Dead internet here we come!
Makes me miss the wild west days of the internet. Everything felt more… human. Now it feels like a soulless corporate husk. It’s wild that covid babies won’t know what those days were like.
wild west days of the internet
What age would that be? The time around 2014? 2010? 1990?
Agreed, but Lemmy feels like the old Internet for the most part. I suspect that 90% ish of comments here are actual humans. The remaining 10% is pushing some kind of agenda.
I agree. There’s also a pervasive feeling that lemmy is unaffected by manipulation and misinformation.
If Lemmy continues to grow sooner or later it will become a large enough target for manipulation, and I wonder how federation will fare at that time.
Idk, hexbear content comes up in my feed and I feel that’s all manipulation and misinformation
Alright. I been afraid to ask for fear of getting banned from other communities hosted on their instance, but what is the deal with hexbear? The chat community seems like satire, but it gives off the same kind of vibes as the_donald, just far-left instead of far right. Like, I consider myself a lefty, but their community just seems self-destructive and toxic. Maybe that’s the point, though? Honestly unsure, and afraid to ask on their instance cuz I don’t wanna get accused of “just asking questions” and banned.
It really does feel like the_donald doesn’t it? I have no idea what they’re about. They claim to far left but when you look at what they’re actually saying it’s all hate for any position on the left. Even the word “left” is a dirty word there. They’re probably trolls trying to muddy the water. Maybe it’s some astroturfing or a space to experiment and generate new misinformation content. Idk, it sucks though, it feels all so toxic.
It’s a bunch lonely people who got hypnotized by a podcast and now that podcast informs all their opinions.
That’s why I’m glad, that my instance defederated from those. I saw some of that content from another instance and I don’t miss it.
Yeah, I feel the same, but I don’t really know enough about it to make that assertion.
Lemmy is too polite for that. Thank gawd.
Definitely more than 10%. The only really unbiased info I’m finding here is related to obscure coding stuff, or Linux tips.
Reddit has a lot of shills, but that’s their business model and they guard access cuz they want to get paid. Lemmy has no moat, and no filter outside of individual mods
For me, it was AIM chatrooms and ebaums forums, maybe the super early days of Skype (before being sold to Microsoft obviously). Shit did feel more real, and while content maybe didn’t come out at the same frequency, and there sure was shit, you just knew you were talking about it with other people. Made some good friends back then, would’ve been cool to stay in touch, but 20+ years is a long time.
You’re right in that it will never be like it was, but there are still fringes and niche communities that have that human feel. The thing is they’re much less engaging without algorithms and UX driving engagement, we’re not drawn to them in the same way.
Nostalgia fallacy
People are certainly susceptible to Rosy Retrospection, but let’s not forget that 2023’s word of the year was enshittification for a reason!
A two word rebuttal naming the argument type someone is using, does not constitute a valid argument.
Yes it does.
Three does
Got em
Check out https://wiby.me/
The Internet gained steam through hobbyists and is now that corporate shell as described. In my opinion it absolutely was a better place 25 years ago. Today the internet is filled with social engineering everyone’s trying to influence something and it’s terrible.
The Internet started as this kinda long-haired hippy fella who thought it would be great if everyone could share knowledge and have conversations with everyone else regardless of where they are geographically. Then the corpos made him cut his hair, put on a suit and tie and get a damn job! And 25 years later, he’s a yuppie corpo slave. I want my hippy back!
“At least…”
I feel like the 15% number is very, very low.
According to backlink.com there is 265,500,000 active users per week so 15% of those weekly users means there is 39,825,000 corporate whores per week. To have the corporate whores filled with real people you would need the entire population of the following cities to even come close:
New York, NY 8,258,035
Los Angeles, CA 3,820,914
Chicago, IL 2,664,452
Houston, TX 2,314,157
Phoenix, AZ 1,650,070
Philadelphia, PA 1,550,542
San Antonio TX 1,495,295
San Diego, CA 1,388,320
Dallas, TX 1,302,868
Jacksonville, FL 985,843
Austin, TX 979,882
Fort Worth, TX 978,468
San Jose, CA 969,655
Columbus, OH 913,175
Charlotte, NC 911,311
Indianapolis, IN 879,293
San Francisco, CA 808,988
Seattle, WA 755,078
Denver, CO 716,577
Oklahoma City, OK 702,767
Nashville, TN 687,788
Washington, DC 678,972
El Paso, TX 678,958
Las Vegas, NV 660,929
Boston, MA 653,833
Detroit, MI 633,218
Portland, OR 630,498
Louisville, KY 622,981
Memphis, TN 618,639
15% of content can easily come from under 1% of users.
