There absolutely no way this isn't an ad for upvote buying services lol this is so insane and transparent and the worst part is it'll work
Have to respect someone getting in on grifting conservatives without even endorsing their views in the process.
Honestly, there's and endless sea of grift attempts going on at all times. You don't think people selling fake gold Trump coins, etc give one damn about his politics, do you? They're just trying to wring every penny out of the die hards
Man, the cash I could make with flexible ethics.
Right? I was going to sell 5g blockers online when the pandemic started, but I have some semblance of a conscience... Also my wife threatened to leave me if I did.
I read that as 5 grams and wondered what a blocker was that 5g worth of it would be extra valuable during the pandemic.
Last presidential election here in Brazil there were some some traffic light salesman selling towels with the presidential candidates. And they walked around with a score board showing which one had sold more. And they sold a lot more because people didn't want to see their beloved candidate on the losing side.
I have to respect the mall t-shirt kiosks selling poorly made trump merch right next to the equally poorly made Kamala merch. At least they're just there for the hustle
In this case they do very much help those views though. Either they create the appearance of public appeal, which draws more people to these views, or they manage to disrupt spaces that formerly fostered a different political culture.
If we look at Twitter we see the second aspect particularly strongly.
Keen observation skills. I wouldn’t have caught on, I’m sad to say.
How to milk the conservatives.
Thats exactly what I believe. I know there is no limits to stupidity, but don’t you use bots to make it seem legit? Who would go around saying, “hey guys we’re losing. We should use BOTS. We should buy BOTS ACCOUNT AND UPVOTES from BOTSFORSALE.org”
It screams Steve Bannon.
The all caps gave it away
I mean, it's an ad but it's also thought-provoking and interesting. Before now we all knew what was happening we just didn't know the details also kind of interesting to see proof it's a conversation starter. I think I would have preferred it if the author would have redacted the URL though.
"It is unambiguous clear that our message is toxic and the majority of people reject our ideology and us with it. Therefore, the most logical solution is to create an artificial narrative via manipulation and vote-buying that makes it appear that people like us." -these people probably
Well, it worked with the news.
It also worked with Reddit. The Palestine discourse there is utterly repulsive and gleefully genocidal.
Is it really that bad? I haven't been on Reddit in over a year.
worldnews is absolutely surreal and awful. Country specific subreddits are also getting worse and worse.
Holy shit you're not wrong. I just browsed the top of the week on World News for a good twenty minutes and there wasn't a single post about the thousands of civilians that have been killed. I didn't see a single pro Palestine post and anybody talking about the literal war crimes being committed over there we're just downvoted. I think I agree with your word choice of "surreal." It feels like straight up propaganda and they are all falling for it. Every post about Israel was just saying something about how they're taking out the terrorists.
I really wish I'd just taken your word for it. That's depressing.
It's hilariously ironic that I got banned from worldnews four years ago for criticizing the Saudi regime and how they use millennia-old scripture as justification to treat women horribly. Apparently that's 'bigotry.'
Everything I hear about the toxicity of worldnews these days is baffling.
Well, Saudi Arabia is an ally in all but name to Israel. Also both countries have excellent ties to large swaths of US politics.
Capitalism™
Or... I run a reddit botnet, and Christmas is coming up. What's the easiest group of rubes to fleece?
That's what they've been doing for decades. And unfortunately they've been very successful at it.
“Our opinions are wildly unpopular to the point where even if a bunch of us showed up we’d struggle to make a difference so we’re gunna need to buy upvotes!”
Like…c’mon.
Have you seen the content there?
Yeah they're gonna need lots of money to get any attention
Oh wow, so it's basically a content farm for /r/TheRightCantMeme
FYI unfortunately that sub got taken over by pro-russia and pro-ccp tankies.
One of the mod of the sub is also a hexbear mod.
Fuckin’ yikes.
Dumb enough to fall for a Facebook lie about Tim Walz, but smart enough to use a crappy image editor?
No, the Russians already provided the image with the lie
I love the conservatives think that's such cutting slander when really having a male politician who understands the need for feminine hygiene products by uterus havers everywhere is such a breath of fresh air
The right may not have good ideas, organizational skills, charm, ethics, understanding of economics, history, or politics, or strength in numbers, but they do have the one thing more important than all of these.
Money!
I'd argue they do have organizational skills and and strength in numbers. Don't underestimate that.
You don't get and keep money without some of these skills though.
Eric Trump says "what?!"
And this after his father would have made 8 times more money by simply leaving it in the bank than all of his variety of hotel and Sharper Image steak sales businesses - he's literally the only one I've ever heard of who managed to lose money running a casino!
"The system" is what makes wealth, not individual people these days. Obviously not solely, but the above example shows how it is the primary determination factor.
Gasp, you all surely don't believe that conservatives would ever engage in voter manipulation tactics... r-r-right!?
No definitely not. They've been wanting "fair elections" all this time.
This must be why Trump said they people only need to vote one more time, and then they'll never need to do so ever again.
One election, to rule them all... ~and~ ~in~ ~the~ ~darkness~ ~bind~ ~them~
Why do I have a feeling this person has a vested financial interest in one of those upvote buying farms.
Who grifts the griftmen?
I literally haven't heard of people buying engagement since like 2012 instagram when everyone was trying to be a rapper.
This is what they do in real life too though. They know the US is mostly liberal (based on the popular vote) so they have to abuse money and historical power to manipulate the votes into their favor.
"Ignore morality and get shit done", aka The Ends Justify The Means
- God or something, probably?
Probably a scam, but congrats on discovering the Russian disinformation strategy from 2016.
Not exactly a scam. I still browse Reddit, and the Jordan Peterson Memes sub has been popping up in Popular for a few weeks, it had been a completely obscure sub before. The posts are ALL about US politics too...on a meme sub for a Canadian 'life coach'
That's because Jordan Peterson is one of the entry points to the alt-right rabbit hole. Despite being from Canada, his brand of grift is intricately tied to U.S. politics. If you have a very short amount of time, some people have put together some very short videos talking about Peterson:
Oh I'm definitely aware. The fact that some anti-woke content appears on the sub isn't unexpected. The fact that it's largely US political content is just a blatant display of meddling.
Ender’s Game was prescient text, regardless of Orson Scott Card’s personal beliefs.
Locke and Demosthenes are now armies of manipulative bots (but often real humans), shaping political discourse throughout the world. The Internet gave mind control powers to people with money, ambition, or both. We saw it with the Bernie Sanders and Trump movements in 2016 on Reddit, all too clearly for those who lived through an era where bullshit detection was a critical skill.
I was once fairly defeatist on this subject: the bad guys won, got Trump elected, and kicked off a new era of 80s conservatism that demonized progressive values like environmental conservation, freedom of choice in a number of matters, and equality.
But now, I’m starting to see young people stand up to their boomer relatives at Thanksgiving and bring facts and logic to social media discussions. And I have regained some hope that we will once again find a way to make the progressive “line go up“. Our society seems to swing like a pendulum between the right and left, over decades, and it feels like the Trump era was a swing too violent for most of us. It’s time to swing back.
Man, ever since the early 2010s I've thought about Ender's Game a LOT - and it's always this part of the book, never the zero-g laser tag or genocide-by-arcade-machine parts.
Didn't Clinton spend $40m on shareblue forum sliding?
the Russian disinformation strategy
I'll never understand why people attribute to the Russian government what was in the obvious best-interests of the Republican Party and the conservative movement.
If you asked who owns and operates the FOX News Channel, or Sinclair Media, or Clear Channel Radio, or any of the other dozen right-wing propaganda projects, I have to wonder how many people would reflexively insist "Russia" despite all of the money spilling in from the UK, Australia, Canada, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and the O&G Industry.
I’ll never understand why people attribute to the Russian government what was in the obvious best-interests of the Republican Party and the conservative movement.
Maybe because there was a demonstrated and provable coordinated effort by the Russian government in the 2016 election to get Trump elected? Look up project lakhta. Russian election interference and the efforts of the domestic conservative movement can (and do) exist simultaneously.
What do you have against attributing to the Russian government actions that are demonstrably attributable to the Russian government?
I'll be real, I have my suspicions regarding that whole scandal in 2016 because following the election there were like 2-3 days of quiet introspection by the Dems and then they aligned on "the Russians were pushing fake news that tricked everyone!"
My pet conspiracy theory is that it was already known within the political campaigns that these misinformation campaigns were happening and they chose to at that point publicize them and use that as their scapegoat. Same with the Russian spies they publicly outed that trump spoke with.
My pet conspiracy theory is that it was already known within the political campaigns that these misinformation campaigns were happening and they chose to at that point publicize them and use that as their scapegoat. Same with the Russian spies they publicly outed that trump spoke with.
Your framing is off. It's not a conspiracy theory. It's true that it was already known. The FBI investigation of Russian interference began before the election, not after. The investigation was being publicized before the election.
If you want to nurse a conspiracy theory about it, whatever. But you're going to appear ignorant when you advance a conspiracy theory without doing the bare minimum of research into the known facts. You're just creating a fictional narrative based on your "suspicions." You're not being "real." You're being ignorant.
I called it a conspiracy theory because it's really just based purely off of observation and gut instinct and not facts. Good to know my gut instinct happened to be right though!
Your takeaway from my reply is that your instinct was correct? You're going to make a great conspiracy theorist.
Meh my "conspiracy theories" just aren't exciting enough because they tend to be too grounded in things that are actually likely in the real world and explaining weirdness in what is presented to the public with a guess as to what happened behind the scenes, like that the sonic movie was a joke pitch that somehow got greenlit so then they had to actually make the movie and to try to make it decent
Their values are aligned, theirs strategies are aligned, and so their efforts are aligned.
Because there have been literal articles and reports by the FBI that Russian interference in social media has been a thing since the 2016 election cycle.
That's why it's been attributed to the Russian government. Because the Russian government actually did a ton of stuff.
They were at it at least a year before the 2016 election cycle. I believe it was the CIA that said Russia was the one that created the Jade Helm scare in 2015 through social media influence.
Jade Helm was the name of a training operation of the US military in central TX near Temple. The Russians created a bunch of posts claiming that Obama was taking over local Walmarts and emptying them of all merchandise to use as prisoners for his political opponents. They even drew diagrams of the insides of the stores with the holding cells and everything. So great was the Russian influence that Abbott (who is still Governor of TX) ordered the TX National Guard to watch the training exercise and make sure that the US military wasn't storming homes and taking prisoners.
there have been literal articles and reports by the FBI that Russian interference
There have been literal articles and reports by the FBI of domestic white nationalist organizing and domestic financing. Significantly more money and manpower is documented as entirely domestically organized, although a sizeable amount is moving between NATO and other Five Eyes states. We're talking on the scale of tens of billions moving between domestic financiers - like the Mercers, Thiel, the Kochs, etc - and domestic fascist media/organizing. That dwarfs Russian state interventions. Its orders of magnitude different.
That’s why it’s been attributed to the Russian government.
Why do you search for the speck in your neighbor's eye when you have a plank within your own?
Hey, remember what happened to Digg? Why a bunch of people moved over to Reddit in the first place?
I guess not a lot of people remember, so let me tell you.
Bunch of dipshits ran upvote brigades. Stories they didn't like got buried really fast.
Now, Digg was a hive mind site to begin with - good luck posting anything the hive mind didn't care about. But add blatant political machinations on top of that, and the site got unusable real fast.
Take a few guesses which political views those groups were trying to futilely promote while quashing opponents. Go on. (I'll give a hint, some of them retreated to Conservapedia)
So that's what killed Digg. ...that, and the Digg admins were being dicks and the site redesign sucked ass. (...insert comparison to modern Reddit here)
Those who don't learn history are doomed to repeat it. Thanks for the quick lesson
But conservatives want to repeat history.
Just not the good parts.
I don't remember Digg being infiltrated by right wing conservatives. What I do remember was a website with a community that dickrode its power users so hard that unless you were a figure like MrBabyMan, your content would not get a single vote. The only people who actually used Digg's social features (i.e. Friends lists) were blog spammers.
