Lemmy wouldn’t have that problem because we’re all too busy enjoying an ice cold Coca-Cola.
Please drink verification can now.
“McDonald’s!”
Omg the amount of sneaky coke ads I saw on that site was insane
Absolutely disgusting that someone would sell out like that. Not me, my integrity is strong like the legal protection I get from litigatenow.com, where you can sign up for a free consultation today, if you use my referral code #loveads2024
Ha, I’ve discovered your hidden advertising like I discovered the great taste of a crunchy Big Kahuna Burger.
Let’s check out some random customer opinions:
Jules W.: “Mm-hmm! This is a tasty burger!”
Marvin: “Mind-blowing!”
Ad comment in reality:
^453 u/DrJamieSmith34:
Actually fast food isn’t that bad for you. A Big Mac for example has everything you need nutrition wise. Carbs, veggies, protein.
Pepsi, the choice of a new generation.
Dead internet here we come!
Makes me miss the wild west days of the internet. Everything felt more… human. Now it feels like a soulless corporate husk. It’s wild that covid babies won’t know what those days were like.
Agreed, but Lemmy feels like the old Internet for the most part. I suspect that 90% ish of comments here are actual humans. The remaining 10% is pushing some kind of agenda.
I agree. There’s also a pervasive feeling that lemmy is unaffected by manipulation and misinformation.
If Lemmy continues to grow sooner or later it will become a large enough target for manipulation, and I wonder how federation will fare at that time.
Idk, hexbear content comes up in my feed and I feel 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.
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.
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
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.
I’ve said this before, but we also need to be cautious about this on lemmy and devise ways to empower mods and the community to fight back against this, I’m not entirely sure how since it’s a very complex problem
I am convinced this is already happening. One example is the endless new accounts posting ibtimes links.
There are also propoganda websites posted regularly by new accounts (especially sowing disinformation about Russia’s war on Ukraine).
Basically be wary of anything posted where it’s their first post. Often they make accounts and don’t use them for months so they look older.
I also think astroturfing is happening but at lower rate than reddit.
Like you, I have no idea how we can counter this at scale.
The same critical thinking should apply as all other platforms.
A link posted to an article on a company’s public blog published in the last 24hrs? Almost certainly viral marketing.
It might help if a poster’s number of posts and signup date were listed at the top of each post or comment. Would’t be a fix but might help weed out upsprouting autotrolls.
There are a lot of subreddits which routinely award hundreds or thousands of upvotes for repetitive low value posts. … This is a cog in the well-tuned machine of new-accounts being created and matured to look ‘real’ for when they are later used for advertising / manipulation later down the line.
In the early months of a new account, it is easier to spot. Eg. If you see a post on a game subreddit with a title like “Exciting to try this game, any tips get started?”, you might click the profile and see that their entire history is a bunch of low-effort discussion starters. “Name a band from the 80s that everyone has forgotten”; “What’s the most misunderstood concept in maths?”; “What’s the most underrated (movie / band / drug / car / tourist attraction / whatever suits the topic of the subreddit)?”
A heap of threads like that, on a new account with a very generic name (adjective-noun-numbers is a common pattern); posting on a variety of subredits… is highly suspicious. But it gets harder to recognise as the account gets older and has a longer history - at which point it is ready to be sold / used for its next purpose.
Yes, definitely. Perhaps highlighted if it’s one of their first few posts or the account is new.
It’s bloody difficult.
I used to mod on /r/videos years and years back. We had this one guy who was not very active as a mod in the day to day stuff, but was respected because he’d basically disappear for a few months and then reappear with a huge post in our modding sub basically going “so these are all spammers/malicious actors, here’s their profiles, the accounts were created in these waves, here’s where they’ve copied existing posts / the identical generic comments and things they use to get around our posting requirements, the targets they’ve been promoting, etc”. Just huge pages of thoroughly researched proof.
This was well before we had huge awareness of situations like Russia manipulating social media - it was usually those viral video places that buy up rights to videos and handle licensing and promotion. It’s why for a long time any licensed videos from places like viralhog etc were outright banned - they were constantly trying to manipulate reddit postings in bad faith, and even trying to socially engineer the mod team in modmail, so any videos that mentioned a licensing deal in the description were automatically banned from posting.
If we didn’t have that one guy spotting the patterns, most of it would have gotten by easily. Unfortunately he did eventually disappear for good. No clue what happened to him, hope he just cut out social media or something. But with the spamming and astroturfing stuff… Even after fighting it for years I can’t tell you what to do to counter it besides “have more of that guy”.
Very interesting
Most, if not all game reddits, product reddits, and company reddits are secretly or openly controlled by their respective corpos. Keeping communities as third party forums is a must have IMO.