Lol I shit the bed. Totally read 15% of users.
I have like 30 reddit accounts and I’m just trolling not-for-profit, so… maybe ~1,000,000? Seems legit
Yeah as I stated in the other reply I totally shit the bed and misread/mistook content as users. My b.
those are some low numbers. between corporate, state, and anonymous shills and trolls, I wholly believe at least 50% of all reddit content is paid for or manipulative for agenda based groups. the sheer number of repetitve posts with repetitve comments constantly being on the front page is pure propaganda. Of course I rmemebr back in the old days when the reddit feed was in (almost) real time where you couldliterally wait every 10 minutes and refresh for an almost completely new front page. Now it’s all about repetivie agendas and narratives operating in cycles to manipulate public opinions. the same lame post will sit on the front page for entire days.
I’d say there is a huge amount of bots, then the smart bots, then the actual shills. The smarter ones run complex operations and are able to use their own power to self propel their own stories. And there are a lot of similar ‘power users’ who are not wholly paid for by someone but would do work for the highest bidder. I’d bet that yes, 50% of what’s on the front page of major things is reputation management or Hail Corporate stuff, then I’d wager the mostly less popular stuff is actual people, with a ton of bad posts from all sides at the low popularity
Uh, this post is a bummer and I don’t even know if I actually believe the premise… Whatever I guess, lett’s all actually just get out of here and go get some Sprite® brand family products, you guys.
But 7up™ is made with natural ingredients, less sugar and is more limey!
My family prefers Brawndo. It has what plants crave.
Only 15% 🤨
at least
Uh, no, not “only”
“Only at least 15%”
As in one could expect the study to yield a higher low bound.
Up to 15% or more.
A good chunk of the rest is morons parroting them.
Capitalism consumes everything.
Doesn’t communism consume everything too?
No. The goal of capitalism is to turn all things into commodities to be bought and sold. It has the growth pattern of cancer. Communism is a moneyless, stateless, classless society where would be free to focus on human-centred objectives like feeding and housing all people, making our environment sustainable, pursuing scientific and academic goals without need for a profit to be generated just for the sake of endless commodification.
That is naive. People will still fight for power and exploit others to get it.
That is cynical. Been hearing this all my life as an excuse for why we can’t have nice things. If you don’t try, you don’t get.
Well, while Marx does call for a “winnowing of the State” after the workers seize the means, a problem we saw, in countries such as the USSR, once some of these revolutionaries got their hands on the levers of power, they found they rather liked it, and would not have let go willingly.
I maintain that the issue is that they keep trying to have someone like a president. That doesn’t work. You need a council that has executive power, that way if one person starts getting corrupted, they can be winnowed out. If you really want it to work, you need to outlaw political parties from day one, and require that no one that wants to hold political office is eligible to do so.
So, more like a sortition system, like how most Western courts select people for jury duty. Now that I think about it, it probably could work. We have wonders of technology that were once the realm of science fiction. These technologies could be leveraged positively in a communist system, I believe. AI in particular could solve things like the Numbers Problem. In a moneyless society, resources are allocated according to what is most necessary. I once watched a video where a problem was asked of the viewer. The scenario is as follows:
You are now the leader of a communist country. All markets and prices and money have been abolished. You want to build a train between City A and City B. There is a mountain between the two cities. You have two options. Option 1: Build a tunnel through the mountain, and Option 2: Build the track around the mountain.
1 will require less steel, but will take more manpower, as you will need more engineers to design and construct the tunnel.
Option 2 will require less manpower, but far more steel. That steel may be needed for other things, like appliances, medical equipment, homes and hospitals.