IIRC Digg v4 tried to address the issue by making users subscribe directly to news websites and dedicated content creators. They hated it and flocked immediately to their competitor.
Reddit has the same power user problem, albeit 1000x worse. Say what you want about the people who gamed Digg's front-page, but they didn't have the power to be judge, jury and executioner when moderating communities.
That's only part of what killed Digg. The final nail in the coffin was when they redesigned the website to give power users even more power to control the front page than they already had.
Yep, as I tried to hint in the last paragraph. 😆
Digg's biggest sin was that the votes were all that mattered, and the admins just leaned into that by coddling the power users. That's why Digg got so toxic to random people who just wanted to share something cool they found. The last redesign just made it official that there are those whose votes matter and the unwashed plebs. Everyone already knew people were fucking with the votes, and the admins just said "go right ahead".
So what Reddit offered was at least some assurance that the algorithm would combat blatant vote manipulation by power blocs and that people could share cool stuff fairly. Digg users promptly voted with their feet.
Now, to Reddit's credit, the system worked for years. Admins absolutely condemned vote manipulation and actively fought it. People were actively against all sorts of vote brigading, and the admins listened.
Problem is, it all changed. Corporate media influencing came in, under radar. Political memefluencers came in, under radar. It's all allowed unless it's blatantly against policy and everyone pretends it's just organic random users.
Now, you don't see the Reddit admins talking about what made the site work so well back in the day. I'm not sure they're interested in maintaining the anti-brigading and anti-manipulation algorithms. They're this close to saying "fuck it, it's a free-for-all" and going full Digg publicly.
lmao even if that happens i fucking bet NOTHING will change. too many people are just addicted to the site and even if it does we'll just get an overload of turbo-redditors here
That's not what happened at all imho.
What killed digg realistically is that it had less control than Reddit and because Kevin Rose blocked posts about the DVD encryption codes and people over reacted to that block. For days digg was full of people simply reposting them (as Digg was worried about getting sued which was fair enough)
Didn't really have anything to do with politics.
Don't forget, this was back in the day of fat people hate and Reddit hosting child porn. Reddit administration was never great
Digg admins were actually ok and I never had an issue with them
Don’t forget, this was back in the day of fat people hate and Reddit hosting child porn. Reddit administration was never great
Reddit in the earliest days was basically 4chan but less controlled and more spread-out. There were thousands of illegal and horrifyingly abusive subreddits. Every single time one got taken down, it was this massive, whinging drama show from thousands of chuds screaming about their "rights" and "censorship."
By the time admins came for the less overtly evil ones, like the weirdly prevalent communities dedicated to fantasizing about punching particular people in the face, reddit had very much become the WalMart of the internet. Not the cleanest or nicest place to visit, but it certainly had everything and was convenient if you needed a fix at odd hours.
I don't even remember Digg but I remember it seemed relatively short-lived in the early days of the explosion of forum sites. A lot of people were trying to strike gold with the next big thing as internet popularity was soaring. There are likely hundreds of other big sites like Digg that people used to frequent that have also since died in the mass-extinction events of the 2010's and beyond.
That's pretty much US politics summed up, isn't it? Ignore what they people say and throw money into it to get what you want.
Yep, it's the same formula for commercials and fliers you see. Just on Reddit, they have to prep to fight back because people can actively voice their opinions where billboards/fliers/commercials, they don't have to deal with that.
Everyone with a Reddit account, let's sell upvotes to conservatives on Jordan_Peterson_Memes. It's income redistribution with zero impact.
Point me to the sign up sheet
Subvert the will and desires of the majority using money and shitty practices....how very GOP of them.
Subvert the will and desires of the majority
Come on, dude. This is Reddit, not a vote in parliament. The site's entire business model revolves around astroturfing.
Counter argument: Reddit is predominately American. These upvote sites use low cost foreign slave labor to generate their output. Buying upvotes is outsourcing jobs. Keep Reddit American. Don't buy upvotes!
I'm not American and I am a Redditor!
Brb gonna sell some upvotes and not actually do anything lol
Show me your ways wise man
It’s easy; you just go on the internet and tell lies
You really think someone would do that, just go on the internet and tell lies?
You ai bots aren't fooling me!
I have never lied on the Internet.
Mostly.
THIS STATEMENT IS FALSE
You wouldn't!
😏
I'm sure that they don't have an economic agreement with that fake up votes website
Owning an "upvote company" is literally the only reason on God's Earth that anyone could give seven shits about content and voting on reddit.
It may have had cultural impact back in 2016, but that was almost a decade ago and the world is different, reddit is different.
Now it's just bots arguing with bots and every post is a surreptitious paid ad for something. People haven't quite "move on" but they certainly don't give reddit communities the relevance they once had. People broadly roll their eyes at reddit. In the last couple offices I worked in, the people joked that you're "never allowed to share something on Teams if it came from reddit" and "reddit is a dirty secret, everyone knows we browse it, but it's shameful to admit it."
Sorry reddit, the cool factor has left the building a long, long time ago.
Is that "Truth Social"😂?
Remembering it's an isolated Mastodon instance is hilarious and ironic.
it is also a crime!
I can't believe that I'm hearing about this for the first time.
They'd fit right at home on r/Asmongold. That place has become a KotakuInAction offshoot in recent months. So much right wing, anti-woke and anti-trans content gets posted there that I'm surprised the admins haven't quarantined or banned it.
so i'm not very familiar with asmongolds content, but I know someone who keeps posting his videos into a group chat I'm in together with anti-woke "why are there minorities in my video games" comments.
is that the type of content asmongold produces or is my acquaintance just extremely dense?
I've watched asmongold a bit on and off over the years, and I don't think that he himself is really right wing (unless that changed recently), more just a no-filter, full-on basement dweller but mostly apolitical. Can't say it's really surprising if some of the audience has the 4chan vibe though. Never participated/cared about the chat or the subreddit though.
Ngl I don’t know why he’s here but I fuck with his vibe
Same I like him
You're telling me I could be getting paid for this shit?
Yes, but you have to be dead inside.
Way ahead of you
Reddit was taken over by the right wing a long time ago. This person is out of the loop
I get the feeling that the Admins and management are pretty right leaning, but the mods and users are left.
It depends heavily on what sub you're in for the mods and users,
But yes, the admin team is very right leaning.
True. r/conservative certainly isn't left.
I meant mods are left leaning on average.
The mods of the main subs have been getting progressively more right wing. And I consider the mainstream of the democrats right wing.
They’re not MAGA but they’re basically moderate repubicans these days. And that is what has taken over the main subreddits.
What are you smoking, reddit is a liberal echo chamber.
Depends on the subreddit. Conservatives have made a conscious effort to take over moderation on various subreddits that represents individual cities often in blue states. Some have succeeded in that, others have failed.
cause everyone knows if conservative replies get upvoted enough people who hate Trump will have a sudden change of heart. Is this guy in the upvote for money business or what?
I'm not terribly against stealing money from maga dumb idiots with too much money.
Does anyone else feel like setting up a scam site that claims to sell upvotes, and donates all the profit to the Harris/Walz campaign?
Won’t last long unless the votes actually come in.
That's why you tell them to only post on subs that are already a chud circle jerk like here. They upvote him and you take the money. If they don't just say the libs have a downvotes bot focused on only them and you need more money to DDOS it for Trump. They will appreciate how important they are. Like any scam, the end goal is to find egotistical idiots and this is rich soil.
"The libs are TOO FERVENT and keep downvoting us! Donate more!!!"
Can’t do a chargeback on bitcoin.
That’ll work a few times
You’re assuming a logical, and frankly, literate adversary. That’s the best part about Trump grifts.
buying a bunch of upvotes on a website dominated by bot accounts is a very cost effective way to run an AstroTurf campaign
"I thought trump was a terrible person, but the updoots be changed my mind"
Yeah sure. I mean there's probably at least one or two feeble minded redditors like that but... Not a bunch. Especially if they're confining themselves to right leaning subs.
Astroturfing is when corpos pretend to be grassroots
I remember, back in 2016, when the /r/The_Donald website just used a bunch of bots and other fake accounts to juice their content to the front page week after week.
And then the Mods tweaked the algorithm so you wouldn't have a wall of Trump memes on the front page every day. /r/The_Donald folks spilled into other sites and started repeating the strategy, so Mods had to tweak the algorithm again. And there was this back and forth that dragged all the way into the general election, at which point the Admins finally decided to ban the sub. But they also had to ban a slew of leftist subs, to make things fair.
And now we have Hexbear, a site composed of purged Reddit-fuges. But Reddit is still full of Trumpies, for some curious reason.
But Reddit is still full of Trumpies, for some curious reason.
And there was this back and forth that dragged all the way into the general election, at which point the Admins finally decided to ban the sub.
My recollection is that they didn't ban the sub until after the election, like a year into his presidency, shortly after the Charlottesville protest. I might be wrong though, I wasn't really paying all that much attention to them.
This is the equivalent of not being able to get your crush to like you, so you pay hooker just to tell people you got a girlfriend.
I bought Canada so I always have a Canadian supermodel girlfriend who just can’t be here right now.
Does they encourage people to buy upvotes in friendly subreddits? Either they are not friendly or them buying internet points is even more useless than I thought.
I think they are posting on "friendly" subreddits so their posts dont get deleted and buy upvotes so they are recommended to people browsing r/all
"We're victims!!! 😭😭😭"
So, putting aside the questionable morals of this person. I'm not sure alt right reddit threads are the election swing spot they seem to think.
Donnie did an AMA on reddit except it was a huge yuge disaster because he couldn't comprehend that it wasn't twitter and all his replies got buried haha
Isn't that what got the crow guy perma-ip-banned?
Ip bans are incredibly ineffective though. You just get a new IP from your isp
Depends on ISP.
If IPv4 ban, it is indeed 100% ineffective. Nearly all ISPs either CGNAT or rotate addresses. If IPv6, the ISP just forwards a 64 bit block and leaves it at that. You must call and request a new IP block. In which case you'll be told yes or no. If yes, it's either free or paid.
I know with ATT Fiber, they don't offer address changes unless there is some security or service interruption reason. You have to unplug the modem for 30+ days so the lease expires if you don't want to do rounds with support. My IPv4 address has changed once, but my IPv6 address block has never changed.
With my "new" ISP, I gave up running my DDNS updater on my home server. It's been years and the IPv4 address still hasn't changed...
something something not your personal army
also fuck trump
You're thinking Anonymous.
Also fuck Trump
Eww far right social media filled with racism,anti sentiment,islamphobia etc etc
its definitely not election interference guys, trust me, it's definitely not election interference.
Just more conservatives casually admitting that they can't win anything without rigging the vote.
Why would posting pro-Trump messaging on conservative friendly subs increase his chances of winning? Nobody who votes who spends any amount of time in those subs wasn't going to vote for Trump. Also, buying upvotes? Pathetique!
The hope, I imagine, is that conservative subs are safe spaces where dissent can be controlled, and with enough purchased engagement, these posts can reach the front page where all the normal people gather.
Busing in those upvotes again?
Lol. What’s truth social stock worth today? 12 cents and a bucket of chicken wing bones?
I cringe every time I see someone like this say “to oblivion.”
Really? Is that really necessary? Why so consistently specific?
Fuckin reddit out of all places too
This is just sad. How will this not get people sick and tired of it?
Karli can suck a fat dick
There's no way buying upvotes is illegal right?
It's against Reddit's ToS, but as far as I'm aware there's no law that says you can't pay to manipulate social media content.
This might be the funniest thing I’ve seen today.
People have gotten sick and tired of r/pics having loads of political content, and while some candidates are better than others, many people are sick and tired of seeing "orange man bad" yet again. The people who were supposed to be propaganda targets immediately knew this was propaganda and the rampant election posts didn't make Harris more popular. If this plan is enacted, people will see the astroturfing straightaway, and more people will see Trump supporters as bothersome cultists than as freedom fighters. It doesn't help that, if pro-Trump people can brigade the sub, so can anti-Trump people, and the whole debacle will just get shut down.
