Will Manidis is the CEO of AI-driven healthcare startup ScienceIO
(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.
Oh boy, identity mechanics to curb out the last vestiges of privacy.
you could try to cook up some kind of trust chain, without totally abandoning privacy.
Get a government-certified agencies minting master key tied to your id. You only get one, with trust rating tied to it.
With that master key you can generate infinite amount of sub-ids that dont identify you but show your trust rating(fuzzed).
Have a cross-network reporting system that can lower that rating for abuses like botting.
idk Im just spitballing
I wonder where people in the future will get their information from. What trustworthy sources of information are there? If the internet is overrun with bots, then you can’t really trust anything you read there, as it could all be propaganda. What else to do, though, to get your news?
I dunno, part of me is ok with it. It’s clear to me how bad things are going to get. So having certain platforms or spaces with some level of public identity validation seems like it might be ok…
Yeah, a real problem solver would probably be to remove the incentive for someone to do this.
It would probably be far less likely for someone to do that on lemmy, as there is no karma and you dont get paid for upvotes or something. (Still there are incentives, like creating credibility, celebrity accounts, maybe influence public opinion, self-pleasure from seeing upvotes to “your” posts/comments etc., but they arent such potent incetives as directly monetary incetives.)
Wait what. I had been on reddit for years and I had never been aware of this. You get paid for upvotes?
And I thought “karma” was just another word for “upvotes”.
Well since around a year ago they decided to give some direct monetary incentive to farm upvotes and gold, as people weren’t already doing this to sell accounts.
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.
Dead internet theory
In the age of A/B testing and automated engagement, I have to wonder who is really getting played? The people reading the synthetically generated bullshit or the people who think they’re “getting engagement” on a website full of bots and other automated forms of engagement cultivation.
How much of the content creator experience is itself gamed by the website to trick creators into thinking they’re more talented, popular, and well-received than a human audience would allow and should therefore keep churning out new shit for consumption?
It’s ultimately about ad money. They haven’t cared it’s humans or bots either. They keep paying out either way. This predates long before the LLM era. It’s bizarre.
It’s pretty much a case of the POSIWID. The system is meant to be genuine human engagement. What the system does is artificial at every step. Turns out its purpose is to fabricate things for bots to engage with. And this is all propped up by people who for some reason pay to keep the system running.
This reminds me of the ad supported games that advertise other ad supported games. I think I’ve even seen an ad supported game run an ad for itself.
I wonder if at some point people will walk away from these platforms and the platform and its owners won’t even be able to tell.
