doesn't mean much anymore, huh.
A troll is just someone who says something to provoke a (usually negative) response. They don't have any agenda other than to entertain themselves.
A dude going into a Fortnite community to post "Fortnite sucks ass" is a troll. A dude posting propaganda to sway opinions toward a political goal/shill a product is something else.
I suppose they're using the term troll to refer to a person engaging in behavior calculated to evoke a desired response while evading detection as doing such. It was actually used similarly in at least one academic paper back in the nineties: "Identity and deception in the virtual community", by Judith S. Donath.
Lower than I expected
I just hope that the next new study doesn't end up being "New Study: At Least 15% of All Lemmy Content is Corporate Trolls Trying to Manipulate Public Opinion", otherwise I would be wondering WTF is going on, is Lemmy on the way of being enshittified by Corporate Morons?
Hey, good to see you around! How is your koala community going?
Yep, Reddit continues to shit itself.
They were failing pretty miserably back when I was a visitor. Hopefully that's still the case, though I imagine they will gain more and more traction as the reddit brain drain continues.
I cannot imagine using Reddit ever again beyond trying to cheat Google. It's so shitty.
And they get pretty obvious in big subs like /cars and /gaming. So many posting opinions like car magazines or gaming reviews do - point out nit-picky negatives that are relatively inconsequential to the product, softball other criticism, but give an overall decent review. Heaven help you if you actually voice an opinion critical of the object, because youโre allowed to have that opinion as an individual, that doesnโt toe the line and you get instant downvotes.
My first realization about this problem with reddit came about a decade ago when it became undeniable that shills flooded the discourse the moment Monsanto was mentioned.
Seen this post over and over. This is not a new study at that point
New study: 15% of Lemmy posts are studies about 15% of all Reddit content
:D
Portillos bots would camp on the Chicagofood sub and Stan about adding cheese sauce to everything and to make sure to save room for the chocolate cake. Nobody irl from the area would hype anything from that chain
New study: my shock and surprise measured by a single slow blink.
I feel like when I run into an old friend and they tell me my ex is in rehab.
And what percent is Russian psy-ops?
I'm not surprised. I get paid good money to troll online
Only going up
And this is why I use lemmy
I worry that if/when Lemmy becomes popular enough the larger communities will be targeted in the same way...
What makes you think lemmy is immune?
Is there a chance that Lemmy admins might have more incentive to combat this than Reddit admins did?
And 80% of Reddit is filled with degenerates of every kind. It's a total cesspool of excrement.
Crusty jugglers
Devil's advocate here. Does not pretty much any post on the subject of politics that is not simply reporting constitute an attempt to manipulate public opinion? Are they specifically referencing nation states trying to influence public opinion?
Astroturfing. Ads disguised as user content.
You see an ad, you recognize it as an ad. Your opinion is probably unchanged.
You see a user saying "Hey this product is actually pretty good," it's more likely to sway your feelings on the product, or at least your perception of the general sentiment to the product.
I'm mostly just wondering how they're distinguishing between astroturfing and legit posts.
Yeah sure but it's the scale and sincerity.
Me telling you my opinion on something is just that. I am just some guy. I don't have access, or even want access, to a billion bots spamming my opinion.
Also my opinion even if applied really doesn't mean much practically. Generally speaking I am pro infrastructure so if somehow the government spent more money on infrastructure that only translates, at best, to a small raise on my part. Not the same as say a major corp.
You see a community board where people can put up ads. What you expect to see are piano lessons, apartment for rent, tutoring etc. little things that really only matter to one person. You don't expect some megacorp to rip every sign down and turn it into a billboard that blasts from speakers each time someone walks past.
Basically it's a question of degree not of kind. It might be that it is all the same kind but the degree is so vastly different.
Used Reddit for years. There's no way the percentage is that low.
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
A chronic compulsive content-stealer creature like gallowboob might have encompassed that 15% all by himself.
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
I'll block them here as well.
Green___Cat?
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.
Right!? At least on Lemmy I can drink my Pepsiยฎ in peace. Like for real, there's nothing better than scrolling through some funny memes with a delicious can of ice cold Pepsiยฎ, my fellow [insert slang term; plural]!
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.
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.
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.
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?
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Looked for their email addressโฆ
(links to ๐)
Yeah reddit totally respects deletion requests
Does deleting our old helpful comments only hurt our fellow web surfers?
The same thing that happened to Digg
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!!
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 safety^TM^, but it may have also gone the same way. I don't keep up with the place)
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.
Lemmy wouldn't have that problem because we're all too busy enjoying an ice cold Coca-Cola.
Please drink verification can now.
"McDonald's!"
Omg the amount of sneaky coke ads I saw on that site was insane
Absolutely disgusting that someone would sell out like that. Not me, my integrity is strong like the legal protection I get from litigatenow.com, where you can sign up for a free consultation today, if you use my referral code #loveads2024
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Dead internet here we come!