I would have been so confused if I was still on reddit. Back then, downvotes were proof you were right and you triggered the woke hive, and upvotes meant you said obvious information, woke opinion or funny not offensive jokes. No upvotes/downvotes meant you said something either really thoughtfull or really boring.
Using “woke” unironically and getting downvoted means you are, in fact, a dumb ass.
Lol, you are talking about irony, yet you completely missed the point. Point that you are the perfect exemple.
Spot on, buddy, and im a dumbass? Lol, pathetic... 🤡
Not sure how I am an example. Please explain.
And I also don’t understand how up and downvotes can form an opinion for you. If that’s all it takes for you to make a decision, then you aren’t being very critical of what you are seeing. Surface level understanding plagues right wing nut jobs like yourself.
Lol, no worry buddy, its okay if you cant understand... 🤡
1 day old account and already ousted yourself as a right-wing nutjob, good job! You've been tagged.
Lol, wow, i dont even know how stupid you have to be to think that im right-wing from my post. Or maybe you think every left-winger is woke? Which would be even more stupid 🤡
LMAO, you use "woke" unironically. "Woke" is nothing but a right-wing dog whistle against everything they don't like, like the LGBTQ+ community
You can't be "anti-woke" and left wing at the same time, it's paradoxical.
Bruh, you are clearly the king of stupidity... Even a mussel is smarter than you...
You do realise that woke is how they describe themselves ? Its not the right wing who invented the term, its nonsensical to believe that only right winger use this term as a slang... It became a slang because all woke people are 🤡, they did it themselves, nothing to do with LGBTQ+, race or any political side...
But let me guess, you are a dumb US citizen, right? You cant be that ignorant and not be from the US...
Reddit culture (and lemmy by extension) changed so much in a short time. Just a few years ago you weren't downvoted just because someone disagreed with your opinion. The polarization and culture war turned reddit users completely dogmatic and as immune to arguments or facts as magats.
The same is true of lemmy. Most users prefer to defederate from socialist instances because "tankies". Which really shows how right wing "limbrols" have become. They hate socialists with a different viewpoint on US empire more than they hate fascists. The fascists have succeeded in utterly destroying reddit and lemmy as a platform for useful political discourse.
We now have the vast majority of "liberals" on lemmy upvoting comments using racist slang terms for Russians to dehumanize them, just like they did for enemies in Japan, Vietnam or Korea. The fascists have made massive inroads.
The OP meme almost seems quaint to me now. The real culture war is elsewhere now.
Most users prefer to defederate from socialist instances because “tankies”.
To the degree that people bother to defederate from anything (most users don't) I would assume its because apologists for Putin and China are about as odious to talk to as MAGAs
Basically any anti-imperialist and anti-US empire critique is stamped as Putin/China apologism and downvoted or outright banned. You don't even have to be a socialist to be "odious". And of course the big instances have already defederated from the major socialist instances.
You have a right to speak but not a right to an audience that doesn't want to listen to you. I think certain groups are accused of harboring pro Putinistas because in fact they do actually feature them.
Just a few years ago you weren’t downvoted just because someone disagreed with your opinion.
Lol what? What year did you join Reddit? As someone who's been there since 2008, I promise you that this is nothing new.
Yeah, I was on Reddit for 13 years and I don't remember that ever.
Reddit was very monoculture in the beginning. The neckbeards upvoted each other because they generally agreed on the same opinions. That gets mistaken for adherence to reddiquette.
It became a rhetorical tool to prove whatever an individuals political or social adversaries are dummies because they don't use reddit properly in current year unlike some glory day that never existed.
If they really did use reddit back in the day as they claim then all of the self referential satire about reddits pseudo-intellectualism must have gone over their head. It was like the second most popular type of content. Second only to the actual circle jerking.
Not sure what year but the culture definitely changed somewhere around 2008-2016. A big part was trump of course, but before that the rise in android and iphone and becoming more popular to a broader segment of the public (e.g. "boomers"). Before it was tech enthusiasts all on desktop PC. This was also before toxic gamer culture.
If you don't think it changed you must have trauma induced amnesia.
So you claim that people are too hyperbolic, then jump straight to accusing the person you replied to of brain damage, and this after jumping straight to the assumption that the majority of said problems were due to Boomers finding Reddit, not e.g. Millennials or Gen-Z or Alpha or merely a less technical audience. If you were attempting a joke there, that was not clear - and yes I saw the "e.g." but you only listed one, so really, this seems to be the best example that you had to convey? Boomers, who are well known for their toxic gaming culture, I suppose.
As mentioned by others, I for one do not user block instances bc "tankies", but rather bc they are an enormous waste of time. Although the very meaning of that word could also be phrased as "denier of historically accurate facts". I for one don't care if someone is a Boomer or a Millennial or whatever physical age, if they don't know or care that 1+1=2 and keep insisting that it's =3 instead, I'm blocking them and moving on with my life. Hopefully they'll open themselves up to the Truth one day, but I'm not waiting anymore, that's entirely on them to go at whatever pace and direction they want, including straight backwards if they so choose - but I am not going to entertain the notion that "all directions/facts are equally valid", they simply aren't.
It was meant lighthearted, but trolling by fascists (maga) or agitprop (putin) does have an mental effect. That is my point, the culture and attitude has changed. To say it hasn't changed is just factually incorrect.
This is the factually incorrect comment, heavily upvoted:
Lol what? What year did you join Reddit? As someone who’s been there since 2008, I promise you that this is nothing new.
He's not just laughing at me, implying I'm some reddit noob, and then attempts to gaslight me. But I'm the meanie? Ohwee.
You're saying you don't waste time and when someone disagrees on facts, they are wrong and you move on. Could you imagine that if the mainstream constantly fed you one version of events, you might be the one being so sure that the historical events are one way that you end up saying 1+1=3?
You rely on facts being what they are because a google search results in sources trusted by you say so. All neoliberal sources fed by the US state department. And the dissident arguments and evidence just happens to be the same as a certain russian dictator - so they must be wrong. Which is called a genetic fallacy.
Luckily blocking, banning and defederation is easy on lemmy, so we can just live happily ever after in our echo chambers.
The culture definitely changed - you are right about that. I was not there at the start as you were, but ultimately, how could it not have? EVERY culture changes all the time, and e.g. the Rexodus surely had a large impact even since we all left it. Though the burden of expressing that point clearly I suppose is on you, and the burden of understanding you is likewise partially on them, i.e. communication is a 2-way process. The difference is that you spoke first, and then when others challenged you as to what you meant, you ramped the matter up by several notches and accused the other person of literal brain damage. This was hyperbolic, and attacking the messenger rather than the message, and after that many people stopped listening to you any further, seeing how you were speaking emotionally rather than logically, or challenged you still further. The responsibility for what they say is on them, but the responsibility for what you said is on you.
And yes, some people literally do seem to have brain damage, but intended as light-hearted or not, you did jump to that rather quickly... and while I am seeing that you do not enjoy being judged, yet you were very quick to offer your judgement to the other person... Why worry about what children are saying about you? But yeah, you did call them brain-damaged, and again that part is on your shoulders.
You catch more flies with honey than vineager. Do what you will with that thought.
so I'm not interested in this conversation but I do need to acknowledge that you're misusing the term "gaslighting". it matters. disagreement, or sharing a perspective you don't agree with, is not gaslighting.
gaslighting refers to a specific form of domestic abuse by which the abuser attempts to control their victim by making them doubt their own faculties of perception, question their grasp reality, and ultimately become dependent on the abuser.
in other words, if you say it was great weather yesterday and i say "what? were you in the park at noon? the weather was so hot!" that's not gaslighting. that's having a different experience. likewise if you ask if I went to the park and i say "No", but i really did go, that's not gaslighting. that's called "lying". lying is not, in itself, gaslighting.
now if you say "but i saw you! you were carrying a green parasol!" and this were true but I went and threw out the green one and got a yellow one and replied "no you didnt, i dont even have a green one, this is my parasol it's clearly yellow, are you sure you recognized me? maybe you are having some brain damage, let's make an appointment and get you checked out" that's getting closer to gaslighting. hey, that's actually sort of similar to what you said to me, although I dont think you were gaslighting me, i think you were just being a self-righteous american jerk.
I know this is irrelevant to what you were hemming and hawing about with that other commenter and you probably won't care, but this matters way more to me. please don't misuse words that we depend on for understanding IPV
I was wondering if gaslighting was the right term to use, but decided to use it anyway. Maybe it is not appropriate here, maybe I'm hypercritical of your words, but I'm very much aware of what it means.
Gaslighting is today used in political context because of Donald Trump. Definitions change. And I think it fits here maybe not specifically because of what you said, but for the context. It is not the first time I heard "reddiquette about upvoting never existed". It's not just 1984 style historical revisionism, it's self-righteous american jerks like you LOUDLY screaming "NEVER HAPPENED! LOL WHAT, ARE YOU ON COKE?" (paraphrasing you here, might have gotten your words slightly wrong)
If you look at other replies, you now also see a moving of the goalpost: It was just the monoculture of neckbeard circlejerks. Or it was just some "purists" who argued about it. But it's always been this way.
Except I was there (3000 years ago). I've seen comments not downvoted that were disagreeable but well stated. Sometimes it still happens. They were not made invisible because they contributed to a discussion. I remember it. And it's still in the long forgotten, now hidden reddiquette. Threads exists where this was argued about. Your comment is just wrong and it is rude. I am not insane.
Even when the fascists loose, they win. Gaslighting is now a routine tool of the liberals to reframe their narrative. Liberal was at war with Tankie; therefore Liberal had always been at war with Tankie.
I also see four lights, so maybe don't take my post too seriously.
Upvotes and downvotes have always been glorified agree/disagree buttons.
Vote. If you think something contributes to conversation, upvote it. If you think it does not contribute to the subreddit it is posted in or is off-topic in a particular community, downvote it.
This used to be understood that people often treated it as agree/disagree but that you are "supposed to be better than that". And that made a difference.
I was there. It was real. You're not crazy, a lot of us went by a kinda honor code for downvotes. You had to say something very irrelevant for me to downvote.
It was the best of times for internet forums.
Better discussions and the gags were limited and not belched out repeat jokes. Yes there were inside jokes but it wasn't like broken arms jackdaw molly rancher every damn thread. It got too popular and with that you drew the youtube comment types all trying to get the "funniest meta joke" per thread which translates to "most likes" for people not interested in genuine discussion. Couple that with echo chambers and astroturfing and well, now we're here.
Thanks, sometimes it does feel like going crazy!
I really wish we could design systems that allow to come closer to that old ideal again. But maybe that age has simply passed and all of our attitudes have changed forever. For example instead of just voting up or down, you could vote for example "funny" or "contributes" or "misinformation". Maybe there are even some clever statistical algorithms in the background aiding that. Somehow technology ought to evolve to further good discussion.
Personally I think it's just a problem that arises when too many people are in the room. Get enough people on board and it starts sliding towards catering to the lowest common denominator
Excellent references!
Btw, this article seems to perfectly describe the effects you are mentioning, e.g.:
That same attitude contributed to the development of an appallingly toxic and hostile culture online: As more people – many with silently held prejudices – flocked to a place where allegedly nothing mattered, they let themselves loose, flinging typo-ridden bigotry at any target that they could find. While the sentiments were occasionally decried and the writing errors were sometimes corrected, the retort of “It’s the Internet! Nobody cares!” was wielded with nearly constant frequency. There were certainly oases of reasonable and well-composed discourse… but as their populations grew, so did the volume of posts and comments that were offered from positions of apathy and ignorance.
