Will Manidis is the CEO of AI-driven healthcare startup ScienceIO
To be fair it was bots that voted them to the front page.
Anyone who did any kind of modding on Reddit could see the majority of posts and comments where mostly bots.
Bots competitions for upvotes/views and clicks.
Reddit’s been like that since ~2018
(Already said this before, but let me reiterate:)
Typical AITA post:
Title: AITAH for calling out my [Friend/Husband/Wife/Mom/Dad/Son/Daughter/X-In-Law] after [He/She] did [Undeniably something outrageous that anyone with an IQ above 80 should know its unacceptable to do]?
Body of post:
[5-15 paragraph infodumping that no sane person would read]
I told my friend this and they said I’m an asshole. AITAH?
Comments:
Comment 1: NTA, you are abosolutely right, you should [Divorce/Go No-Contact/Disown/Unfriend, the person] IMMEDIATELY. Don’t walk away, RUNNN!!!
Comment 2: NTA, call the police! That’s totally unacceptable!
And sometimes you get someone calling out OP… 3: Wait, didn’t OP also claim to be [Totally different age and gender and race] a few months ago? Heres the post: [Link]
🙄 C’mon, who even think any of this is real…
Way too many…
I was born before the Internet. The Internet is always lumped into the “entertainment” part of my brain. A lot of people that have grown up knowing only the Internet think the Internet is much more “real”. It’s a problem.
I’ve come up with a system to categorize reality in different ways:
Category 1: Thoughts inside my brain formed by logics
Category 2: Things I can directly observe via vision, hearing, or other direct sensory input
Category 3: IRL Other people’s words, stories, anecdotes, in face to face conversations
Category 4: Acredited News Media, Television, Newspaper, Radio (Including Amateur Radio Conversations), Telegrams, etc…
Category 5: The General Internet
The higher the category number, means the more distant that information is, and therefore more suspicious I am.
I mean like, if a user on Reddit (or any internet fourm or social media for that matter) told me X is a valid treatment for X disease without like real evidence, I’m gonna laugh in their face (well not their face, since its a forum, but you get the idea).
I would recommend switching categories one and two. Sometimes our thoughts are fucked.
I genuinely miss the 90s. I mean, yeah, early forms of internet and computers existed, but not everyone had a camera, and not everyone got absolutely bukkaked with disinformation. Not that I think everything is bad about the tech in of itself, but how we use it nowadays is just so exhausting.
Man, sometimes when I finish grabbing something I needed from Reddit, I hit the frontpage (always logged out) just out of morbid curiosity.
Every single time that r/AmIOverreacting sub is there with the most obvious “no, you’re not” situation ever.
I never once seen that sub show up before the exodus. AI or not, I refuse to believe any frontpage posts from that sub are anything other than made up bullshit.
I’m thinking of pulling the plug on Reddit (at least for a while). My tipping point has become how the “drone” story is becoming popular. At first it was intriguing and mysterious (the airport shutdowns and reports of large vehicles at low levels was fascinating), but I’m getting the vibe it’s a misinformation campaign to distract the US from how we are about to be changed.
I was actually permabanned in the “News” sub for an innocuous comment. All it was is that I noted the federal authorities are likely correct for saying most of the reports of “UFOs” are likely airplanes and manmade drones, and to play devil’s advocate I mentioned there were likely legitimate reports of UAPs, but since the majority were probably mistaken planes the Federal agencies’ reactions were technically truthful.
Lemmy is not safe either.
there isnt so much incentive. No advertisement. Upvote counters behave weirdly in the fediverse (from what i can see).
No advertisement
You don’t think that commercial products can’t get good (or bad) coverage in a place like this? In any discussion of hardware, software (including, for example, video games), cars, books, movies, television, etc., there’s plenty of profit motive behind getting people interested in things.
There are already popular and unpopular things here. Some of those things are pretty far removed from a direct profit motive (Linux, Star Trek memes, beans). But some are directly related to commercial products being sold now (current video games and the hardware to run them, specific types of devices from routers to CPUs to televisions to bicycles or even cars and trucks, movies, books, etc.).
Not to mention the political motivations to influence on politics, economics, foreign affairs, etc. There’s lots of money behind trying to convince people of things.
As soon as a thread pops up in a search engine it’s fair game for the bots to find it, and for that platform to be targeted by humans who unleash bots onto that platform. Lemmy/Mastodon aren’t too obscure to notice.
There are no virtual points to earn on Lemmy. So hopefully it will resist the enshitification for while.
Same reason why people play cookie clicker, watch the useless number go up.
Also, some subs are downright hostile to people with low karma.
Some subreddits require a minimum karma score for posting. And it gets less likely to get shadow banned the more karma you have.
This is the whole reason that I discovered and came to Lemmy. Reddit is literally 90% bots, from the posts, to the filtering, to the censoring, to outright banning. It’s a mess.
Or getting this shit after you comment somewhere:
“Excuse me but could you please send a direct message to our admins to verify your account before placing a comment? Everyone has to do it.”
I replied “go fuck yourself” and they banned me instantly and I never even submitted anything lmao.