I agree, this is a very complex issue. As a community we should come together and brainstorm ideas while quenching our thirst with a nice can of Diet Pepsi, the zero-sugar alternative to being thirsty!
Capitalism consumes everything.
Doesn’t communism consume everything too?
No. The goal of capitalism is to turn all things into commodities to be bought and sold. It has the growth pattern of cancer. Communism is a moneyless, stateless, classless society where would be free to focus on human-centred objectives like feeding and housing all people, making our environment sustainable, pursuing scientific and academic goals without need for a profit to be generated just for the sake of endless commodification.
That is naive. People will still fight for power and exploit others to get it.
That is cynical. Been hearing this all my life as an excuse for why we can’t have nice things. If you don’t try, you don’t get.
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.
-
If you have something better than suggest it, otherwise regulated capitalism is the best economic system we have. Marxism is as shitty as Fascism, it’s not an alternative.
-
Wtf are you talking about? Communism is literally a Marxist idea. It is the utopia end zone that Marx envisioned for his ideology. Listing off a bunching of other fantasy based ideologies doesn’t give this utopia any more credibility. It’ll never happen. There’s a reason why all the attempts at communism lead to collapse or tyranny.
Ok, boomer.
Truth hurts
-
No, communism kills everyone. That’s a big difference.
Yes, which is why a delicate mixture of both is best because they spend their efforts fighting each other rather than fighting your freedom.
Sounds like capitalism.
Marxist subscribe to such a shitty ideology that they literally cannot defend it with the most brain dead whataboutisms known to man.
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.
The director of marketing at my company just got out of a meeting with reddit and is super hyped at funneling all our Facebook and Twitter dollars into reddit instead. I didn’t have the heart to tell him he’s five years too late.
Is fb or twitter really any more useful for ads though?
I scoped out reddit as a marketer for a few companies over the years. It’s just a standard brand awareness piece. Unless their targeting has got better, I recall you had to dump a minimum of $10k/month and your ad just “got shown” to whomever
I assume they let you target by subreddit and user interest now, but it still can’t be that accurate
lol. That’s funny as hell. Might as well shift some money to it for a different market penetration but not all of it
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.
Not surprising at all.
In other news, GTA Online is awesome! I am definitely not a plant or anything like that, go check out GTA Online!
Or something like that.
lol
I remember when /r/HailCorporate was a trending sub and then it just sort of got strangled to death.
Also remember the periodic waves of “Hillary is bae! Mother of dragons! Yas Queen!” and “I love Mayor Pete” and “KHive ftw!” and even a smattering of Mitt Romney fanboi-ism on /r/politics, as their campaigns rose and fell.
Nevermind the absolutely sycophantic corporate ghoul AMAs. Bill Gates, Ann Coulter, and Don Lemon all leap to mind. Just the absolute worst moderation imaginable for these guys. Then there was the Elon Musk AMA. Jesus fucking Christ.
oh yah, I remember the absolute torrent of crypto shills that started spamming the place when crypto shill posts from other subs started getting posted there.
They were proper angry that they got called out.
Those of us who noticed when HailCorporate first got shadowbanned could see that particular train a coming. Reddit was always going to strangle its own content to death in order to make it more advertiser friendly. I’m honestly surprised it took as long as it did.
I remember one specific account that spammed everything pro Tulsi into the politics subreddit. It was glaringly obvious that they were paid.
Just checked on him, 5 months ago he was posting to sports subreddits… which also feels like a red flag.
Is it a possibility that shill accounts are using sports subreddits to obfuscate the fact that they are still accounts? Like “Hey there fellow citizens, I’m totally a normal poster and a red blooded American who really likes sports!”.
The only subreddit I still check is /r/cfb because it’s by far the best college football specific part of the internet and my Fanactus account seems to have been deleted. I’m not disclosing what my old account was but I was a upper mid level account there for about 7 years, not bragging just framing, it has gotten really fucking shilly in comparison to even last year although itd been happening for a while. It crescendoed with the release of the new college football madden analog, which does make logical sense for why, but there was some hard corporate dick riding. I don’t care for sports video games that don’t involve Mario or have the word Jam in the title so I don’t know if the game is any good but it was obviously paid
Also remember the periodic waves of “Hillary is bae! Mother of dragons! Yas Queen!” and “I love Mayor Pete” and “KHive ftw!” and even a smattering of Mitt Romney fanboi-ism on /r/politics, as their campaigns rose and fell.
Literally no, I was there and I don’t recall that at all.
Perhaps the record was corrected after you left.
Remember to ShareBlue!
My eyes were opened that election.