So, how do you prioritize resources? How do you know what your fellow citizens value more as a society?
You could do a survey, but then you run into the Numbers Problem. Your country has a lot of people. That’s a lot of survey responses. You’ll need nearly all of the available manpower in your country to sort them all. But with AI, that might not be necessary. The algorithm could collect all the responses and then output solutions to resource allocation based on those responses. To do this would require a massive surveillance network, though. People would no longer have much in the way of privacy.
I was under the impression that the nation state should be dissolved and everyone forms communes that reflect their values.
Direct democracy can work way better with smaller communities.
The problem is, you would need a large federation of these communes to band together to defeat a hostile nation state level threat.
The federation! Oh shit
The Soviet Union threatened my parents and grandparents lives. My country did try it, we decided against it. All the issues that capitalism has, communism still has. Add centralized power, and human exploitation is worse. Communism will not solve your problems.
Yeah, only privileged people from Western countries who never knew struggle dream about communism. No one who went through communism will ever support that shit.
It had some of the same problems but not all of them. It had universal healthcare, better rights for women, faster increase of education and literacy, less homelessness, less problems with religion interfering with politics, or companies buying politicians, etc.
It also had some new problems we didn’t have like lack of focus on small commodities or suppression of religion, but that’s not fixable or required for communism, it’s just a focus they had specifically. It also had of the same problems we have just from being human, like anti-LGBTQ attitudes, racism against certain groups, bureaucrats, and wars. But communism’s implementation changes between countries, none of those problems are necessary, it’s just stuff that has to be learned from. For example, Cuba is communist but has made great strides towards fixing LGBTQ and racist attitudes, and has eased up on religion. China is communist but has a bigger focus on small manufacturing and as a result has lots of small commodities.
Imagine if we abandoned democracy the first time it “failed” in Greece thousands of years ago or the republic in Rome. I don’t doubt that you have some relatives that suffered, but by comparison, the US and it’s capitalist allies destabilized basically all of South America and Africa. While most people who were alive in the former Soviet block would prefer to go back to when it existed because it caused a huge economic disaster when they sold the countries off for parts and privatized everything for the oligarchs.
The important part is that it’s a system not focused on things like GDP, growth, or money made by corporations to determine success, but the happiness and well-being of all the humans as a collective. Just focusing on that would go a long way, no matter which implementation we used (but imo it probably has to be an implementation of socialism or communism, because capitalism can’t imagine a society without those money and growth metrics).
We have universal healthcare and human rights everywhere in Europe. But we don’t have authoritarian regimes which kill millions for ideology. Fuck communism!
You can still bribe leaders in a communist system. Woman amd healthcare exist in lots of capalist systems.
While most people who were alive in the former Soviet block would prefer to go back to when it existed because it caused a huge economic disaster when they sold the countries off for parts and privatized everything for the oligarchs
Not even close to most. Make friends in Europe.
The important part is that it’s a system not focused on things like GDP, growth, or money made by corporations to determine success, but the happiness and well-being of all the humans as a collective
Don’t I have the power over my happiness in capitalism because I can work towards higher wealth extraction to achieve my own goals?.
This is what people don’t seem to get. Human nature is when things are bad we band together, when things are good, we compete against each other. Capitalism leverages the latter while communism just tries to ignore that it exists.
Capitalism certainly has its flaws, but it’s a far better starting point.
We tried many times, millions were killed each time.
I meant try for utopia. What you refer to isn’t that.
It is exactly that. Otherwise Marx wouldn’t praise the Taiping massacre, which led to tens of millions of deaths.
No shit. That’s why it’s a constant ongoing effort to build communism. The current system is leading us to certain annihilation.
Why wouldn’t communism lead to cancer like growth? Wouldn’t political leaders be incentivized by the masses for never ending quality of life improvements?
Money is not the problem, it’s people. If replace the system, nothing changes. If we want sustainability, that needs to be desired by the masses, and that is achievable without communism.
Because once you reach a certain level, growth isn’t required, you just divide the resources you have to give everyone a happy life. People don’t need infinite money to be happy, but they do a need a minimum amount, studies have shown that. Capitalism denies that minimum amount to a lot of people because of its focus on accumulating and concentrating that wealth.