.. Before long, accuracy, quality, and correctness became optional requirements, and online audiences learned to expect mostly low-effort content instead of refined assemblages. ...We ignore thoughtfully composed “walls of text,” but we electronically applaud memetic image macros and single-sentence references that aren’t inherently entertaining or insightful (yet are somehow still poorly written). When we amplify these things – using our likes, upvotes, retweets, and shares – we encourage the creation of more low-effort content, and in so doing, we send the message that higher-quality offerings are unwelcome and unwanted. That above-mentioned message isn’t necessarily what we intend, but it’s nonetheless what we say: Positive responses of any variety communicate more than just “I like this;” they also serve to mean “other people should see this” and “more of this, please.” The other implication, then, is that things which receive less attention – if only because they would have taken more effort to consume – aren’t as deserving of it. We may even state as much directly, downvoting or dismissing submissions that irritate us by either asking for too much of our time or challenging our expectations. In the end, the unified statement which arises from all of our indirectly expressed preferences is that only low-effort content will be accepted.
It is a fantastic article and I cannot recommend it highly enough.
Edit: also it helps explain why this isn't a problem seen merely with Reddit, but also Twitter/X, Facebook, Threads, and yes Lemmy (+Mbin/Piefed/Sublinks) too - it's apparently rooted in human nature, thus would require enormous pushback to try to counter, while in contrast monetary profits tend to go along with whatever most easily aligns with our most basal natures. Sex sells, greed moar so, but laziness most of all.
Thanks, really interesting analysis! I'd argue that profit seeking is significant in this change though. Polarizing content leads to anger and higher engagement. So any algorithm that is written or trained to increase profit from advertisement will encourage that outcome.
I believe there are other influences too, the fascists and putin trolls (agitprop) has led to some "automatic downvote and ban reflex". On lemmy the mods are basically power tripping non stop in trying to curate their fief into a single minded community that brooks no dissent. There is one narrative and anyone dissenting is a . On all sides, people are just sick of the bullshit and are on a hair trigger.
This seems to the be result of the last decade of mainstream media and social media being run for profit through engagement. I have no idea of how to reverse this.
Lemmy isn't run for profit - mostly (though there are some amounts of money involved, and moreover power & fame) - but being based off of Reddit still uses that identical model. And then similarly for Mbin, Sublinks, Piefed, Tesseract, etc. Someone would need to basically do all of having an idea for alternative mechanisms, and also write the code for it, and also start up an instance, and promote it to let others know, whereas a failure in any of those steps would prevent its acceptance by the global community. Plus while all of that is going on, all of Facebook, Threads, Xhitter, Bluesky, and yes Reddit can continue to innovate, possibly stealing the idea out from under someone and twist it to meet their profit-seeking needs, though conversely those also generate ideas that non-profit sources can steal from as well.
One example is Reddit's automated CrowdControl (an optional feature available to mods of all subs) - instead of a mod needing to outright "remove" an unpopular comment in a post, it simply gets collapsed by default, thereby working against the trends to maintain an echo chamber by allowing people to post dissenting opinions in the identically same space as the majority of the community, who control what they want to see with voting. Similarly posts that are too lengthy could be cut off after a point, needing you to click to continue reading, but thereby allowing you to scroll past something that you don't want to spend time on. But these are tiny things, and still many people wouldn't bother making all that many comments that they know in advance will be unpopular, b/c what would they even gain from such? (besides a brief relief to get something off their chest, but how many can keep coming that way, for weeks and months and years?)
One reason for that is the power dynamics, which regardless of for- vs. non-profit organizations, still offer greater power to one "side" or the other of a transaction. Voting for instance is anonymous, whereas posting is not, hence voters (even lurkers!) have more power than content creators. All someone has to do is spin up their own instance, or join one of the many that do not require even so much as an email sign-up, and they can generate as many votes as they want, for "free". As so many discussions have highlighted, "content creators" really are at a severe disadvantage, compared to unethical voters, mods, and ofc admins, especially for those first few vulernable minutes where it hasn't received any upvotes yet. After all, *I* may offer fewer than one downvote per day, maybe per week, and also routinely sort content by New, but that's not what others (seem to) choose to do. So should downvotes be rationed? Or the source made publicly viewable? Mbin does the latter btw, though as "reduces" not "downvotes" shared with Lemmy.
Which further illustrates the trend towards echo chambers: they tend to work, to cut out some of the bull crap - if you ban an agitator then all of their BS goes out the door with them, their downvoting, their harassment, their toxicity, etc. BTW speaking of harassment another example of unqual power dynamics is the sending of messages from different people - e.g. I did not know what ChapoTrapHouse was all about, so when I replied there and subsequently received messages from different users for WEEKS and WEEKS afterwards, and then again from something in lemmygrad.ml, I had no control at the time but to receive those notifications. I almost left social media entirely b/c that is an absolute waste of my time & attention, and by flooding me with unwanted spam they essentially took away from me the normal intended functioning of the notifications feature. But then the ability to block those instances was added, and now after blocking them + lemmy.ml, I enjoy myself here. The only way offered to me to not receive tens and tens and tens and tens of replies was to cut myself off from them, i.e. curate my feed which is if not full-on echo chamber at least is one step towards it. And yet... what other alternative is there? Ignore my notifications entirely? There are SO MANY of them, but only one of me, and this unequal power dynamic leaves me with no other choices - after all, it's not like I can apply filters to my notifications, where I could still receive messages from them but just not treat them as the same, absolute highest-priority status that is assigned to every other notification also. Also, prior to the blocking of the instance they had the ability to live rent-free in my head, as I would need to read every one of those before I could know what it was about. This is not "fair", nor equal, hence illustrating that echo chambers are not the absolute worst things in all of existence - rather, they are a poor solution to problems that are far worse (e.g. not having an echo chamber, perhaps rather having nobody at all in a community that remains willing to speak, or possibly even to lurk anymore, i.e. its death).
These are the tools that we have. If we want better, we need to make them. And this will require emotional intelligence that most of us seem extremely unwilling to ponder. e.g. one idea, which seems to sound to most people to be really bad, would be to implement what we already kinda do as humans, and assign greater weight to people based on their community-specific karma. This would be horrible for new people joining, but if someone has been posting half of a community's content but then ten new people join, not posting anything at all but instead harassing the existing users and downvoting everything they see that does not match what they want, then those votes should count as "lesser" than the pillars of the community whose votes should count for "more". New people can always start new communities of their own - ofc that gets back to the "discoverability" issue - but it would virtually eliminate some of the less-organized "noise" trends that so often pollute social media streams, similar to how anti-cheating or captcha devices work, as in if they can do as well as a human who knows the material, then that's arguably more of a success more than it is a failure? :-P
But it would also come at a severe cost, of tying together a community's content to its content creators. And yet... is that such a bad thing? It essentially distributes power from mods to the users, but not all users and rather those who contribute the most. But maybe this idea really is a horrible one - in which case, again, we would need to make a better one, somehow.
I'm surprised that you deduce from that article that echo chambers are a good thing or "work". If you're here purely for entertainment and funny memes instead of discourse, then that's fine. But you can honestly do that better on reddit, more niche communities as well.
And you seem to be advocating that everyone should defederate or block all three major socialist instances...
And that is what I meant, Lemmy has already failed. Because instead of seeing the actual enemy, the very real rise of fascism, nationalism and escalating war and genocide, they focus their aggression on the mythological tankie. Absolutely unwilling to tolerate any dissenting opinion outside the mainstream.
I can understand that people get a severe culture shock from the dirtbag left from chap traphouse because they are not well behaved, and there are boneheads in every movement, but even fucking lemmy.ml?
Nothing is ever so black and white or night and day as to be perfectly separable into binary categories - e.g. it tends to get dark at night, but a light sensor or timer could be confused by a moonlit night being brighter than a cloudy day, or like someone or an animal walking in front of the former and thus casting a localized shadow even on a fairly bright day.
Yes obviously echo chambers "work", or else they would not exist. They are imperfect solutions to some of the real problems that people face. Perhaps we can come up with better solutions, which will require even more work, not because they are binary="bad", but rather bc despite working to solve some problems (kicking out trolls reduces the effectiveness of their campaigns of harassment tactics), they do not work well for other issues, namely they leave someone vulnerable to be misled into believing whatever the owner/admin/mod chooses to feed their sheeple.
And make no mistake: similar to hexbear.net and Lemmygrad.ml, Lemmy.ml is also very much of an echo chamber, as too is Lemmy.world. Though also the Lemmy code being offered to the whole world free of charge is quite friendly - both are true at the same time.:-)
Also true is that Lemmy.world blocking some of the worst behavior present on the Fediverse is helpful, even while that happens at the expense of it being an echo chamber. At some point, if 1+1=2 but some people disagree and say that it =3, and I mean VEHEMENTLY - and more to the point abuse the power control systems like anonymous downvotes on EVERYTHING that someone posts regardless of its own content - then yes, such people need to be banned. Not bc of their toxic beliefs, but due to their abusive actions. That much isn't even evidence of an "echo chamber" effect - that's just mandatory keeping a community alive rather than allowing all the members to be harassed and thus everyone quits.
The real problem, afaik, comes from there being far too few volunteers to do all the necessary work, hence those that do step up tend to be power hungry dictators. And yes, again, Lemmy.ml admins are known for exactly this - don't pretend that everyone else is an echo chamber but they somehow are not.
Though personally the reason I blocked it is bc the users there, I guess bc they get used to talking only inside of their echo chamber provided to them, are far less well-behaved than the average across the Fediverse. I was able to delete so very many individual user blocks that I had made previously to blocking the entire instance, plus new people that now I don't have to have the displeasure of getting to know them first before not having to see them anymore. Me refusing to listen CONSTANTLY to "b-b-but 1+1=3", without my consent... okay call my solution an "echo chamber" if you like, but it's just not fun or worthwhile (and frankly, it's not an echo chamber, not quite, bc I discuss plenty of things that I do not agree with, with people who are polite:-).
Not all "opinions" are equally thought out or valid. And then yeah there's agitprop too but I've been ignoring the intentional stuff in order to focus on useful idiots who simply don't know themselves even what they are saying, but ofc agitprop would be an even more extreme version. Anyway, it's a personal decision not a defederation - I'm not making any decisions for anyone else, just stating a preference, and sharing that thought and yes advocating for others to know that they can similarly enact their preferences, even if theirs happen to differ from mine:-). e.g., perhaps they'll create an account on Lemmy.ml - that is their right and I would not dream of trying to stop anyone from such, though also I demand to be free myself to enact my own freedom of choices.:-)
Post from 13 years ago, basically agreeing that everyone ignored the "rule" and used upvote/downvote as glorified agree/disagree buttons:
Your link directly contradicts that "everybody... always..." thought this since there is discussion about it. My point is that it's an attitude problem and the aspiration to do better has an effect. And this had an effect and that has changed.
I considered editing my post to say the vast majority instead of everybody, but I was hoping you weren't going to be that pedantic. It was very clear that 13 years ago, reddit was already having the argument because it was so pervasive that all the purists were upset about it.
Just a few years ago you weren't downvoted just because someone disagreed with your opinion.
Yeah, no, "downvote is jot a disagree button" has always been aspirational on reddit.
Most users prefer to defederate from socialist instances because "tankies".
I would advocate for defederation based on idiotic politics but calling tankies socialist is disingenuous. Since when is genocide denial and or worship is an acceptable behavior?
The problem is that the mainstream is simply declaring historical events one way and any other dissenting viewpoint or evidence is suppressed. And there IS evidence.
The fascists (and Putin's propaganda trolls) have been successful in disruption any dialogue between people from the actual left: socialists. Not the neoliberal "democrats".
And now you do their work for them: You censor the socialists (marxist-leninist, maoists) because some "dirtbag left" troll once was mean to someone. You probably can't even link to an example of what you accuse entire group of. But this tankie slur gets repeated and amplified more and more. People simply call you tankie, downvote and everyone piles on without thinking.
The problem is that disinformation and post-truth doublethink on the so called "left" (=neoliberals) is almost indistinguishable from MAGA like OP.
If you check out lemmy from an instance that hasn't defederated from the socialist instances you'll see that basically half of lemmy activity is invisible - the socialist half. The result is rather predictable.
here is an example of how these "socialists" behave check modlog for the actual convo.