Makes me miss the wild west days of the internet. Everything felt more... human. Now it feels like a soulless corporate husk. It's wild that covid babies won't know what those days were like.
Agreed, but Lemmy feels like the old Internet for the most part. I suspect that 90% ish of comments here are actual humans. The remaining 10% is pushing some kind of agenda.
I agree. There's also a pervasive feeling that lemmy is unaffected by manipulation and misinformation.
If Lemmy continues to grow sooner or later it will become a large enough target for manipulation, and I wonder how federation will fare at that time.
Idk, hexbear content comes up in my feed and I feel thatโs all manipulation and misinformation
Alright. I been afraid to ask for fear of getting banned from other communities hosted on their instance, but what is the deal with hexbear? The chat community seems like satire, but it gives off the same kind of vibes as the_donald, just far-left instead of far right. Like, I consider myself a lefty, but their community just seems self-destructive and toxic. Maybe that's the point, though? Honestly unsure, and afraid to ask on their instance cuz I don't wanna get accused of "just asking questions" and banned.
It really does feel like the_donald doesnโt it? I have no idea what they're about. They claim to far left but when you look at what theyโre actually saying itโs all hate for any position on the left. Even the word โleftโ is a dirty word there. They're probably trolls trying to muddy the water. Maybe itโs some astroturfing or a space to experiment and generate new misinformation content. Idk, it sucks though, it feels all so toxic.
It's a bunch lonely people who got hypnotized by a podcast and now that podcast informs all their opinions.
That's why I'm glad, that my instance defederated from those. I saw some of that content from another instance and I don't miss it.
Yeah, I feel the same, but I don't really know enough about it to make that assertion.
Lemmy is too polite for that. Thank gawd.
Definitely more than 10%. The only really unbiased info I'm finding here is related to obscure coding stuff, or Linux tips.
Reddit has a lot of shills, but that's their business model and they guard access cuz they want to get paid. Lemmy has no moat, and no filter outside of individual mods
For me, it was AIM chatrooms and ebaums forums, maybe the super early days of Skype (before being sold to Microsoft obviously). Shit did feel more real, and while content maybe didn't come out at the same frequency, and there sure was shit, you just knew you were talking about it with other people. Made some good friends back then, would've been cool to stay in touch, but 20+ years is a long time.
You're right in that it will never be like it was, but there are still fringes and niche communities that have that human feel. The thing is they're much less engaging without algorithms and UX driving engagement, we're not drawn to them in the same way.
What age would that be? The time around 2014? 2010? 1990?
Nostalgia fallacy
People are certainly susceptible to Rosy Retrospection, but letโs not forget that 2023โs word of the year was enshittification for a reason!
A two word rebuttal naming the argument type someone is using, does not constitute a valid argument.
Yes it does.
Three does
Got em
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The Internet gained steam through hobbyists and is now that corporate shell as described. In my opinion it absolutely was a better place 25 years ago. Today the internet is filled with social engineering everyone's trying to influence something and it's terrible.
The Internet started as this kinda long-haired hippy fella who thought it would be great if everyone could share knowledge and have conversations with everyone else regardless of where they are geographically. Then the corpos made him cut his hair, put on a suit and tie and get a damn job! And 25 years later, he's a yuppie corpo slave. I want my hippy back!
those are some low numbers. between corporate, state, and anonymous shills and trolls, I wholly believe at least 50% of all reddit content is paid for or manipulative for agenda based groups. the sheer number of repetitve posts with repetitve comments constantly being on the front page is pure propaganda. Of course I rmemebr back in the old days when the reddit feed was in (almost) real time where you couldliterally wait every 10 minutes and refresh for an almost completely new front page. Now it's all about repetivie agendas and narratives operating in cycles to manipulate public opinions. the same lame post will sit on the front page for entire days.
I'd say there is a huge amount of bots, then the smart bots, then the actual shills. The smarter ones run complex operations and are able to use their own power to self propel their own stories. And there are a lot of similar 'power users' who are not wholly paid for by someone but would do work for the highest bidder. I'd bet that yes, 50% of what's on the front page of major things is reputation management or Hail Corporate stuff, then I'd wager the mostly less popular stuff is actual people, with a ton of bad posts from all sides at the low popularity
I've said this before, but we also need to be cautious about this on lemmy and devise ways to empower mods and the community to fight back against this, I'm not entirely sure how since it's a very complex problem
I am convinced this is already happening. One example is the endless new accounts posting ibtimes links.
There are also propoganda websites posted regularly by new accounts (especially sowing disinformation about Russia's war on Ukraine).
Basically be wary of anything posted where it's their first post. Often they make accounts and don't use them for months so they look older.
I also think astroturfing is happening but at lower rate than reddit.
Like you, I have no idea how we can counter this at scale.
The same critical thinking should apply as all other platforms.
A link posted to an article on a company's public blog published in the last 24hrs? Almost certainly viral marketing.
It might help if a poster's number of posts and signup date were listed at the top of each post or comment. Would't be a fix but might help weed out upsprouting autotrolls.