Who decides when growth isn’t required?
“People” are not the problem. That’s Malthusian garbage. Capitalism is the problem.
Human beings use complex language and are capable of learning and developing culture.
Capitalism is a system that teaches and enforces greed, competition and exploitation. Capitalism is a system that demands infinite growth for the sake of growth. It’s nonsensical, and obvious that such a system leads to over-exploitation and collapse. We are currently the way we are because we’ve been forced to under this system.
We are capable of change, and learning to build communities and societies based on mutual aid, cooperation, and living in harmony with the world we live in.
If we start to build such communities we will learn to cooperate just as the capitalist system has taught us to be greedy and exploit each other for fear of ending up without the means to house and feed ourselves.
Why wouldn’t communism lead to cancer like growth? Because the objective isn’t endless expansion to make some imaginary line go up and hand over all the wealth to a small number of people. It’s to manage our world based on good science and achieving objectives that lead to a sustainable world in which all people’s basic needs are met.
There are countless ways of building communism, and all of them require constant work. And yes it’s true that if implemented in an authoritarian manner it would lead to a bad outcome (still not as bad as our certain extinction under any capitalist system). Anarchism (and there are many schools of thought within anarchism) gives us many tools to build communism in a libertarian manner where we keep each other in check, ensuring that no one person gains power over others.
Look at Rojava, revolutionary Catalonia, the Ukrainian Free Territory, the Shinmin Autonomous Region. These societies can work, expanded, and built upon if given half a chance.
No, communism is an authoritarian regime fuelled by a never ending genocide. Because there are always enemies of communism and they all must be killed.
Utopias don’t exist and never will, that’s why Marxism, and by extension communism, is such a colossal failure.
- Just because reaching a true utopia is not possible, it doesn’t mean we should settle for an economic system that is literally destroying the planet.
- Despite what both conservatives and tankies want everyone to believe, marxism and comunism are not the same thing. All marxists are communist, but not all forms of comunism are marxist, there’s also anarchism, democratic confederalism and libertarian socialism.
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If you have something better than suggest it, otherwise regulated capitalism is the best economic system we have. Marxism is as shitty as Fascism, it’s not an alternative.
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Wtf are you talking about? Communism is literally a Marxist idea. It is the utopia end zone that Marx envisioned for his ideology. Listing off a bunching of other fantasy based ideologies doesn’t give this utopia any more credibility. It’ll never happen. There’s a reason why all the attempts at communism lead to collapse or tyranny.
Ok, boomer.
Truth hurts
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No, communism kills everyone. That’s a big difference.
Yes, which is why a delicate mixture of both is best because they spend their efforts fighting each other rather than fighting your freedom.
Sounds like capitalism.
Marxist subscribe to such a shitty ideology that they literally cannot defend it with the most brain dead whataboutisms known to man.
Why is Medium conflating trolls and shills?
People who are paid propagandists are shills, not trolls.
Agreed. Trolls don’t conceal themselves
Nice, glad to see concise and clear counterpoints!
You got me. Sometimes revanced not having ads isn’t a good thing
True. For example I’m here for pleasure not for business.
People are literally defenceless vs propaganda. Me too. It takes extraordinary effort to decipher the fake from true and whether the true is a full truth or some small piece on silver platter.
At this point I gave up and I just try to find out motives of every… player and align myself with these that best serve my interests.
I don’t read much news because it’s all leftist or alt right propaganda drivel and while I align myself with the left because it serves my interests the best I won’t waste my time listening to their whatever narrative they crafted last week…
Just observe their actions and try to find out the motives and then ask if their motives align with yours. Their words or narrative are worthless drivel at this point, mostly.
Alt right drivel however is especially toxic and insulting but that is specifically done to evoke emotions. Anti gay propaganda crafted by closeted bisexual priests that want a piece from the table. It’s a bit like these email scammers who filter out less naive by making lots of grammar errors on purpose. You are supposed to be enraged either way.
Have you ever seen Adam Curtis’s “Century of the Self”? Super long, but it goes on about how marketing and politics intertwined.