Doesn't look like anything to me (lol)
He didn't deny the ills and the repression in the USSR but showed with sources that there were significant economic upsides. He states that Russia isn't communist or socialist any more. At no point does he deny Russia's invasion is illegal. He at no point denies genocide.
So what does make him a tankie? That he has a different analysis of the history about how this war came to be? Which wasn't even the topic of discussion! You can argue about the quality of the sources or survey - but you were already ready to call him an odious tankie and shitpost.
People equate anyone socialist or antiwar or anti US empire with being a tankie and putin apologist. Which leads to the wholesale censoring and defederation.
I do agree that mods are WAY too ban-happy on lemmy.
Arguably neither that post nor the political discussion belongs in that community.
He didn't deny the ills and the repression in the USSR but showed with sources that there were significant economic upsides.
genocide denial spotted again...
these comments don't get removed on lemmy.ml but counter points do...
You make no counter points just baseless and heinous accusations.
Sure buddy
Then you wonder why people scoff at this sort of "socialism"
There absolutely no way this isn't an ad for upvote buying services lol this is so insane and transparent and the worst part is it'll work
Have to respect someone getting in on grifting conservatives without even endorsing their views in the process.
Honestly, there's and endless sea of grift attempts going on at all times. You don't think people selling fake gold Trump coins, etc give one damn about his politics, do you? They're just trying to wring every penny out of the die hards
Man, the cash I could make with flexible ethics.
Right? I was going to sell 5g blockers online when the pandemic started, but I have some semblance of a conscience... Also my wife threatened to leave me if I did.
I read that as 5 grams and wondered what a blocker was that 5g worth of it would be extra valuable during the pandemic.
Last presidential election here in Brazil there were some some traffic light salesman selling towels with the presidential candidates. And they walked around with a score board showing which one had sold more. And they sold a lot more because people didn't want to see their beloved candidate on the losing side.
I have to respect the mall t-shirt kiosks selling poorly made trump merch right next to the equally poorly made Kamala merch. At least they're just there for the hustle
In this case they do very much help those views though. Either they create the appearance of public appeal, which draws more people to these views, or they manage to disrupt spaces that formerly fostered a different political culture.
If we look at Twitter we see the second aspect particularly strongly.
Keen observation skills. I wouldn’t have caught on, I’m sad to say.
How to milk the conservatives.
Thats exactly what I believe. I know there is no limits to stupidity, but don’t you use bots to make it seem legit? Who would go around saying, “hey guys we’re losing. We should use BOTS. We should buy BOTS ACCOUNT AND UPVOTES from BOTSFORSALE.org”
It screams Steve Bannon.
The all caps gave it away
I mean, it's an ad but it's also thought-provoking and interesting. Before now we all knew what was happening we just didn't know the details also kind of interesting to see proof it's a conversation starter. I think I would have preferred it if the author would have redacted the URL though.
"It is unambiguous clear that our message is toxic and the majority of people reject our ideology and us with it. Therefore, the most logical solution is to create an artificial narrative via manipulation and vote-buying that makes it appear that people like us." -these people probably
Well, it worked with the news.
It also worked with Reddit. The Palestine discourse there is utterly repulsive and gleefully genocidal.
Is it really that bad? I haven't been on Reddit in over a year.
worldnews is absolutely surreal and awful. Country specific subreddits are also getting worse and worse.
Holy shit you're not wrong. I just browsed the top of the week on World News for a good twenty minutes and there wasn't a single post about the thousands of civilians that have been killed. I didn't see a single pro Palestine post and anybody talking about the literal war crimes being committed over there we're just downvoted. I think I agree with your word choice of "surreal." It feels like straight up propaganda and they are all falling for it. Every post about Israel was just saying something about how they're taking out the terrorists.
I really wish I'd just taken your word for it. That's depressing.
It's hilariously ironic that I got banned from worldnews four years ago for criticizing the Saudi regime and how they use millennia-old scripture as justification to treat women horribly. Apparently that's 'bigotry.'
Everything I hear about the toxicity of worldnews these days is baffling.
Well, Saudi Arabia is an ally in all but name to Israel. Also both countries have excellent ties to large swaths of US politics.
Capitalism™
Or... I run a reddit botnet, and Christmas is coming up. What's the easiest group of rubes to fleece?
That's what they've been doing for decades. And unfortunately they've been very successful at it.
“Our opinions are wildly unpopular to the point where even if a bunch of us showed up we’d struggle to make a difference so we’re gunna need to buy upvotes!”
Like…c’mon.
Have you seen the content there?
Yeah they're gonna need lots of money to get any attention
Oh wow, so it's basically a content farm for /r/TheRightCantMeme
FYI unfortunately that sub got taken over by pro-russia and pro-ccp tankies.
One of the mod of the sub is also a hexbear mod.
Fuckin’ yikes.
Dumb enough to fall for a Facebook lie about Tim Walz, but smart enough to use a crappy image editor?
No, the Russians already provided the image with the lie
I love the conservatives think that's such cutting slander when really having a male politician who understands the need for feminine hygiene products by uterus havers everywhere is such a breath of fresh air
The right may not have good ideas, organizational skills, charm, ethics, understanding of economics, history, or politics, or strength in numbers, but they do have the one thing more important than all of these.
Money!
I'd argue they do have organizational skills and and strength in numbers. Don't underestimate that.
You don't get and keep money without some of these skills though.
Eric Trump says "what?!"
And this after his father would have made 8 times more money by simply leaving it in the bank than all of his variety of hotel and Sharper Image steak sales businesses - he's literally the only one I've ever heard of who managed to lose money running a casino!
"The system" is what makes wealth, not individual people these days. Obviously not solely, but the above example shows how it is the primary determination factor.
Gasp, you all surely don't believe that conservatives would ever engage in voter manipulation tactics... r-r-right!?
No definitely not. They've been wanting "fair elections" all this time.
This must be why Trump said they people only need to vote one more time, and then they'll never need to do so ever again.
One election, to rule them all... ~and~ ~in~ ~the~ ~darkness~ ~bind~ ~them~
Why do I have a feeling this person has a vested financial interest in one of those upvote buying farms.
Who grifts the griftmen?
I literally haven't heard of people buying engagement since like 2012 instagram when everyone was trying to be a rapper.
This is what they do in real life too though. They know the US is mostly liberal (based on the popular vote) so they have to abuse money and historical power to manipulate the votes into their favor.
"Ignore morality and get shit done", aka The Ends Justify The Means
- God or something, probably?
Probably a scam, but congrats on discovering the Russian disinformation strategy from 2016.
Not exactly a scam. I still browse Reddit, and the Jordan Peterson Memes sub has been popping up in Popular for a few weeks, it had been a completely obscure sub before. The posts are ALL about US politics too...on a meme sub for a Canadian 'life coach'
That's because Jordan Peterson is one of the entry points to the alt-right rabbit hole. Despite being from Canada, his brand of grift is intricately tied to U.S. politics. If you have a very short amount of time, some people have put together some very short videos talking about Peterson:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIK-x5uT6oS9EnO9-D6ePsWKOxtFhDZdF
https://youtu.be/hSNWkRw53Jo
https://youtu.be/fWUAGfduUlg
https://youtu.be/CvH0Pkw_iCg
https://youtu.be/m81q-ZkfBm0
https://youtu.be/s1FkO7Tr70A
Oh I'm definitely aware. The fact that some anti-woke content appears on the sub isn't unexpected. The fact that it's largely US political content is just a blatant display of meddling.
Ender’s Game was prescient text, regardless of Orson Scott Card’s personal beliefs.
Locke and Demosthenes are now armies of manipulative bots (but often real humans), shaping political discourse throughout the world. The Internet gave mind control powers to people with money, ambition, or both. We saw it with the Bernie Sanders and Trump movements in 2016 on Reddit, all too clearly for those who lived through an era where bullshit detection was a critical skill.
I was once fairly defeatist on this subject: the bad guys won, got Trump elected, and kicked off a new era of 80s conservatism that demonized progressive values like environmental conservation, freedom of choice in a number of matters, and equality.
But now, I’m starting to see young people stand up to their boomer relatives at Thanksgiving and bring facts and logic to social media discussions. And I have regained some hope that we will once again find a way to make the progressive “line go up“. Our society seems to swing like a pendulum between the right and left, over decades, and it feels like the Trump era was a swing too violent for most of us. It’s time to swing back.
Man, ever since the early 2010s I've thought about Ender's Game a LOT - and it's always this part of the book, never the zero-g laser tag or genocide-by-arcade-machine parts.
Didn't Clinton spend $40m on shareblue forum sliding?
I'll never understand why people attribute to the Russian government what was in the obvious best-interests of the Republican Party and the conservative movement.
If you asked who owns and operates the FOX News Channel, or Sinclair Media, or Clear Channel Radio, or any of the other dozen right-wing propaganda projects, I have to wonder how many people would reflexively insist "Russia" despite all of the money spilling in from the UK, Australia, Canada, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and the O&G Industry.
Maybe because there was a demonstrated and provable coordinated effort by the Russian government in the 2016 election to get Trump elected? Look up project lakhta. Russian election interference and the efforts of the domestic conservative movement can (and do) exist simultaneously.
What do you have against attributing to the Russian government actions that are demonstrably attributable to the Russian government?
I'll be real, I have my suspicions regarding that whole scandal in 2016 because following the election there were like 2-3 days of quiet introspection by the Dems and then they aligned on "the Russians were pushing fake news that tricked everyone!"
My pet conspiracy theory is that it was already known within the political campaigns that these misinformation campaigns were happening and they chose to at that point publicize them and use that as their scapegoat. Same with the Russian spies they publicly outed that trump spoke with.
Your framing is off. It's not a conspiracy theory. It's true that it was already known. The FBI investigation of Russian interference began before the election, not after. The investigation was being publicized before the election.
If you want to nurse a conspiracy theory about it, whatever. But you're going to appear ignorant when you advance a conspiracy theory without doing the bare minimum of research into the known facts. You're just creating a fictional narrative based on your "suspicions." You're not being "real." You're being ignorant.
I called it a conspiracy theory because it's really just based purely off of observation and gut instinct and not facts. Good to know my gut instinct happened to be right though!
Your takeaway from my reply is that your instinct was correct? You're going to make a great conspiracy theorist.
Meh my "conspiracy theories" just aren't exciting enough because they tend to be too grounded in things that are actually likely in the real world and explaining weirdness in what is presented to the public with a guess as to what happened behind the scenes, like that the sonic movie was a joke pitch that somehow got greenlit so then they had to actually make the movie and to try to make it decent
Their values are aligned, theirs strategies are aligned, and so their efforts are aligned.
Because there have been literal articles and reports by the FBI that Russian interference in social media has been a thing since the 2016 election cycle.
That's why it's been attributed to the Russian government. Because the Russian government actually did a ton of stuff.
They were at it at least a year before the 2016 election cycle. I believe it was the CIA that said Russia was the one that created the Jade Helm scare in 2015 through social media influence.
Jade Helm was the name of a training operation of the US military in central TX near Temple. The Russians created a bunch of posts claiming that Obama was taking over local Walmarts and emptying them of all merchandise to use as prisoners for his political opponents. They even drew diagrams of the insides of the stores with the holding cells and everything. So great was the Russian influence that Abbott (who is still Governor of TX) ordered the TX National Guard to watch the training exercise and make sure that the US military wasn't storming homes and taking prisoners.
There have been literal articles and reports by the FBI of domestic white nationalist organizing and domestic financing. Significantly more money and manpower is documented as entirely domestically organized, although a sizeable amount is moving between NATO and other Five Eyes states. We're talking on the scale of tens of billions moving between domestic financiers - like the Mercers, Thiel, the Kochs, etc - and domestic fascist media/organizing. That dwarfs Russian state interventions. Its orders of magnitude different.
Why do you search for the speck in your neighbor's eye when you have a plank within your own?