There are a lot of subreddits which routinely award hundreds or thousands of upvotes for repetitive low value posts. ... This is a cog in the well-tuned machine of new-accounts being created and matured to look 'real' for when they are later used for advertising / manipulation later down the line.
In the early months of a new account, it is easier to spot. Eg. If you see a post on a game subreddit with a title like "Exciting to try this game, any tips get started?", you might click the profile and see that their entire history is a bunch of low-effort discussion starters. "Name a band from the 80s that everyone has forgotten"; "What's the most misunderstood concept in maths?"; "What's the most underrated (movie / band / drug / car / tourist attraction / whatever suits the topic of the subreddit)?"
A heap of threads like that, on a new account with a very generic name (adjective-noun-numbers is a common pattern); posting on a variety of subredits... is highly suspicious. But it gets harder to recognise as the account gets older and has a longer history - at which point it is ready to be sold / used for its next purpose.
Yes, definitely. Perhaps highlighted if it's one of their first few posts or the account is new.
It's bloody difficult.
I used to mod on /r/videos years and years back. We had this one guy who was not very active as a mod in the day to day stuff, but was respected because he'd basically disappear for a few months and then reappear with a huge post in our modding sub basically going "so these are all spammers/malicious actors, here's their profiles, the accounts were created in these waves, here's where they've copied existing posts / the identical generic comments and things they use to get around our posting requirements, the targets they've been promoting, etc". Just huge pages of thoroughly researched proof.
This was well before we had huge awareness of situations like Russia manipulating social media - it was usually those viral video places that buy up rights to videos and handle licensing and promotion. It's why for a long time any licensed videos from places like viralhog etc were outright banned - they were constantly trying to manipulate reddit postings in bad faith, and even trying to socially engineer the mod team in modmail, so any videos that mentioned a licensing deal in the description were automatically banned from posting.
If we didn't have that one guy spotting the patterns, most of it would have gotten by easily. Unfortunately he did eventually disappear for good. No clue what happened to him, hope he just cut out social media or something. But with the spamming and astroturfing stuff... Even after fighting it for years I can't tell you what to do to counter it besides "have more of that guy".
Very interesting
Most, if not all game reddits, product reddits, and company reddits are secretly or openly controlled by their respective corpos. Keeping communities as third party forums is a must have IMO.
I agree, this is a very complex issue. As a community we should come together and brainstorm ideas while quenching our thirst with a nice can of Diet Pepsi, the zero-sugar alternative to being thirsty!
Capitalism consumes everything.
Doesn't communism consume everything too?
No. The goal of capitalism is to turn all things into commodities to be bought and sold. It has the growth pattern of cancer. Communism is a moneyless, stateless, classless society where would be free to focus on human-centred objectives like feeding and housing all people, making our environment sustainable, pursuing scientific and academic goals without need for a profit to be generated just for the sake of endless commodification.
That is naive. People will still fight for power and exploit others to get it.
That is cynical. Been hearing this all my life as an excuse for why we can't have nice things. If you don't try, you don't get.
The Soviet Union threatened my parents and grandparents lives. My country did try it, we decided against it. All the issues that capitalism has, communism still has. Add centralized power, and human exploitation is worse. Communism will not solve your problems.
Yeah, only privileged people from Western countries who never knew struggle dream about communism. No one who went through communism will ever support that shit.
It had some of the same problems but not all of them. It had universal healthcare, better rights for women, faster increase of education and literacy, less homelessness, less problems with religion interfering with politics, or companies buying politicians, etc.
It also had some new problems we didn't have like lack of focus on small commodities or suppression of religion, but that's not fixable or required for communism, it's just a focus they had specifically. It also had of the same problems we have just from being human, like anti-LGBTQ attitudes, racism against certain groups, bureaucrats, and wars. But communism's implementation changes between countries, none of those problems are necessary, it's just stuff that has to be learned from. For example, Cuba is communist but has made great strides towards fixing LGBTQ and racist attitudes, and has eased up on religion. China is communist but has a bigger focus on small manufacturing and as a result has lots of small commodities.
Imagine if we abandoned democracy the first time it "failed" in Greece thousands of years ago or the republic in Rome. I don't doubt that you have some relatives that suffered, but by comparison, the US and it's capitalist allies destabilized basically all of South America and Africa. While most people who were alive in the former Soviet block would prefer to go back to when it existed because it caused a huge economic disaster when they sold the countries off for parts and privatized everything for the oligarchs.
The important part is that it's a system not focused on things like GDP, growth, or money made by corporations to determine success, but the happiness and well-being of all the humans as a collective. Just focusing on that would go a long way, no matter which implementation we used (but imo it probably has to be an implementation of socialism or communism, because capitalism can't imagine a society without those money and growth metrics).
We have universal healthcare and human rights everywhere in Europe. But we don't have authoritarian regimes which kill millions for ideology. Fuck communism!
