cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/17793163
It’s unbelievable how vocal the minority of conservatives on reddit have suddenly gotten in the one sub where a large demographic of important voters often interact. Hmmm. Coincidence?
I agree with yggstyle here, trying to silence your opponents is bad form and can quickly snow ball into fascism.
You just need to counter bots with your bots. We have AI now for Christ sake, it’s really not that hard to train ‘em, deploy ‘em, and manage ‘em
Edit: Santa’s coming to town mfers
https://blog.replit.com/llm-training
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38759877
https://medium.com/intel-analytics-software/create-your-own-chatbot-on-cpus-b8d186cfefb2
Now for creating bot farms, you’re going to need to sail those waters yourself, as they’re often against TOS/UAs, but I don’t think you’ll have to look too hard
Edit: Republicans didn’t like the idea of fighting back ig
Problem: community is being flooded with content A which is diametrically opposed to a content B
Solution: flood content B
Part of the troll factory tactic is to make it a morally grey zone, because they know they have the money and the numbers to materialize it. Indiscriminately doing this is helping them in their effort to lower the information to noise ratio and make their efforts more indistinguishable from “the other side’s” turning it into a “well, they would do it too, if they were as successful and had as much money and resources as us” argument.
I’m aware of this tactic. There are a few well documented systems that work very efficiently at splintering groups. The problem with labeling any conversation that falls into the grey area, like it or not, is actually alienating the vast majority of nonpolarized viewpoints. Either you fall in line with faction a or b or you are the enemy of both. Political parties have used this effectively for decades. You beat the majority by splitting them into subfactions. This thread and topic is a spectacular demonstration of the result.
Doesn’t matter, if a conversation is likely to influence someone, then that makes it the ideal target for a troll factory. Troll factories also don’t just influence one side, they influence any “factions” people might crowd in. The most straightforward solution is eliminating high noise-to-signal ratios, in other words, misinformation and disinformation, and being transparent about it.But that will never be effective against people who just don’t care about the noise-to-signal ratio and just care about the information that satisfies their ego. It will never be effective against cults.
There’s a reason we need to filter out spam, and there’s a reason we need to filter out disinformation and misinformation, it isn’t just factions, but yes, it will necessarily devolve conversations into factions because some of them just don’t curate the quality of their information.
See but, this isn’t indiscriminate action, I mentioned in another comment that I don’t mean flood shit posts, but to flood with valuable and informative content.
If we cannot stop the pipe from spewing sewage, we have to counter flood with enriched flow to lower the ratio of shit:water.
We will still have a flooding problem, don’t get me wrong, but that is a much larger problem that exists. Republicans have been quoted as stating they just want to muddy waters. We need to flood with water to reduce how muddy they truly are. And certainly not with more mud.
The distinct problem we face is that of busy minds who don’t have the capacity to filter. So they flood with mud to bog down the mind. Hope this makes sense and helps to clear up my intentions/proposed soln.
There are sites that try to do this like ground.news , but the problem I think is that you are misjudging which side has the people really willing to inform themselves and which just accept the information that is convenient for their ego.
This is simply the reality of what division brings. The second it becomes less about discussion and more about us vs them the topics stop mattering. Discussion breaks down and you have yet another rift our society - regardless of how many people probably are at neither extreme. Anyone with moderate ideals or somewhere in between is ultimately forced to one side or the other … or trampled by both. It’s a disgusting degradation of a culture/society that despite being more connected than ever is finding more and more ways to isolate everyone.
Good on you for speaking up on what you believe. It sucks sometimes but it’s better to put the words out there.
While it has been proven time and again that corps and countries will seed social media with narratives…
I would caution people against brigadeing against ideologies and opinions counter to what you may be comfortable with. That is a surefire way to make an echo chamber. Simply downvoting an opinion you don’t agree with- without providing discussion simply becomes a silent mechanism for oppressing those views.
Edit:
Irony never fails to amuse.
I do not need to immerse myself in fascist rhetoric to be reminded that fascists exist.
I get your point but in curating my content I am not burying my head in the sand but using my time and energy in better ways.
