The longer you are on lemmy, the more you can step back and see the ebb and flow of manipulative posts in and out of circulation to create rifts between people and create short-lived topics of ‘conversation’ to busy the people here. The general anti-capitalism direction is pandered to singing the tune people think they want to hear and is no different I’m sure to the many bot posts aimed at facebook users to play the tune they also want to hear to manipulate, and get them to come back.
I’m sure facebook, twitter, and the other shitty social sites are far worse but for over a decade, a deep level of warfare has been fought online via manipulation and disinformation and young people are far too easily manipulated by a post because well, obviously a real person wrote it, right? Right? There’s even a picture of their face and everything!
So, I’d like to ask lemmy users to be particularly on guard, both here and any other site they visit with ‘user’ postings on in the future, and to perhaps step back, stop visiting sites, posts, forums, etc outside of your hobbies, and ignore it all. That’s the only way to be immune to the noise and to lead a better life. Whatever that direction is for you. Also, help your friends ignore the noise and help them focus on visiting information about just their hobbies.
Early internet was just information about hobbies and for the betterment of people and furthering knowledge. Let’s take that back.
Disinformation is often a term thrown about when there is some fundamental disagreement. It’s so overused as to be meaningless to talk about actual astroturfing
- It’s not clear exactly what you mean, what are some examples of posts that you think are being made by bots?
- IDK man, there is definitely a problem of misleading and disinformative posts and I will 100% agree with it as a problem, but just abandoning the idea of being able to talk about anything of substance because the disinfo is trying to fuck it up is not the answer, to me. I like being able to talk about politics / anti-capitalism / geopolitics / whatever. I don’t find it “stressful” or the way some people receive it. If they don’t want it presumably they are not subscribed to that stuff, but I really value being able to find out what’s going on in the world and talk with a wide variety and population of people about it.
- The early internet was wild. It was not for hobbies and betterment, it was for ludicrous conspiracy theories, arguments between creationism and evolution, far flung neo-Nazis finally being able to communicate with each other, and snuff videos. That was what made it awesome. I think you are thinking of early Facebook.
Regarding pointing out examples of posts made by bots, that is just a waste of time! No one will know for certain, people will argue, those bots will argue, other bot accounts with the same agenda will argue, people will be manipulated, they will argue, and status quo returns…
By talking about ‘anything of substance’ is being framed by the bot posts, repeatedly, to manipulate. But, take a step back and you’ll realise it really isn’t ‘anything of substance’ but something to distract.
As for the early internet, I think you’re thinking about early pre-banhammer-FBI-raid 4-chan.
No one will know for certain, people will argue, those bots will argue, other bot accounts with the same agenda will argue, people will be manipulated, they will argue, and status quo returns…
Fair enough. I do think this happens. At the same time I don’t see that there’s a lot to be gained by being super sensitive about it, or deciding to freak out and abandon the topic because of some people arguing.
I would say that every so often, I wander into one of the lemmy.world political communities and I have exactly the reaction you are expressing here. It’s just random aggressive people, some of whom I think are deliberately trying to inflame conflict and prejudice, and they drown out anything useful. It’s a waste of time, so I don’t fuck with it. I guess the point that I’m trying to make is that not everything is that way. I would say the vast majority of things I observe on Lemmy are not that way.
Or, they’re not what I would describe that way. You seem like you’re maybe talking about something different, and accusing the conversations I like of being something deliberately designed to waste my time that I should be able to “rise above” or etc. But you also don’t want to give examples, so IDK, not much I can do with that.
So check out this example. I’ll give my take on it:
https://ponder.cat/post/2904223
I think there are some people there who are just there to stir shit. But, I would say the great majority at least of what I was paying attention to is productive. I learned about some propaganda, learned the shape of the media landscape, from some previous interactions, and then in that thread we got to talk about some other issues related to that, and work some things out.
Yeah, if you focus on the idiots exclusively, then your interaction will be unproductive. I do definitely think that yes.
By talking about ‘anything of substance’ is being framed by the bot posts, repeatedly, to manipulate. But, take a step back and you’ll realise it really isn’t ‘anything of substance’ but something to distract.
If you feel strongly enough about this topic to be concerned that people are going to be taken in by it, give some examples. By being vague and evasive about what it is you’re talking about, you make it impossible for anyone to learn about what you’re saying if you have something of value to try to make a point about, and also impossible for them to make counterpoints if they disagree with you. It just all stays in waste-of-time-land. Which is, ironically, exactly the issue you are trying to raise.