You do, but you don't see it as that because the millions dying are in the Middle-East where you're getting your oil, Africa where you get your diamonds and coffee, South America where you get your minerals and oil, and Asia where they're assembling your manufacturing. And it took wars and imperialism and installed authoritarian puppet regimes to extract the wealth from all those places. Not to mention what do you think the monarchies of World War I and fascist regimes of World War 2 did? Give out puppies?
You guys are better than the US, but only because you're balanced by actual socialist and communist political parties and labor unions that are able to extract concessions like that universal healthcare. Looks like a few of those countries are turning fascist again, so just give it some time, and those human rights will be gone, too.
Lol ok
You can still bribe leaders in a communist system. Woman amd healthcare exist in lots of capalist systems.
Not even close to most. Make friends in Europe.
Don't I have the power over my happiness in capitalism because I can work towards higher wealth extraction to achieve my own goals?.
Sure you can bribe people, but it's a harder when the wealth isn't concentrated in a few people, and the companies are owned by the people instead of private interests. USSR politicians weren't known for being rich, but compare that to modern Russian oligarchs, or even US Congressmen. A majority of the US Congressman are millionaires, not at all true for the common populace.
I'm going off statistics and surveys, not anecdotal evidence.
http://thetrumpet.com/6322-eastern-germans-feel-life-was-better-under-communism
http://pewresearch.org/short-reads/2010/04/28/hungary-better-off-under-communism/
http://reason.com/2009/11/16/the-rise-of-communist-nostalgi/
http://voxukraine.org/en/the-strong-hand-curse-why-ukrainians-do-not-like-capitalism
http://balkaninsight.com/2010/11/24/macedonians-deem-communist-past-better-than-present/
http://themoscowtimes.com/2017/12/25/majority-of-russians-regret-soviet-collapse-poll-says-a60039
http://rt.com/news/ussr-collapse-mistake-poll-585/
If you're lucky, but you can't work your way to being billionaire without exploiting people on the way. So, chances are, no. Statistically you're probably one of the people having wealth extracted than the other way around unless you have a supportive network, friendly investors or parents loaning you money. If not, chances are you're making it harder for other people, either who work for you, work with you, act as a reserve army of labor, or are victims of your country's imperialism. It requires some people to suffer as part of the system, but that's not sustainable. There's a reason the US has a shrinking middle class, and a growing fascism problem, and economic crises every 10 years. The UK and Canada aren't far behind, with some groups trying to privatize their health services and such. Europe will be next, with the democratic socialist Scandinavian countries probably last. So it may seem fine where you live now, but give it some years and you'll be right where we are, with someone trying to sell off your health services or other state assets. I'd be willing to bet.
Mate, I was born in USSR, stop spreading lies.
This is what people don't seem to get. Human nature is when things are bad we band together, when things are good, we compete against each other. Capitalism leverages the latter while communism just tries to ignore that it exists.
Capitalism certainly has its flaws, but it's a far better starting point.
Well, while Marx does call for a "winnowing of the State" after the workers seize the means, a problem we saw, in countries such as the USSR, once some of these revolutionaries got their hands on the levers of power, they found they rather liked it, and would not have let go willingly.
I maintain that the issue is that they keep trying to have someone like a president. That doesn't work. You need a council that has executive power, that way if one person starts getting corrupted, they can be winnowed out. If you really want it to work, you need to outlaw political parties from day one, and require that no one that wants to hold political office is eligible to do so.
So, more like a sortition system, like how most Western courts select people for jury duty. Now that I think about it, it probably could work. We have wonders of technology that were once the realm of science fiction. These technologies could be leveraged positively in a communist system, I believe. AI in particular could solve things like the Numbers Problem. In a moneyless society, resources are allocated according to what is most necessary. I once watched a video where a problem was asked of the viewer. The scenario is as follows:
You are now the leader of a communist country. All markets and prices and money have been abolished. You want to build a train between City A and City B. There is a mountain between the two cities. You have two options. Option 1: Build a tunnel through the mountain, and Option 2: Build the track around the mountain.
1 will require less steel, but will take more manpower, as you will need more engineers to design and construct the tunnel.
Option 2 will require less manpower, but far more steel. That steel may be needed for other things, like appliances, medical equipment, homes and hospitals.
So, how do you prioritize resources? How do you know what your fellow citizens value more as a society?
You could do a survey, but then you run into the Numbers Problem. Your country has a lot of people. That's a lot of survey responses. You'll need nearly all of the available manpower in your country to sort them all. But with AI, that might not be necessary. The algorithm could collect all the responses and then output solutions to resource allocation based on those responses. To do this would require a massive surveillance network, though. People would no longer have much in the way of privacy.
The answer is you want to build a train route through a mountain. You don't need it, thus we don't have to build it.
But the nation does need a robust transportation system for people and resources. Both people and things have places they need to go. What's your solution? Unless you can build Star Trek-style matter-energy transporters, rail and road are your best options.