This statement in and of itself is divisive and isn’t helpful. The behavior is no better than the behavior you apparently abhor.
I am no fan of most of the positions taken but I’m not so closed minded to suppress someone else’s opinion without discussion.
You are welcome to disagree, but being an instigator by your actions and words will not improve this community. Period.
Edit:
Allow me to shed light on why I said be careful.
Fascism (/ˈfæʃɪzəm/ FASH-iz-əm) is a far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement,[1][2][3] characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation…
To enforce only one side of a conversation is in effect only creating the exact same environment. It’s hypocrisy. I agree we should be mindful- but also mindful we ourselves do not become oppressive.
You’re here policing how people should use Lemmy and castigating them for “not improving” the community because they won’t do what you want, and you’re telling us to be mindful “we ourselves do not become oppressive”?
I wonder what the LD50 of irony is.
You are welcome to continue to talk to them. I am not. Fascists play with words, they do not debate.
What irony? Your comment is perfectly legible. Fortunately this hasn’t turned out like reddit, where massively downvoted comments get hidden, and the moderators and admins who would ban you for your comments just being “too negative” are either localized to instances or are no longer present.
The only bad thing is you can’t normally see and check out who’s doing the downvoting, which promotes unverifiable suspicion since people are going to make up their own answer if none is provided anyway, otherwise it’s mostly meaningless.
Downvotes are essentially useless in lemmy, and that has proven to be a good thing. It adds nothing and just proves that for some reason a large accounts are tagging your comment negative. If the comment is really bad, plenty of other options to deal with it. It isn’t even a cohesive concept for everyone, some people upvote and downvote everything, they cannot think of a world where maybe you just don’t have an opinion about something because you are either not interested or its outside of your scope of knowledge.
I do think that the differences in downvotes on Lemmy are overall beneficial. Reddit had this problem far worse - but I still think that opinions should be attached to words. It’s a social platform: if you don’t want to interact that’s your prerogative. While I acknowledge the existence of them I rarely let them direct my statements. It’s not batons and tear gas.
That said: I agree with your final statements… not everyone needs to participate in every conversation (we can still read and form opinions.)
Objectively how you feel about a call for brigadeing a particular viewpoint? Yes, I will give you that a lot of the shit posted by some of these groups is deplorable, but does that give us the right to simply ostracize the group as a whole?
You’ve made some good and valid points- I’m looking forward to your response. Cheers.
I think that Lemmy is just step in the road towards a better system. I frankly would prefer a system that was truly federated - where communities wouldn’t be hosted by a particular server, but rather, just a group of moderators and curators you could tailor, where each server could remove the messages they each deem to offensive by the most flagrant violators but it would be up to particular moderators / curators you choose to curate the comments that would show under a given tag and whose upvotes/downvotes should be discarded for a more fine-tuned experience.
Regarding upvotes and downvotes, requiring at least a reason and showing who made a downvote would definitely be a plus in my book, and would allow you to judge the reliability and judgement of people whom you might choose in your customized group of moderators/curators.
Education is a form of brigading a particular viewpoint, the problem in today’s world is accepting information that has poor noise-to-information ratio, which gives a skewed view of things. Every site and instance should have a right to curate its content, and you can even develop dedicated information sources like ground.news if you want to look at how information is getting skewed.
But it isn’t something that’s happening equally across sides, because the sides that are actually being molded are those that respect the purpose and ideals of a government versus those that see it as a means to an ends, and it is the latter that has a much, much higher noise-to-information ratio which should be respected about as much as one respects spam.
Meanwhile on the r/JordanPeterson sub right now, there’s a complaint about leftwing bots on r/millennials
https://www.reddit.com/r/JordanPeterson/comments/1e8cwwh/uptick_in_propaganda_bots_or_post/le6m8jo/
…oh r/millennials says there’s two subs… r/millennials and r/millenials with one n… Maybe that’s part of what’s going on.
Got called an llm arguing with a Trumper on one of those posts. On my 13 year old account. By his 3-month old account.
I just think it’s incredible how many conservatives are completely willing to handwave pedophilia as long as it’s their guy, bots or no.