Hey, remember what happened to Digg? Why a bunch of people moved over to Reddit in the first place?
I guess not a lot of people remember, so let me tell you.
Bunch of dipshits ran upvote brigades. Stories they didn't like got buried really fast.
Now, Digg was a hive mind site to begin with - good luck posting anything the hive mind didn't care about. But add blatant political machinations on top of that, and the site got unusable real fast.
Take a few guesses which political views those groups were trying to futilely promote while quashing opponents. Go on. (I'll give a hint, some of them retreated to Conservapedia)
So that's what killed Digg. ...that, and the Digg admins were being dicks and the site redesign sucked ass. (...insert comparison to modern Reddit here)
Those who don't learn history are doomed to repeat it. Thanks for the quick lesson
But conservatives want to repeat history.
Just not the good parts.
I don't remember Digg being infiltrated by right wing conservatives. What I do remember was a website with a community that dickrode its power users so hard that unless you were a figure like MrBabyMan, your content would not get a single vote. The only people who actually used Digg's social features (i.e. Friends lists) were blog spammers.
IIRC Digg v4 tried to address the issue by making users subscribe directly to news websites and dedicated content creators. They hated it and flocked immediately to their competitor.
Reddit has the same power user problem, albeit 1000x worse. Say what you want about the people who gamed Digg's front-page, but they didn't have the power to be judge, jury and executioner when moderating communities.
That's only part of what killed Digg. The final nail in the coffin was when they redesigned the website to give power users even more power to control the front page than they already had.
Yep, as I tried to hint in the last paragraph. 😆
Digg's biggest sin was that the votes were all that mattered, and the admins just leaned into that by coddling the power users. That's why Digg got so toxic to random people who just wanted to share something cool they found. The last redesign just made it official that there are those whose votes matter and the unwashed plebs. Everyone already knew people were fucking with the votes, and the admins just said "go right ahead".
So what Reddit offered was at least some assurance that the algorithm would combat blatant vote manipulation by power blocs and that people could share cool stuff fairly. Digg users promptly voted with their feet.
Now, to Reddit's credit, the system worked for years. Admins absolutely condemned vote manipulation and actively fought it. People were actively against all sorts of vote brigading, and the admins listened.
Problem is, it all changed. Corporate media influencing came in, under radar. Political memefluencers came in, under radar. It's all allowed unless it's blatantly against policy and everyone pretends it's just organic random users.
Now, you don't see the Reddit admins talking about what made the site work so well back in the day. I'm not sure they're interested in maintaining the anti-brigading and anti-manipulation algorithms. They're this close to saying "fuck it, it's a free-for-all" and going full Digg publicly.
lmao even if that happens i fucking bet NOTHING will change. too many people are just addicted to the site and even if it does we'll just get an overload of turbo-redditors here
That's not what happened at all imho.
What killed digg realistically is that it had less control than Reddit and because Kevin Rose blocked posts about the DVD encryption codes and people over reacted to that block. For days digg was full of people simply reposting them (as Digg was worried about getting sued which was fair enough)
Didn't really have anything to do with politics.
Don't forget, this was back in the day of fat people hate and Reddit hosting child porn. Reddit administration was never great
Digg admins were actually ok and I never had an issue with them
Reddit in the earliest days was basically 4chan but less controlled and more spread-out. There were thousands of illegal and horrifyingly abusive subreddits. Every single time one got taken down, it was this massive, whinging drama show from thousands of chuds screaming about their "rights" and "censorship."
By the time admins came for the less overtly evil ones, like the weirdly prevalent communities dedicated to fantasizing about punching particular people in the face, reddit had very much become the WalMart of the internet. Not the cleanest or nicest place to visit, but it certainly had everything and was convenient if you needed a fix at odd hours.
I don't even remember Digg but I remember it seemed relatively short-lived in the early days of the explosion of forum sites. A lot of people were trying to strike gold with the next big thing as internet popularity was soaring. There are likely hundreds of other big sites like Digg that people used to frequent that have also since died in the mass-extinction events of the 2010's and beyond.
That's pretty much US politics summed up, isn't it? Ignore what they people say and throw money into it to get what you want.
Yep, it's the same formula for commercials and fliers you see. Just on Reddit, they have to prep to fight back because people can actively voice their opinions where billboards/fliers/commercials, they don't have to deal with that.
Everyone with a Reddit account, let's sell upvotes to conservatives on Jordan_Peterson_Memes. It's income redistribution with zero impact.
Point me to the sign up sheet
Subvert the will and desires of the majority using money and shitty practices....how very GOP of them.
Come on, dude. This is Reddit, not a vote in parliament. The site's entire business model revolves around astroturfing.
Counter argument: Reddit is predominately American. These upvote sites use low cost foreign slave labor to generate their output. Buying upvotes is outsourcing jobs. Keep Reddit American. Don't buy upvotes!
I'm not American and I am a Redditor!
Brb gonna sell some upvotes and not actually do anything lol
Show me your ways wise man
It’s easy; you just go on the internet and tell lies
You really think someone would do that, just go on the internet and tell lies?
You ai bots aren't fooling me!
I have never lied on the Internet.
Mostly.
THIS STATEMENT IS FALSEYou wouldn't!
😏
I'm sure that they don't have an economic agreement with that fake up votes website
Owning an "upvote company" is literally the only reason on God's Earth that anyone could give seven shits about content and voting on reddit.
It may have had cultural impact back in 2016, but that was almost a decade ago and the world is different, reddit is different.
Now it's just bots arguing with bots and every post is a surreptitious paid ad for something. People haven't quite "move on" but they certainly don't give reddit communities the relevance they once had. People broadly roll their eyes at reddit. In the last couple offices I worked in, the people joked that you're "never allowed to share something on Teams if it came from reddit" and "reddit is a dirty secret, everyone knows we browse it, but it's shameful to admit it."
Sorry reddit, the cool factor has left the building a long, long time ago.
Is that "Truth Social"😂?
Remembering it's an isolated Mastodon instance is hilarious and ironic.
it is also a crime!
I can't believe that I'm hearing about this for the first time.
It's nothing new for them.
yes it is
They'd fit right at home on r/Asmongold. That place has become a KotakuInAction offshoot in recent months. So much right wing, anti-woke and anti-trans content gets posted there that I'm surprised the admins haven't quarantined or banned it.
so i'm not very familiar with asmongolds content, but I know someone who keeps posting his videos into a group chat I'm in together with anti-woke "why are there minorities in my video games" comments.
is that the type of content asmongold produces or is my acquaintance just extremely dense?
I've watched asmongold a bit on and off over the years, and I don't think that he himself is really right wing (unless that changed recently), more just a no-filter, full-on basement dweller but mostly apolitical. Can't say it's really surprising if some of the audience has the 4chan vibe though. Never participated/cared about the chat or the subreddit though.
Ngl I don’t know why he’s here but I fuck with his vibe
Same I like him
You're telling me I could be getting paid for this shit?
Yes, but you have to be dead inside.
Way ahead of you
Reddit was taken over by the right wing a long time ago. This person is out of the loop
I get the feeling that the Admins and management are pretty right leaning, but the mods and users are left.
It depends heavily on what sub you're in for the mods and users,
But yes, the admin team is very right leaning.
True. r/conservative certainly isn't left.
I meant mods are left leaning on average.
The mods of the main subs have been getting progressively more right wing. And I consider the mainstream of the democrats right wing.
They’re not MAGA but they’re basically moderate repubicans these days. And that is what has taken over the main subreddits.
What are you smoking, reddit is a liberal echo chamber.
Depends on the subreddit. Conservatives have made a conscious effort to take over moderation on various subreddits that represents individual cities often in blue states. Some have succeeded in that, others have failed.
cause everyone knows if conservative replies get upvoted enough people who hate Trump will have a sudden change of heart. Is this guy in the upvote for money business or what?
I'm not terribly against stealing money from maga dumb idiots with too much money.
Does anyone else feel like setting up a scam site that claims to sell upvotes, and donates all the profit to the Harris/Walz campaign?
Won’t last long unless the votes actually come in.
That's why you tell them to only post on subs that are already a chud circle jerk like here. They upvote him and you take the money. If they don't just say the libs have a downvotes bot focused on only them and you need more money to DDOS it for Trump. They will appreciate how important they are. Like any scam, the end goal is to find egotistical idiots and this is rich soil.
"The libs are TOO FERVENT and keep downvoting us! Donate more!!!"
Can’t do a chargeback on bitcoin.
That’ll work a few times
You’re assuming a logical, and frankly, literate adversary. That’s the best part about Trump grifts.
buying a bunch of upvotes on a website dominated by bot accounts is a very cost effective way to run an AstroTurf campaign
"I thought trump was a terrible person, but the updoots be changed my mind"
Yeah sure. I mean there's probably at least one or two feeble minded redditors like that but... Not a bunch. Especially if they're confining themselves to right leaning subs.
Astroturfing is when corpos pretend to be grassroots
I remember, back in 2016, when the /r/The_Donald website just used a bunch of bots and other fake accounts to juice their content to the front page week after week.
And then the Mods tweaked the algorithm so you wouldn't have a wall of Trump memes on the front page every day. /r/The_Donald folks spilled into other sites and started repeating the strategy, so Mods had to tweak the algorithm again. And there was this back and forth that dragged all the way into the general election, at which point the Admins finally decided to ban the sub. But they also had to ban a slew of leftist subs, to make things fair.
And now we have Hexbear, a site composed of purged Reddit-fuges. But Reddit is still full of Trumpies, for some curious reason.
It's because conservative voices are being silenced!
My recollection is that they didn't ban the sub until after the election, like a year into his presidency, shortly after the Charlottesville protest. I might be wrong though, I wasn't really paying all that much attention to them.
This is the equivalent of not being able to get your crush to like you, so you pay hooker just to tell people you got a girlfriend.
I bought Canada so I always have a Canadian supermodel girlfriend who just can’t be here right now.
Does they encourage people to buy upvotes in friendly subreddits? Either they are not friendly or them buying internet points is even more useless than I thought.
I think they are posting on "friendly" subreddits so their posts dont get deleted and buy upvotes so they are recommended to people browsing r/all
"We're victims!!! 😭😭😭"
So, putting aside the questionable morals of this person. I'm not sure alt right reddit threads are the election swing spot they seem to think.
Donnie did an AMA on reddit except it was a
hugeyuge disaster because he couldn't comprehend that it wasn't twitter and all his replies got buried hahaIsn't that what got the crow guy perma-ip-banned?
Ip bans are incredibly ineffective though. You just get a new IP from your isp
Depends on ISP.
If IPv4 ban, it is indeed 100% ineffective. Nearly all ISPs either CGNAT or rotate addresses. If IPv6, the ISP just forwards a 64 bit block and leaves it at that. You must call and request a new IP block. In which case you'll be told yes or no. If yes, it's either free or paid.
I know with ATT Fiber, they don't offer address changes unless there is some security or service interruption reason. You have to unplug the modem for 30+ days so the lease expires if you don't want to do rounds with support. My IPv4 address has changed once, but my IPv6 address block has never changed.
With my "new" ISP, I gave up running my DDNS updater on my home server. It's been years and the IPv4 address still hasn't changed...
something something not your personal army
also fuck trump
You're thinking Anonymous.
Also fuck Trump
Eww far right social media filled with racism,anti sentiment,islamphobia etc etc
its definitely not election interference guys, trust me, it's definitely not election interference.
Just more conservatives casually admitting that they can't win anything without rigging the vote.
Why would posting pro-Trump messaging on conservative friendly subs increase his chances of winning? Nobody who votes who spends any amount of time in those subs wasn't going to vote for Trump. Also, buying upvotes? Pathetique!
The hope, I imagine, is that conservative subs are safe spaces where dissent can be controlled, and with enough purchased engagement, these posts can reach the front page where all the normal people gather.
Busing in those upvotes again?
Lol. What’s truth social stock worth today? 12 cents and a bucket of chicken wing bones?
I cringe every time I see someone like this say “to oblivion.”