I was under the impression that the nation state should be dissolved and everyone forms communes that reflect their values.
Direct democracy can work way better with smaller communities.
The problem is, you would need a large federation of these communes to band together to defeat a hostile nation state level threat.
The federation! Oh shit
We tried many times, millions were killed each time.
I meant try for utopia. What you refer to isn't that.
It is exactly that. Otherwise Marx wouldn't praise the Taiping massacre, which led to tens of millions of deaths.
No shit. Thatโs why itโs a constant ongoing effort to build communism. The current system is leading us to certain annihilation.
Why wouldn't communism lead to cancer like growth? Wouldn't political leaders be incentivized by the masses for never ending quality of life improvements?
Money is not the problem, it's people. If replace the system, nothing changes. If we want sustainability, that needs to be desired by the masses, and that is achievable without communism.
Because once you reach a certain level, growth isn't required, you just divide the resources you have to give everyone a happy life. People don't need infinite money to be happy, but they do a need a minimum amount, studies have shown that. Capitalism denies that minimum amount to a lot of people because of its focus on accumulating and concentrating that wealth.
Who decides when growth isn't required?
The people probably.
So wouldnt a sugnificant number of people want more than they have?
โPeopleโ are not the problem. Thatโs Malthusian garbage. Capitalism is the problem.
Human beings use complex language and are capable of learning and developing culture.
Capitalism is a system that teaches and enforces greed, competition and exploitation. Capitalism is a system that demands infinite growth for the sake of growth. Itโs nonsensical, and obvious that such a system leads to over-exploitation and collapse. We are currently the way we are because weโve been forced to under this system.
We are capable of change, and learning to build communities and societies based on mutual aid, cooperation, and living in harmony with the world we live in.
If we start to build such communities we will learn to cooperate just as the capitalist system has taught us to be greedy and exploit each other for fear of ending up without the means to house and feed ourselves.
Why wouldnโt communism lead to cancer like growth? Because the objective isnโt endless expansion to make some imaginary line go up and hand over all the wealth to a small number of people. Itโs to manage our world based on good science and achieving objectives that lead to a sustainable world in which all peopleโs basic needs are met.
There are countless ways of building communism, and all of them require constant work. And yes itโs true that if implemented in an authoritarian manner it would lead to a bad outcome (still not as bad as our certain extinction under any capitalist system). Anarchism (and there are many schools of thought within anarchism) gives us many tools to build communism in a libertarian manner where we keep each other in check, ensuring that no one person gains power over others.
Look at Rojava, revolutionary Catalonia, the Ukrainian Free Territory, the Shinmin Autonomous Region. These societies can work, expanded, and built upon if given half a chance.
No, communism is an authoritarian regime fuelled by a never ending genocide. Because there are always enemies of communism and they all must be killed.
Utopias don't exist and never will, that's why Marxism, and by extension communism, is such a colossal failure.
If you have something better than suggest it, otherwise regulated capitalism is the best economic system we have. Marxism is as shitty as Fascism, it's not an alternative.
Wtf are you talking about? Communism is literally a Marxist idea. It is the utopia end zone that Marx envisioned for his ideology. Listing off a bunching of other fantasy based ideologies doesn't give this utopia any more credibility. It'll never happen. There's a reason why all the attempts at communism lead to collapse or tyranny.
Ok, boomer.
Truth hurts
No, communism kills everyone. That's a big difference.
Yes, which is why a delicate mixture of both is best because they spend their efforts fighting each other rather than fighting your freedom.
Sounds like capitalism.
Marxist subscribe to such a shitty ideology that they literally cannot defend it with the most brain dead whataboutisms known to man.
One thing I've noticed over the years is that in terms of marketing, reddit has a disproportionately high level of return in interaction relative to its size, while Twitter has traditionally had a low level of return relative to its size.
For some reason, comments on reddit has always been viewed as more trustworthy relative to other social media platform, despite reddit or's general reputation for being confidently incorrect on many subjects.
There are certain people whose entire career was made by their reddit posts, yet, it was always odd to me that reddit never managed to effectively capitalize on this other than making their platform worse with every update.
Testing out this theory has been interesting.
Reddit's strategy is genuinely brain dead. Just think of the shit they've been up to:
Truly the works of geniuses.
Old Reddit still works.
For now, but they've been chipping away at it slowly but surely.
I worked at startups and I'm not going to deny that I was absolutely horking my company as a solution for years on Reddit. Especially with niche products.
This was from 2014-2018, and then I left startups and worked in corps.
When Google has plans to slurp reddit comments, I bet I could gamify reddit even more.
Only 15% ๐คจ
Uh, no, not "only"
"Only at least 15%"
As in one could expect the study to yield a higher low bound.
Up to 15% or more.
A good chunk of the rest is morons parroting them.
The director of marketing at my company just got out of a meeting with reddit and is super hyped at funneling all our Facebook and Twitter dollars into reddit instead. I didn't have the heart to tell him he's five years too late.
