Comment on The number of manipulative, disinformation posts on lemmy is too damn high
PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 1 week ago
- 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.
0101100101@programming.dev 1 week ago
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…
PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 1 week ago
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:
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.
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.
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.