Really? Is that really necessary? Why so consistently specific?
Fuckin reddit out of all places too
This is just sad. How will this not get people sick and tired of it?
Karli can suck a fat dick
There's no way buying upvotes is illegal right?
It's against Reddit's ToS, but as far as I'm aware there's no law that says you can't pay to manipulate social media content.
This might be the funniest thing I’ve seen today.
People have gotten sick and tired of r/pics having loads of political content, and while some candidates are better than others, many people are sick and tired of seeing "orange man bad" yet again. The people who were supposed to be propaganda targets immediately knew this was propaganda and the rampant election posts didn't make Harris more popular. If this plan is enacted, people will see the astroturfing straightaway, and more people will see Trump supporters as bothersome cultists than as freedom fighters. It doesn't help that, if pro-Trump people can brigade the sub, so can anti-Trump people, and the whole debacle will just get shut down.
I would have been so confused if I was still on reddit. Back then, downvotes were proof you were right and you triggered the woke hive, and upvotes meant you said obvious information, woke opinion or funny not offensive jokes. No upvotes/downvotes meant you said something either really thoughtfull or really boring.
Using “woke” unironically and getting downvoted means you are, in fact, a dumb ass.
Lol, you are talking about irony, yet you completely missed the point. Point that you are the perfect exemple.
Spot on, buddy, and im a dumbass? Lol, pathetic... 🤡
Not sure how I am an example. Please explain.
And I also don’t understand how up and downvotes can form an opinion for you. If that’s all it takes for you to make a decision, then you aren’t being very critical of what you are seeing. Surface level understanding plagues right wing nut jobs like yourself.
Lol, no worry buddy, its okay if you cant understand... 🤡
1 day old account and already ousted yourself as a right-wing nutjob, good job! You've been tagged.
Lol, wow, i dont even know how stupid you have to be to think that im right-wing from my post. Or maybe you think every left-winger is woke? Which would be even more stupid 🤡
LMAO, you use "woke" unironically. "Woke" is nothing but a right-wing dog whistle against everything they don't like, like the LGBTQ+ community
You can't be "anti-woke" and left wing at the same time, it's paradoxical.
Bruh, you are clearly the king of stupidity... Even a mussel is smarter than you...
You do realise that woke is how they describe themselves ? Its not the right wing who invented the term, its nonsensical to believe that only right winger use this term as a slang... It became a slang because all woke people are 🤡, they did it themselves, nothing to do with LGBTQ+, race or any political side...
But let me guess, you are a dumb US citizen, right? You cant be that ignorant and not be from the US...
Reddit culture (and lemmy by extension) changed so much in a short time. Just a few years ago you weren't downvoted just because someone disagreed with your opinion. The polarization and culture war turned reddit users completely dogmatic and as immune to arguments or facts as magats.
The same is true of lemmy. Most users prefer to defederate from socialist instances because "tankies". Which really shows how right wing "limbrols" have become. They hate socialists with a different viewpoint on US empire more than they hate fascists. The fascists have succeeded in utterly destroying reddit and lemmy as a platform for useful political discourse.
We now have the vast majority of "liberals" on lemmy upvoting comments using racist slang terms for Russians to dehumanize them, just like they did for enemies in Japan, Vietnam or Korea. The fascists have made massive inroads.
The OP meme almost seems quaint to me now. The real culture war is elsewhere now.
To the degree that people bother to defederate from anything (most users don't) I would assume its because apologists for Putin and China are about as odious to talk to as MAGAs
Basically any anti-imperialist and anti-US empire critique is stamped as Putin/China apologism and downvoted or outright banned. You don't even have to be a socialist to be "odious". And of course the big instances have already defederated from the major socialist instances.
You have a right to speak but not a right to an audience that doesn't want to listen to you. I think certain groups are accused of harboring pro Putinistas because in fact they do actually feature them.
Lol what? What year did you join Reddit? As someone who's been there since 2008, I promise you that this is nothing new.
Yeah, I was on Reddit for 13 years and I don't remember that ever.
Reddit was very monoculture in the beginning. The neckbeards upvoted each other because they generally agreed on the same opinions. That gets mistaken for adherence to reddiquette.
It became a rhetorical tool to prove whatever an individuals political or social adversaries are dummies because they don't use reddit properly in current year unlike some glory day that never existed.
If they really did use reddit back in the day as they claim then all of the self referential satire about reddits pseudo-intellectualism must have gone over their head. It was like the second most popular type of content. Second only to the actual circle jerking.
Not sure what year but the culture definitely changed somewhere around 2008-2016. A big part was trump of course, but before that the rise in android and iphone and becoming more popular to a broader segment of the public (e.g. "boomers"). Before it was tech enthusiasts all on desktop PC. This was also before toxic gamer culture.
If you don't think it changed you must have trauma induced amnesia.
So you claim that people are too hyperbolic, then jump straight to accusing the person you replied to of brain damage, and this after jumping straight to the assumption that the majority of said problems were due to Boomers finding Reddit, not e.g. Millennials or Gen-Z or Alpha or merely a less technical audience. If you were attempting a joke there, that was not clear - and yes I saw the "e.g." but you only listed one, so really, this seems to be the best example that you had to convey? Boomers, who are well known for their toxic gaming culture, I suppose.
As mentioned by others, I for one do not user block instances bc "tankies", but rather bc they are an enormous waste of time. Although the very meaning of that word could also be phrased as "denier of historically accurate facts". I for one don't care if someone is a Boomer or a Millennial or whatever physical age, if they don't know or care that 1+1=2 and keep insisting that it's =3 instead, I'm blocking them and moving on with my life. Hopefully they'll open themselves up to the Truth one day, but I'm not waiting anymore, that's entirely on them to go at whatever pace and direction they want, including straight backwards if they so choose - but I am not going to entertain the notion that "all directions/facts are equally valid", they simply aren't.
It was meant lighthearted, but trolling by fascists (maga) or agitprop (putin) does have an mental effect. That is my point, the culture and attitude has changed. To say it hasn't changed is just factually incorrect.
This is the factually incorrect comment, heavily upvoted:
He's not just laughing at me, implying I'm some reddit noob, and then attempts to gaslight me. But I'm the meanie? Ohwee.
You're saying you don't waste time and when someone disagrees on facts, they are wrong and you move on. Could you imagine that if the mainstream constantly fed you one version of events, you might be the one being so sure that the historical events are one way that you end up saying 1+1=3?
You rely on facts being what they are because a google search results in sources trusted by you say so. All neoliberal sources fed by the US state department. And the dissident arguments and evidence just happens to be the same as a certain russian dictator - so they must be wrong. Which is called a genetic fallacy.
Luckily blocking, banning and defederation is easy on lemmy, so we can just live happily ever after in our echo chambers.
The culture definitely changed - you are right about that. I was not there at the start as you were, but ultimately, how could it not have? EVERY culture changes all the time, and e.g. the Rexodus surely had a large impact even since we all left it. Though the burden of expressing that point clearly I suppose is on you, and the burden of understanding you is likewise partially on them, i.e. communication is a 2-way process. The difference is that you spoke first, and then when others challenged you as to what you meant, you ramped the matter up by several notches and accused the other person of literal brain damage. This was hyperbolic, and attacking the messenger rather than the message, and after that many people stopped listening to you any further, seeing how you were speaking emotionally rather than logically, or challenged you still further. The responsibility for what they say is on them, but the responsibility for what you said is on you.
And yes, some people literally do seem to have brain damage, but intended as light-hearted or not, you did jump to that rather quickly... and while I am seeing that you do not enjoy being judged, yet you were very quick to offer your judgement to the other person... Why worry about what children are saying about you? But yeah, you did call them brain-damaged, and again that part is on your shoulders.
You catch more flies with honey than vineager. Do what you will with that thought.
so I'm not interested in this conversation but I do need to acknowledge that you're misusing the term "gaslighting". it matters. disagreement, or sharing a perspective you don't agree with, is not gaslighting.
gaslighting refers to a specific form of domestic abuse by which the abuser attempts to control their victim by making them doubt their own faculties of perception, question their grasp reality, and ultimately become dependent on the abuser.
in other words, if you say it was great weather yesterday and i say "what? were you in the park at noon? the weather was so hot!" that's not gaslighting. that's having a different experience. likewise if you ask if I went to the park and i say "No", but i really did go, that's not gaslighting. that's called "lying". lying is not, in itself, gaslighting.
now if you say "but i saw you! you were carrying a green parasol!" and this were true but I went and threw out the green one and got a yellow one and replied "no you didnt, i dont even have a green one, this is my parasol it's clearly yellow, are you sure you recognized me? maybe you are having some brain damage, let's make an appointment and get you checked out" that's getting closer to gaslighting. hey, that's actually sort of similar to what you said to me, although I dont think you were gaslighting me, i think you were just being a self-righteous american jerk.
I know this is irrelevant to what you were hemming and hawing about with that other commenter and you probably won't care, but this matters way more to me. please don't misuse words that we depend on for understanding IPV
I was wondering if gaslighting was the right term to use, but decided to use it anyway. Maybe it is not appropriate here, maybe I'm hypercritical of your words, but I'm very much aware of what it means.
Gaslighting is today used in political context because of Donald Trump. Definitions change. And I think it fits here maybe not specifically because of what you said, but for the context. It is not the first time I heard "reddiquette about upvoting never existed". It's not just 1984 style historical revisionism, it's self-righteous american jerks like you LOUDLY screaming "NEVER HAPPENED! LOL WHAT, ARE YOU ON COKE?" (paraphrasing you here, might have gotten your words slightly wrong)
If you look at other replies, you now also see a moving of the goalpost: It was just the monoculture of neckbeard circlejerks. Or it was just some "purists" who argued about it. But it's always been this way.
Except I was there (3000 years ago). I've seen comments not downvoted that were disagreeable but well stated. Sometimes it still happens. They were not made invisible because they contributed to a discussion. I remember it. And it's still in the long forgotten, now hidden reddiquette. Threads exists where this was argued about. Your comment is just wrong and it is rude. I am not insane.
Even when the fascists loose, they win. Gaslighting is now a routine tool of the liberals to reframe their narrative. Liberal was at war with Tankie; therefore Liberal had always been at war with Tankie.
I also see four lights, so maybe don't take my post too seriously.
Upvotes and downvotes have always been glorified agree/disagree buttons.
This is simply incorrect. It's true that they now evolved completely to that, but you are wrong stating that it was always like this. It's still in the reddiquette: https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/205926439-Reddiquette
This used to be understood that people often treated it as agree/disagree but that you are "supposed to be better than that". And that made a difference.
It's historic revisionism to say it was always like this because clearly there was discussion about this if you go just 10 years back: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/search/?q=downvote
I was there. It was real. You're not crazy, a lot of us went by a kinda honor code for downvotes. You had to say something very irrelevant for me to downvote.
It was the best of times for internet forums.
Better discussions and the gags were limited and not belched out repeat jokes. Yes there were inside jokes but it wasn't like broken arms jackdaw molly rancher every damn thread. It got too popular and with that you drew the youtube comment types all trying to get the "funniest meta joke" per thread which translates to "most likes" for people not interested in genuine discussion. Couple that with echo chambers and astroturfing and well, now we're here.
Thanks, sometimes it does feel like going crazy!
I really wish we could design systems that allow to come closer to that old ideal again. But maybe that age has simply passed and all of our attitudes have changed forever. For example instead of just voting up or down, you could vote for example "funny" or "contributes" or "misinformation". Maybe there are even some clever statistical algorithms in the background aiding that. Somehow technology ought to evolve to further good discussion.
Personally I think it's just a problem that arises when too many people are in the room. Get enough people on board and it starts sliding towards catering to the lowest common denominator
Excellent references!
Btw, this article seems to perfectly describe the effects you are mentioning, e.g.:
It is a fantastic article and I cannot recommend it highly enough.