Is fb or twitter really any more useful for ads though?
lol. Thatโs funny as hell. Might as well shift some money to it for a different market penetration but not all of it
I scoped out reddit as a marketer for a few companies over the years. It's just a standard brand awareness piece. Unless their targeting has got better, I recall you had to dump a minimum of $10k/month and your ad just "got shown" to whomever
I assume they let you target by subreddit and user interest now, but it still can't be that accurate
Y combinator discussion suggests this author posts completely made up garbage:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38700636
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38627266
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.
Not surprising at all.
In other news, GTA Online is awesome! I am definitely not a plant or anything like that, go check out GTA Online!
Or something like that.
lol
I remember when /r/HailCorporate was a trending sub and then it just sort of got strangled to death.
Also remember the periodic waves of "Hillary is bae! Mother of dragons! Yas Queen!" and "I love Mayor Pete" and "KHive ftw!" and even a smattering of Mitt Romney fanboi-ism on /r/politics, as their campaigns rose and fell.
Nevermind the absolutely sycophantic corporate ghoul AMAs. Bill Gates, Ann Coulter, and Don Lemon all leap to mind. Just the absolute worst moderation imaginable for these guys. Then there was the Elon Musk AMA. Jesus fucking Christ.
oh yah, I remember the absolute torrent of crypto shills that started spamming the place when crypto shill posts from other subs started getting posted there.
They were proper angry that they got called out.
I remember one specific account that spammed everything pro Tulsi into the politics subreddit. It was glaringly obvious that they were paid.
Just checked on him, 5 months ago he was posting to sports subreddits... which also feels like a red flag.
Is it a possibility that shill accounts are using sports subreddits to obfuscate the fact that they are still accounts? Like "Hey there fellow citizens, I'm totally a normal poster and a red blooded American who really likes sports!".
The only subreddit I still check is /r/cfb because itโs by far the best college football specific part of the internet and my Fanactus account seems to have been deleted. Iโm not disclosing what my old account was but I was a upper mid level account there for about 7 years, not bragging just framing, it has gotten really fucking shilly in comparison to even last year although itd been happening for a while. It crescendoed with the release of the new college football madden analog, which does make logical sense for why, but there was some hard corporate dick riding. I donโt care for sports video games that donโt involve Mario or have the word Jam in the title so I donโt know if the game is any good but it was obviously paid
Those of us who noticed when HailCorporate first got shadowbanned could see that particular train a coming. Reddit was always going to strangle its own content to death in order to make it more advertiser friendly. I'm honestly surprised it took as long as it did.
Literally no, I was there and I don't recall that at all.
Perhaps the record was corrected after you left.
Remember to ShareBlue!
My eyes were opened that election.
"At least" doing a lot of lifting here.
Well, you've gotta leave enough of a percentage for all the Russian and CCP sockpuppets.
Yeah I was surprised the state propagandists left the corpos that much market share.
The next 65% are political trolls
Uh, this post is a bummer and I don't even know if I actually believe the premise... Whatever I guess, lett's all actually just get out of here and go get some Spriteยฎ brand family products, you guys.
But 7upโข is made with natural ingredients, less sugar and is more limey!
My family prefers Brawndo. It has what plants crave.
Remember the_donald started out as a meme sub that got taken over? I fell victim to astroturfing that election season. Thankfully it has made me more skeptical about online interactions now.
"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
15% of content can easily come from under 1% of users.
Lol I shit the bed. Totally read 15% of users.
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.
Key word: At least
Why is Medium conflating trolls and shills?
Paid propagandists are shills, not trolls.
Agreed. Trolls don't conceal themselves
Seems like concealment to me
Nice, glad to see concise and clear counterpoints!
You got me. Sometimes revanced not having ads isn't a good thing
True. For example I'm here for pleasure not for business.
I donโt 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
And now imagine that companies paid reddit money to be enabled to train their AI on them...
Wonder what the percent of AI datasets being propaganda is
Yes.
15% only? Not bad Iโd say. I was expecting more like 30%+
"at least" 15%
Fair point.
I'm confused. So this is a study that shows that significant less content on reddit is bots and trolls than it seems? Like ONLY 15%?
I feel like 15% would have been a realistic number a few years ago, but nowadays you have a hard time comunicating with a real human. A bit like online customer service.
I was also surprised, then I read how this is based on two studies, one four and and the other six years old. Now it makes sense: this was during the good old days!
This 15% isn't inclusive of ALL bots and trolls. Just the corporate sponsored ones.
I remember writing a comment about invasive advertising by Instagram. Just shared some anecdotes about how a few extremely specific conversation topics soon became the topic for the ads I was seeing on Instagram, and pointed out that if they were in fact using background conversation to target ads, it would be extremely easy to automate with the voice recognition technology available at the time, so why would they ignore the opportunity if targeted ads are their main source of revenue?
It became one of my most down voted comments at the time, and I had about twice as many replies as downvotes, claiming all kinds of wild or easily disproven shit to disprove the idea that Instagram used such tactics. Was very fishy
And remember, if THEY have thousands of bots that each 'think independently' but still end up downvoting your post en masse, then that's totally fine. But if YOU try to upvote your post with one of your alts so it doesn't get buried, that's bannable.
To be fair mods did try to take action against that and they did have tools. How well they worked is not something I will pretend to even guess at.
You regularly see posts with 10k+ upvotes and about 5 comments. Even the users say it's scummy as hell.
Go to r/virtualreality and try to give a negative opinion about meta and the quest 3.
To be fair it's great value hardware if you don't care about privacy.
I prefer it when someone watches.
I like to watch
The Meta OnlyFans partnership you've always wanted.
goto horny jail
good thing i care about my privacy and VR makes me nauseous.
โฆor battery life, or comfort, or buying batteries for your controllersโฆ
say: "i am sexually attracted ro Samsung gear vr"
Actually that is not true your interactions are very authentic. Beep boop.
That's alarmingly low - it suggests that it doesn't take much for any given influencing campaign. If there are fifteen discrete such campaigns in play, that's just 1/100 of everyone. Now imagine that there's tens of such campaigns, and the numbers look even more reasonable. Also, it's probably cost-effective at this scale since this has been with us a while, which is terrifying.
What I want to know is: what percentage are human users that ate the
onionmetaphorical tequila worm^1^ and are now parroting these trolls?1. Follow me here: drink a bottle and eat the worm inside. You're not thinking straight and did something you wouldn't do if you had your wits about you, or maybe a friend nearby that is thinking clearly. Propaganda has a way of forcing you into a phantasm by emotional manipulation, making it easy to jam all kinds of nonsense into your head. Extending the metaphor, said propaganda also lays out how to defend your worm eating habit as though it's totally normal to do.
It makes me feel weird when I try to recommend stuff I really like. I'll be so in favor of the things I like that it sounds like I'm selling it to you because I want you to like it too. I'm sure some people think I'm shilling the Steam Deck.
Same. I try to steer people to ALDI for groceries cause they were the least fuckwadish the past few years about price gouging and I sometimes feel like I'm shilling. I only wish I were getting paid for it :\
First things first.
Second, given that the author has hidden this in a paywall--you have to sign up in order to access the article and presumably any links--I'm going to immediately distrust the motives.
Third, Medium is a glorified blogging site; anyone can say anything on it.
The โauthorโ is citing a study. Idk why youโd indict the study because the media that is making you aware of the existence of said study is behind a paywall. Bizarre reasoning.
Hmmm, not necessarily all that bizarre. The title on the Lenny link states that 15% of ALL Reddit content is corporate trolls trying to sway public opinion - now that this gentleperson has kindly provided the link to a non-paywall version, I can see that this is 2 studies, one from 2018 and one from 2020, one of which states that 15% of the top 100 subreddits may have experienced corporate trolls and/or bots posting content at some point, but they donโt say how much.
Huge difference between the title and the substance of the article, they buried the lede in a somewhat clever way. Chances are the author (and editor) are well aware that most of their audience doesnโt have an account, and arenโt going to create an account - therefore, by posting a misleading title (or letting others exaggerate the claims in the title through links on other platforms) they can reach a far larger audience, and sway public opinion more effectively, by burying the actual context behind the paywall.
I mean, I donโt know that that is whatโs happening, but it makes a lot of sense and kind of rhymes with the whole point of the article, so yeah - I donโt trust their motives either, and I can definitely see the logic behind distrusting paywalls on principle.
Additionally, the data is self-reported surveys with questions like "Have you ever been contacted by someone from a company or corporation?" and... yeah? This part shouldn't be surprising to any platform that allows private messages. And "Have you ever seen someone promoting a product?" and most people are going to either shrug or already have a strong opinion, it's not very scientific for actual data on the actual traffic from bots and corporate shills, more how the human users feel about the platform.
I would much rather see an independent investigation from a technical point-of-view, which tracks the comments and timing of user comments to determine how many are actually bots just quietly gaining karma with innocuous comments, or how many are just programmed to go to certain subreddits at certain times to push a narrative.
Glad they included "at least" because there's no way it's that low.
You can tell by the amount of reddit posts or comments that links you a paywalled article. Like what the fuck?! Is everyone paying for this shit?
Thanks for sharing
If it's not corporations then it's PACs astroturfing. It's nothing new.
Companies definitely astroturf on Reddit, but, they do it through third or even fourth parties. There is a whole micro industry of vote buying and comment spamming, ad firms or companies will pay such groups to add certain messaging to their comment spam. You can actually make a quick buck by selling any old Reddit accounts to such groups.
Especially the petrococksuckers.
I just want more people to LEAVE Reddit. To hell with corporate agendas, cowardly moderators, and incompetent admin. The internet needs an open source platform like Reddit where you can voice your opinion, no matter how flawed it may be, without concern you'll be "banned"...