I think it’s on YouTube for free
One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that in terms of marketing, reddit has a disproportionately high level of return in interaction relative to its size, while Twitter has traditionally had a low level of return relative to its size.
For some reason, comments on reddit has always been viewed as more trustworthy relative to other social media platform, despite reddit or’s general reputation for being confidently incorrect on many subjects.
There are certain people whose entire career was made by their reddit posts, yet, it was always odd to me that reddit never managed to effectively capitalize on this other than making their platform worse with every update.
Testing out this theory has been interesting.
Reddit’s strategy is genuinely brain dead. Just think of the shit they’ve been up to:
- Jacking up API prices to unreasonable levels and killing off third party apps that brought millions of users on to your platform
- Continuously make the UI shittier and shittier to the point where it’s unusable
- Do the same with the app
- Kill off old Reddit which is the sole reason millions of users still use the site
- Add awards and expand the feature to basically become paid reaction emojis
- Remove awards even though they were one of the biggest revenue streams
- Announce it was a mistake and add the awards again
- Add avatars that nobody asked for and make some of them paid
- Add a premium subscription that does nothing and do absolutely nothing to improve it
- Add a bunch of useless features that nobody uses like Reddit live
Truly the works of geniuses.
Old Reddit still works.
For now, but they’ve been chipping away at it slowly but surely.
I worked at startups and I’m not going to deny that I was absolutely horking my company as a solution for years on Reddit. Especially with niche products.
This was from 2014-2018, and then I left startups and worked in corps.
When Google has plans to slurp reddit comments, I bet I could gamify reddit even more.
Remember the_donald started out as a meme sub that got taken over? I fell victim to astroturfing that election season. Thankfully it has made me more skeptical about online interactions now.
I remember writing a comment about invasive advertising by Instagram. Just shared some anecdotes about how a few extremely specific conversation topics soon became the topic for the ads I was seeing on Instagram, and pointed out that if they were in fact using background conversation to target ads, it would be extremely easy to automate with the voice recognition technology available at the time, so why would they ignore the opportunity if targeted ads are their main source of revenue?
It became one of my most down voted comments at the time, and I had about twice as many replies as downvotes, claiming all kinds of wild or easily disproven shit to disprove the idea that Instagram used such tactics. Was very fishy
And remember, if THEY have thousands of bots that each ‘think independently’ but still end up downvoting your post en masse, then that’s totally fine. But if YOU try to upvote your post with one of your alts so it doesn’t get buried, that’s bannable.
To be fair mods did try to take action against that and they did have tools. How well they worked is not something I will pretend to even guess at.
And now imagine that companies paid reddit money to be enabled to train their AI on them…
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I’m glad I got caught up in the great exodus when they fucked over the 3rd party app devs. I’d read Reddit with Apollo, and it was mostly passive consumption of the posts and discussions being thrown out there by the faceless masses.
Here, it feels more like having actual discussions with real people, and I started actively participating right away. (Granted, this place isn’t impervious to bots and trolls, but for now it’s a smaller target at least)
I actually was still using RIF till the end. Took almost a month break and started using Sync for Lemmy the day it came out.
I mean Lemmy is also a bit of a cesspool at times, but it’s home now at least.
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Why would Lemmy be immune?
That’s alarmingly low - it suggests that it doesn’t take much for any given influencing campaign. If there are fifteen discrete such campaigns in play, that’s just 1/100 of everyone. Now imagine that there’s tens of such campaigns, and the numbers look even more reasonable. Also, it’s probably cost-effective at this scale since this has been with us a while, which is terrifying.
What I want to know is: what percentage are human users that ate the
onionmetaphorical tequila worm1 and are now parroting these trolls?1. Follow me here: drink a bottle and eat the worm inside. You’re not thinking straight and did something you wouldn’t do if you had your wits about you, or maybe a friend nearby that is thinking clearly. Propaganda has a way of forcing you into a phantasm by emotional manipulation, making it easy to jam all kinds of nonsense into your head. Extending the metaphor, said propaganda also lays out how to defend your worm eating habit as though it’s totally normal to do.