Edit: also it helps explain why this isn't a problem seen merely with Reddit, but also Twitter/X, Facebook, Threads, and yes Lemmy (+Mbin/Piefed/Sublinks) too - it's apparently rooted in human nature, thus would require enormous pushback to try to counter, while in contrast monetary profits tend to go along with whatever most easily aligns with our most basal natures. Sex sells, greed moar so, but laziness most of all.
Thanks, really interesting analysis! I'd argue that profit seeking is significant in this change though. Polarizing content leads to anger and higher engagement. So any algorithm that is written or trained to increase profit from advertisement will encourage that outcome.
I believe there are other influences too, the fascists and putin trolls (agitprop) has led to some "automatic downvote and ban reflex". On lemmy the mods are basically power tripping non stop in trying to curate their fief into a single minded community that brooks no dissent. There is one narrative and anyone dissenting is a . On all sides, people are just sick of the bullshit and are on a hair trigger.
This seems to the be result of the last decade of mainstream media and social media being run for profit through engagement. I have no idea of how to reverse this.
Lemmy isn't run for profit - mostly (though there are some amounts of money involved, and moreover power & fame) - but being based off of Reddit still uses that identical model. And then similarly for Mbin, Sublinks, Piefed, Tesseract, etc. Someone would need to basically do all of having an idea for alternative mechanisms, and also write the code for it, and also start up an instance, and promote it to let others know, whereas a failure in any of those steps would prevent its acceptance by the global community. Plus while all of that is going on, all of Facebook, Threads, Xhitter, Bluesky, and yes Reddit can continue to innovate, possibly stealing the idea out from under someone and twist it to meet their profit-seeking needs, though conversely those also generate ideas that non-profit sources can steal from as well.
One example is Reddit's automated CrowdControl (an optional feature available to mods of all subs) - instead of a mod needing to outright "remove" an unpopular comment in a post, it simply gets collapsed by default, thereby working against the trends to maintain an echo chamber by allowing people to post dissenting opinions in the identically same space as the majority of the community, who control what they want to see with voting. Similarly posts that are too lengthy could be cut off after a point, needing you to click to continue reading, but thereby allowing you to scroll past something that you don't want to spend time on. But these are tiny things, and still many people wouldn't bother making all that many comments that they know in advance will be unpopular, b/c what would they even gain from such? (besides a brief relief to get something off their chest, but how many can keep coming that way, for weeks and months and years?)
One reason for that is the power dynamics, which regardless of for- vs. non-profit organizations, still offer greater power to one "side" or the other of a transaction. Voting for instance is anonymous, whereas posting is not, hence voters (even lurkers!) have more power than content creators. All someone has to do is spin up their own instance, or join one of the many that do not require even so much as an email sign-up, and they can generate as many votes as they want, for "free". As so many discussions have highlighted, "content creators" really are at a severe disadvantage, compared to unethical voters, mods, and ofc admins, especially for those first few vulernable minutes where it hasn't received any upvotes yet. After all, *I* may offer fewer than one downvote per day, maybe per week, and also routinely sort content by New, but that's not what others (seem to) choose to do. So should downvotes be rationed? Or the source made publicly viewable? Mbin does the latter btw, though as "reduces" not "downvotes" shared with Lemmy.
Which further illustrates the trend towards echo chambers: they tend to work, to cut out some of the bull crap - if you ban an agitator then all of their BS goes out the door with them, their downvoting, their harassment, their toxicity, etc. BTW speaking of harassment another example of unqual power dynamics is the sending of messages from different people - e.g. I did not know what ChapoTrapHouse was all about, so when I replied there and subsequently received messages from different users for WEEKS and WEEKS afterwards, and then again from something in lemmygrad.ml, I had no control at the time but to receive those notifications. I almost left social media entirely b/c that is an absolute waste of my time & attention, and by flooding me with unwanted spam they essentially took away from me the normal intended functioning of the notifications feature. But then the ability to block those instances was added, and now after blocking them + lemmy.ml, I enjoy myself here. The only way offered to me to not receive tens and tens and tens and tens of replies was to cut myself off from them, i.e. curate my feed which is if not full-on echo chamber at least is one step towards it. And yet... what other alternative is there? Ignore my notifications entirely? There are SO MANY of them, but only one of me, and this unequal power dynamic leaves me with no other choices - after all, it's not like I can apply filters to my notifications, where I could still receive messages from them but just not treat them as the same, absolute highest-priority status that is assigned to every other notification also. Also, prior to the blocking of the instance they had the ability to live rent-free in my head, as I would need to read every one of those before I could know what it was about. This is not "fair", nor equal, hence illustrating that echo chambers are not the absolute worst things in all of existence - rather, they are a poor solution to problems that are far worse (e.g. not having an echo chamber, perhaps rather having nobody at all in a community that remains willing to speak, or possibly even to lurk anymore, i.e. its death).
These are the tools that we have. If we want better, we need to make them. And this will require emotional intelligence that most of us seem extremely unwilling to ponder. e.g. one idea, which seems to sound to most people to be really bad, would be to implement what we already kinda do as humans, and assign greater weight to people based on their community-specific karma. This would be horrible for new people joining, but if someone has been posting half of a community's content but then ten new people join, not posting anything at all but instead harassing the existing users and downvoting everything they see that does not match what they want, then those votes should count as "lesser" than the pillars of the community whose votes should count for "more". New people can always start new communities of their own - ofc that gets back to the "discoverability" issue - but it would virtually eliminate some of the less-organized "noise" trends that so often pollute social media streams, similar to how anti-cheating or captcha devices work, as in if they can do as well as a human who knows the material, then that's arguably more of a success more than it is a failure? :-P
But it would also come at a severe cost, of tying together a community's content to its content creators. And yet... is that such a bad thing? It essentially distributes power from mods to the users, but not all users and rather those who contribute the most. But maybe this idea really is a horrible one - in which case, again, we would need to make a better one, somehow.
I'm surprised that you deduce from that article that echo chambers are a good thing or "work". If you're here purely for entertainment and funny memes instead of discourse, then that's fine. But you can honestly do that better on reddit, more niche communities as well.
And you seem to be advocating that everyone should defederate or block all three major socialist instances...
And that is what I meant, Lemmy has already failed. Because instead of seeing the actual enemy, the very real rise of fascism, nationalism and escalating war and genocide, they focus their aggression on the mythological tankie. Absolutely unwilling to tolerate any dissenting opinion outside the mainstream.
I can understand that people get a severe culture shock from the dirtbag left from chap traphouse because they are not well behaved, and there are boneheads in every movement, but even fucking lemmy.ml?
Nothing is ever so black and white or night and day as to be perfectly separable into binary categories - e.g. it tends to get dark at night, but a light sensor or timer could be confused by a moonlit night being brighter than a cloudy day, or like someone or an animal walking in front of the former and thus casting a localized shadow even on a fairly bright day.
Yes obviously echo chambers "work", or else they would not exist. They are imperfect solutions to some of the real problems that people face. Perhaps we can come up with better solutions, which will require even more work, not because they are binary="bad", but rather bc despite working to solve some problems (kicking out trolls reduces the effectiveness of their campaigns of harassment tactics), they do not work well for other issues, namely they leave someone vulnerable to be misled into believing whatever the owner/admin/mod chooses to feed their sheeple.
And make no mistake: similar to hexbear.net and Lemmygrad.ml, Lemmy.ml is also very much of an echo chamber, as too is Lemmy.world. Though also the Lemmy code being offered to the whole world free of charge is quite friendly - both are true at the same time.:-)
Also true is that Lemmy.world blocking some of the worst behavior present on the Fediverse is helpful, even while that happens at the expense of it being an echo chamber. At some point, if 1+1=2 but some people disagree and say that it =3, and I mean VEHEMENTLY - and more to the point abuse the power control systems like anonymous downvotes on EVERYTHING that someone posts regardless of its own content - then yes, such people need to be banned. Not bc of their toxic beliefs, but due to their abusive actions. That much isn't even evidence of an "echo chamber" effect - that's just mandatory keeping a community alive rather than allowing all the members to be harassed and thus everyone quits.
The real problem, afaik, comes from there being far too few volunteers to do all the necessary work, hence those that do step up tend to be power hungry dictators. And yes, again, Lemmy.ml admins are known for exactly this - don't pretend that everyone else is an echo chamber but they somehow are not.
Though personally the reason I blocked it is bc the users there, I guess bc they get used to talking only inside of their echo chamber provided to them, are far less well-behaved than the average across the Fediverse. I was able to delete so very many individual user blocks that I had made previously to blocking the entire instance, plus new people that now I don't have to have the displeasure of getting to know them first before not having to see them anymore. Me refusing to listen CONSTANTLY to "b-b-but 1+1=3", without my consent... okay call my solution an "echo chamber" if you like, but it's just not fun or worthwhile (and frankly, it's not an echo chamber, not quite, bc I discuss plenty of things that I do not agree with, with people who are polite:-).
Not all "opinions" are equally thought out or valid. And then yeah there's agitprop too but I've been ignoring the intentional stuff in order to focus on useful idiots who simply don't know themselves even what they are saying, but ofc agitprop would be an even more extreme version. Anyway, it's a personal decision not a defederation - I'm not making any decisions for anyone else, just stating a preference, and sharing that thought and yes advocating for others to know that they can similarly enact their preferences, even if theirs happen to differ from mine:-). e.g., perhaps they'll create an account on Lemmy.ml - that is their right and I would not dream of trying to stop anyone from such, though also I demand to be free myself to enact my own freedom of choices.:-)
Post from 13 years ago, basically agreeing that everyone ignored the "rule" and used upvote/downvote as glorified agree/disagree buttons:
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/s/HAxw7Z9PE4
Your link directly contradicts that "everybody... always..." thought this since there is discussion about it. My point is that it's an attitude problem and the aspiration to do better has an effect. And this had an effect and that has changed.
I considered editing my post to say the vast majority instead of everybody, but I was hoping you weren't going to be that pedantic. It was very clear that 13 years ago, reddit was already having the argument because it was so pervasive that all the purists were upset about it.
Yeah, no, "downvote is jot a disagree button" has always been aspirational on reddit.
I would advocate for defederation based on idiotic politics but calling tankies socialist is disingenuous. Since when is genocide denial and or worship is an acceptable behavior?
The problem is that the mainstream is simply declaring historical events one way and any other dissenting viewpoint or evidence is suppressed. And there IS evidence.
The fascists (and Putin's propaganda trolls) have been successful in disruption any dialogue between people from the actual left: socialists. Not the neoliberal "democrats".
And now you do their work for them: You censor the socialists (marxist-leninist, maoists) because some "dirtbag left" troll once was mean to someone. You probably can't even link to an example of what you accuse entire group of. But this tankie slur gets repeated and amplified more and more. People simply call you tankie, downvote and everyone piles on without thinking.
The problem is that disinformation and post-truth doublethink on the so called "left" (=neoliberals) is almost indistinguishable from MAGA like OP.
If you check out lemmy from an instance that hasn't defederated from the socialist instances you'll see that basically half of lemmy activity is invisible - the socialist half. The result is rather predictable.
https://lemmy.ml/comment/13653122
here is an example of how these "socialists" behave check modlog for the actual convo.
Doesn't look like anything to me (lol)
He didn't deny the ills and the repression in the USSR but showed with sources that there were significant economic upsides. He states that Russia isn't communist or socialist any more. At no point does he deny Russia's invasion is illegal. He at no point denies genocide.
So what does make him a tankie? That he has a different analysis of the history about how this war came to be? Which wasn't even the topic of discussion! You can argue about the quality of the sources or survey - but you were already ready to call him an odious tankie and shitpost.
People equate anyone socialist or antiwar or anti US empire with being a tankie and putin apologist. Which leads to the wholesale censoring and defederation.
I do agree that mods are WAY too ban-happy on lemmy.
Arguably neither that post nor the political discussion belongs in that community.
genocide denial spotted again...
these comments don't get removed on lemmy.ml but counter points do...
You make no counter points just baseless and heinous accusations.
Sure buddy
Then you wonder why people scoff at this sort of "socialism"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor