I just want more people to LEAVE Reddit. To hell with corporate agendas, cowardly moderators, and incompetent admin. The internet needs an open source platform like Reddit where you can voice your opinion, no matter how flawed it may be, without concern you’ll be “banned”…
Second, end users need to display more maturity and stop being so sensitive…a BLOCK resolves 99.99% of ANY. “Moderator” involvement. “****” words is about all they need to “censor” and even that’s questionable. Mods should just focus on actual bots and sub organization not so much the content police, most stuff can be self regulated…
Lemmy, albeit I don’t think the name is good for brand recognition, the functionality is ok, similar, just needs the audience. Even YouTube and Facebook…"community guidelines " …I “offended” the AI,… this is dire times and sadly most are not even aware. Without US these platforms don’t exist. Facebook wouldn’t be Facebook if it weren’t for the USERS so why are you micromanaging them… YouTube videos have to say “unalive” “deleted” “no longer with us” instead of kill murder death… it’s so cringe and I’m so upset that critical thinking, having an opinion, being an adult using “curse” words is problematic… I look forward to Reddit crashing. I look forward to mods crashing as well. They ruined the open space to speak freely… but again the massess go along to get along and they continue to win…
Second, given that the author has hidden this in a paywall–you have to sign up in order to access the article and presumably any links–I’m going to immediately distrust the motives.
Third, Medium is a glorified blogging site; anyone can say anything on it.
The “author” is citing a study. Idk why you’d indict the study because the media that is making you aware of the existence of said study is behind a paywall. Bizarre reasoning.
Hmmm, not necessarily all that bizarre. The title on the Lenny link states that 15% of ALL Reddit content is corporate trolls trying to sway public opinion - now that this gentleperson has kindly provided the link to a non-paywall version, I can see that this is 2 studies, one from 2018 and one from 2020, one of which states that 15% of the top 100 subreddits may have experienced corporate trolls and/or bots posting content at some point, but they don’t say how much.
Huge difference between the title and the substance of the article, they buried the lede in a somewhat clever way. Chances are the author (and editor) are well aware that most of their audience doesn’t have an account, and aren’t going to create an account - therefore, by posting a misleading title (or letting others exaggerate the claims in the title through links on other platforms) they can reach a far larger audience, and sway public opinion more effectively, by burying the actual context behind the paywall.
I mean, I don’t know that that is what’s happening, but it makes a lot of sense and kind of rhymes with the whole point of the article, so yeah - I don’t trust their motives either, and I can definitely see the logic behind distrusting paywalls on principle.
I’m going to immediately distrust the motives.
Additionally, the data is self-reported surveys with questions like “Have you ever been contacted by someone from a company or corporation?” and… yeah? This part shouldn’t be surprising to any platform that allows private messages. And “Have you ever seen someone promoting a product?” and most people are going to either shrug or already have a strong opinion, it’s not very scientific for actual data on the actual traffic from bots and corporate shills, more how the human users feel about the platform.
I would much rather see an independent investigation from a technical point-of-view, which tracks the comments and timing of user comments to determine how many are actually bots just quietly gaining karma with innocuous comments, or how many are just programmed to go to certain subreddits at certain times to push a narrative.
And 80% of Reddit is filled with degenerates of every kind. It’s a total cesspool of excrement.
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.
Y combinator discussion suggests this author posts completely made up garbage:
Lol nice, it’s 404’d now
Probably just an anecdote, but notice more sus medium content recently. Used to be niche Python tutorials.
The advent of ChatGPT has made those obsolete, since ChatGPT is probably trained on all of those.
Side note, it doesn’t always fuck up, but most of the time it’ll give just completely wrong matplot instructions. The recent tattoo post comes to mind.
