I experimented a few times with throwaway accounts and yeah, they’re locking or shadowbanning people just for engaging with politics or social issues. They don’t want humans influencing these topics, they want people to read what the bots are saying without distraction.
Not saying literally everyone there is a bot, but they’re slowly doing a bot-creep.
Which makes it incredibly dangerous. Opium has destroyed empires.
This is just one of the commercial products too, the companies that have their own in-house tech development departments have their own proprietary systems for just creating an entire realm of content at the touch of a button.
Want to reveal some new development to a story that didn’t exist before today? Use your content bots to manufacture a bunch of blogs and journalist tweets and news websites that look exactly like they were made 10 years ago, with links that go to supporting sources. (which you also manufactured with a few keystrokes.)
The internet isn’t just dead, it’s a shambling corpse raised to feed off the living, animated by its undead lich overlords.
Amazingly it appears like a pro left wing website. That is some wonderful camouflage.
This should be making everyone with half a brain freak out right now, even though I know nobody is going to pay attention until it’s too late.
But that website, reddit, is probably the last remaining public spaces that reflects the actual attitudes of the majority of people. (Boring lib shit, but hey better than than facebook or twitter.) So when we’re learning that this site is being hijacked by bots and corporations trying to subtly take over and replace the users so they can “adjust” the nature of popular sentiment, it’s a giant blaring air-horn of alarm that we’re about to see a massive manufactured-consent engine come to life.
People as individuals are amazing creatures, as individuals you can talk to people and make them learn and get them curious.
As a population? As a group? Worthless troglodytes, unevolved pond-scum, slime, oozing shit that seeks the lowest level. This is why we need to have a lot of concern over platforms that purportedly depict average people having average conversations, because as a population, people look to their peers for cues and when everyone is taking cues from a single, artificial entity made to look like millions of real people, we need to start pouring water on some servers somewhere.
Using a VPN to log into reddit can get your account shadowbanned instantly. Just an FYI to those browsing.
What’s worse is it’s infectious. If you log into your main account on a VPN, get shadowbanned and change accounts without clearing your history, changing IP and deleting all your cookies, your next account will also get immediately shadowbanned.
If you argue about politics, shadowban. If you make too many reports, shadowban. If you do anything on reddit that isn’t the most milquetoast, bot-like comments on media and celebrities, you will likely get banned or shadowbanned.
The place is overrun with very convincing AI bots that even go as far as criticizing reddit to look convincing, but a large portion of users aren’t even real anymore, maybe as high as half in some communities by my reckoning.
They don’t want human users anymore. They announced a few years ago they were using reddit as a “test bed” for new AI models, they want a site that millions of people visit every day that looks like a social media site where users can communicate, but they want to be able to control what everyone is saying and discussing with a control panel to influence public sentiment with ease, and it’s already working to fantastic effect.
Edit: most normal, commercial internet users can reset their dynamic IP address simply by unplugging your router for a minute. Also, if you try to register a reddit account with a “throwaway” email, or even many major domains like yahoo or msn, it can start you out shadowbanned permanently. They are looking for any excuse to silence users so their bots can control the popular narrative.
Just remember that evolutionary biology is largely considered quack science, often by evolutionary biologists themselves (at least in terms of how ev-bio is used to write papers and books about how horny men and women act in bars, and why your Tinder profile isn’t working and what it “means” when she texts you a certain way.)
How is my take bad? I didn’t say don’t own what you like, I said people around you become irrational. That’s factual, not a take. You can choose to react any way you want to it.
No faster way to make otherwise normal-seeming people go full-on rabies-mode is to make a public statement about a kind of music you don’t like.
It’s wild how people take that as a personal attack. In every instance, in a public space, if you type out distaste in a music genre someone is going to lose all reason and restraint and come at you swinging fucking viking axes.
I don’t like music in major-key but make an exception for Bad Moon Rising by Creedence Clearwater Revival, who specifically talked about how he made the juxtaposition between upbeat music and lyrics about the apocalypse and doom a deliberate choice and made one of the all-time classic songs.
What the fuck are you talking about and who the fuck are you talking to
He’s acting like Light Yagami from Death Note, not Picard.
Oh in this regard, I blame internet counter-culture not being taken seriously enough in the early 2000’s, those times that we thought all these “ironic nazis” were a fad that would wash out like so many times before, this scene is where people found each other and started creating online movements out of the general, passing angst that everyone feels now and then. Depressed teens finding each other did more to kill Picard than any other media.
When Somethingawful purged their low-effort users and those users went and formed 4-chan that led directly to much of our current cultural norms, it seems to many like a footnote in internet history, but that led to the formation of several fetid fandoms and subcultures that went on to get signal-boosts from foreign powers looking for every opportunity to play both sides of our nation’s potential stress-points. And they did this to great effect, this is where we saw jokes and memes turn into political movements.
I don’t know if we could have done anything at the time, maybe if hosts of popular forums and boards and social media were not paid off immediately by Russian bot farms to let them rampage around, maybe if government stepped in early and nipped this interference and passed some kind of legislation against hate-speech on the internet, maybe we could have saved Picard.
As Gen X, I think I’ve seen all these cycles over and over again, media makes ostensible “role models” that people pattern themselves after, then the pattern changes suddenly as it does and leaves a generation stuck without direction as new role models take the stage and make all the previous adopters resentful of society.
It’s part of the “nothing ever happens” generation desperate to have a narrative to follow. If they’re going to feel disengaged and disconnected from how complicated politics has become in an increasingly complicated world… WELL MIGHT AS WELL DUMB THIS SHIT BACK DOWN, OOHRAH WWE WRESTLEMANIA YEAH BROTHA ACTION
I too grew up in an age of movies like Star Wars fighting an overtly fascist empire, of Indiana Jones killing nazis, of countless kid’s shows and cartoons emphasizing values like being accepting and not judging people by appearances, of shows like Star Trek explaining the complexity of human societies and using aliens to relay messages of understanding and empathy with others, of science and educational shows like everything on PBS… I thought FOR SURE that these lessons being seen by everyone would lead to a brighter future of mutual compassion and understanding between people.
Holy shit was I wrong. People didn’t watch ANY of that shit, and if they did, they didn’t think about it, and certainly didn’t take any lessons from it. A vast majority of media-consumers don’t engage with their entertainment I’ve learned, they just experience it and move on without any attempt at making mental effort. Even the lightest mental effort is too much for most people. I’m literally shocked we have the society we do knowing now exactly how ignorant most people are.
I would much rather see a concerted effort to like not do wars, instead of this overtly obvious attempt to stir the pot.