Second, end users need to display more maturity and stop being so sensitive.....a BLOCK resolves 99.99% of ANY. "Moderator" involvement. "****" words is about all they need to "censor" and even that's questionable. Mods should just focus on actual bots and sub organization not so much the content police, most stuff can be self regulated.....
Lemmy, albeit I don't think the name is good for brand recognition, the functionality is ok, similar, just needs the audience. Even YouTube and Facebook....."community guidelines " ....I "offended" the AI,.... this is dire times and sadly most are not even aware. Without US these platforms don't exist. Facebook wouldn't be Facebook if it weren't for the USERS so why are you micromanaging them..... YouTube videos have to say "unalive" "deleted" "no longer with us" instead of kill murder death... it's so cringe and I'm so upset that critical thinking, having an opinion, being an adult using "curse" words is problematic..... I look forward to Reddit crashing. I look forward to mods crashing as well. They ruined the open space to speak freely.... but again the massess go along to get along and they continue to win.......
Shit you can get paid?
The word "troll" just kinda doesn't mean much anymore, huh.
A troll is just someone who says something to provoke a (usually negative) response. They don't have any agenda other than to entertain themselves.
A dude going into a Fortnite community to post "Fortnite sucks ass" is a troll. A dude posting propaganda to sway opinions toward a political goal/shill a product is something else.
I suppose they're using the term troll to refer to a person engaging in behavior calculated to evoke a desired response while evading detection as doing such. It was actually used similarly in at least one academic paper back in the nineties: "Identity and deception in the virtual community", by Judith S. Donath.
Lower than I expected
I just hope that the next new study doesn't end up being "New Study: At Least 15% of All Lemmy Content is Corporate Trolls Trying to Manipulate Public Opinion", otherwise I would be wondering WTF is going on, is Lemmy on the way of being enshittified by Corporate Morons?
Hey, good to see you around! How is your koala community going?
Yep, Reddit continues to shit itself.
They were failing pretty miserably back when I was a visitor. Hopefully that's still the case, though I imagine they will gain more and more traction as the reddit brain drain continues.
I cannot imagine using Reddit ever again beyond trying to cheat Google. It's so shitty.
And they get pretty obvious in big subs like /cars and /gaming. So many posting opinions like car magazines or gaming reviews do - point out nit-picky negatives that are relatively inconsequential to the product, softball other criticism, but give an overall decent review. Heaven help you if you actually voice an opinion critical of the object, because youโre allowed to have that opinion as an individual, that doesnโt toe the line and you get instant downvotes.
My first realization about this problem with reddit came about a decade ago when it became undeniable that shills flooded the discourse the moment Monsanto was mentioned.
Or the NRA. Or Exon/Mobile. Or ..
Before or after IPO?
Yes
It's behind a paywall
https://archive.is/ev7Tk
the rest are just regular trolls
Seen this post over and over. This is not a new study at that point
New study: 15% of Lemmy posts are studies about 15% of all Reddit content
:D
Portillos bots would camp on the Chicagofood sub and Stan about adding cheese sauce to everything and to make sure to save room for the chocolate cake. Nobody irl from the area would hype anything from that chain
New study: my shock and surprise measured by a single slow blink.
I feel like when I run into an old friend and they tell me my ex is in rehab.
And what percent is Russian psy-ops?
I'm not surprised. I get paid good money to troll online
Only going up
And this is why I use lemmy
I worry that if/when Lemmy becomes popular enough the larger communities will be targeted in the same way...
What makes you think lemmy is immune?
Is there a chance that Lemmy admins might have more incentive to combat this than Reddit admins did?
And 80% of Reddit is filled with degenerates of every kind. It's a total cesspool of excrement.
Crusty jugglers
Devil's advocate here. Does not pretty much any post on the subject of politics that is not simply reporting constitute an attempt to manipulate public opinion? Are they specifically referencing nation states trying to influence public opinion?
Astroturfing. Ads disguised as user content.
You see an ad, you recognize it as an ad. Your opinion is probably unchanged.
You see a user saying "Hey this product is actually pretty good," it's more likely to sway your feelings on the product, or at least your perception of the general sentiment to the product.
I'm mostly just wondering how they're distinguishing between astroturfing and legit posts.
Yeah sure but it's the scale and sincerity.
Me telling you my opinion on something is just that. I am just some guy. I don't have access, or even want access, to a billion bots spamming my opinion.
Also my opinion even if applied really doesn't mean much practically. Generally speaking I am pro infrastructure so if somehow the government spent more money on infrastructure that only translates, at best, to a small raise on my part. Not the same as say a major corp.
You see a community board where people can put up ads. What you expect to see are piano lessons, apartment for rent, tutoring etc. little things that really only matter to one person. You don't expect some megacorp to rip every sign down and turn it into a billboard that blasts from speakers each time someone walks past.
Basically it's a question of degree not of kind. It might be that it is all the same kind but the degree is so vastly different.