If you’re concerned that people will disagree with your categorizations, and that’ll just be so upsetting that you can’t bear the thought of doing it as a result, I feel like this whole issue may be more of a you problem than a Lemmy problem.
As for the early internet, I think you’re thinking about early pre-banhammer-FBI-raid 4-chan.
Not even close. I was talking about Usenet, early BBS culture and anonymous FTP days, then the more modern era of Napster / Slashdot / Rotten.com / the little proliferation of forums and personal sites came after those “old days,” and 4chan was created a little bit after that.
Everyone is going to have different definitions of when “early” is, but “the internet” goes back quite a long way before 4chan. 4chan and Myspace were kind of the first iteration of the massive everyone-goes-to-the-same-place omni-site model that presaged the horrors to come.
I’m just here for the memes :|
Hey everybody, this guy’s having fun
Get him out of here
Maybe I’m naive, but I haven’t seen this besides from spam accounts that are generally quickly closed.
The thing to do is of course to report it when you spot it.Edit.
Quietly to quickly.Gen AI writes posts that can use specific dialects, that you would never be certain/realise. Hence the whole people-thinking-it’s-the-thoughts-of-a-real-person-and-peer-pressure manipulation aspect.
If Gen AI algorithms are having difficulty with it also being used as training data due to the large amounts of it around, you can bet that you’ve read at least a few posts / comments each day written by gen AI.
Could you link some examples?
Lemmy.ml started off as marxist-lenninist site. All sites need to start with a niche and I doubt any future social network will avoid the niche issue.
I think normies are turning off of Lemmy recently, which naturally causes the extremists feel more loud (because the extremists will NEVER leave this site).
Trying to figure out a good social network is like looking for a good hangout in real life. The people who frequent is entirely the picture. It’s hard to compete vs commercial interests like Blue sky or whatever as they pop up though.
Still, Threads, BlueSky and Twitter are all obviously suspect sites that will seed algorithms with their message. Lemmy doesn’t do that. Lemmy has its own issues but it’s very much a pick your poison situation.
Early internet was just information about hobbies and for the betterment of people and furthering knowledge. Let’s take that back.
Nope. After 2010s proved that the internet is the central location for political battles with Wikipedia Blackouts causing major political shifts, Pandoras Box has been opened.
The internet is now the premier location for propaganda and politicalization.
I don’t think it’s as easy as that. The developers hold that resentment. But that doesn’t mean it translates to the users. Also Lemmy as we know it today has be very much shaped by the Reddit exodus. So even if it had been marxist at some point (which I’d argue it always played a minor role), that’s long gone. And I don’t think this is even one of the main issues as of today.
Just to be clear, I’m not accusing lemmy (whoever / whatever that is as a 'thing) of adding messages, but bad actors are doing so to control the short-term narrative for (perhaps, mainly) capitalist reasons.
Kinda like propaganda gone wild. A Cambridge Analytica’s former employee book, mindfuck is a good read.
Nope. After 2010s proved that the internet is the central location for political battles with Wikipedia Blackouts causing major political shifts, Pandoras Box has been opened.
The internet is now the premier location for propaganda and politicalization.
This is only true if people feed the monster.
Ummm. Elon Musk made $100,000,000,000 by making internet propaganda about how his electric cars are better than internal combustion, lies about their capabilities (full self driving), lies about how often they explode and lies about how well his Robots work. And then the propaganda is so strong he becomes Buddy in chief and people think that literally paying Musk another $50Billion is a good idea.
The cats out of the bag. Internet propaganda is too cheap and too effective. Everyone will be doing it if only to counter Elon Musk (let alone make money for themselves like through bullshit crypto coins or whatever).
You or I deciding to ‘not fill the internet with shit’ stops nobody. It’s going to happen given this political climate and the benefits therein.
I’d support that. I mean I’m very okay with the anti-capitalist comments. But I agree that we participate way toi much in the rage-baiting, emotional news articles if the day, generally re-posting all the news and memes we got from the newsfeeds, Facebook and Reddit. That’s all not very original. And not very useful to me either. I’d rather have a genuine conversation. Preferrably about things I like, so hobbies etc.
Fuck if you’re pro capitalist you obviously drank leaded glue instead of the non toxic variant.
I think you’re missing the point of the post. Or maybe the personal insult is the action of a bot to encourage other personal insults against me as a form of manipulation of others to build a group against me?
I don’t think you understand how exploiting it is the only people who support capitalism now are the exploiters.
