• Fiction@lemm.ee
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      5 days ago

      Yeah, it’s a playground for bots and misinformation now

      • toy_boat_toy_boat@lemmy.world
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        5 days ago

        i started visiting reddit back around 2009 when places like digg and fark kept linking over there. i liked it because it had a design that the average person wouldn’t like - the old design. they sorted comments in a new way that i liked. it’s been a slow boil, but look at the reddit monstrosity now. the redesign is puke-inducing, and there really isn’t any point in the vote sorting any more because people don’t upvote for visibility any more insomuch as just use it as like/dislike. there isn’t even any benefit in trying to point that out any more either, because today’s reddit users just don’t understand that approach to votes - and it really, really sucks.

        • My_IFAKs___gone@lemmy.world
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          5 days ago

          I want to upvote this because I like it, but now I’m conflicted because I don’t want to inadvertently abuse the upvote mechanism.

          • toy_boat_toy_boat@lemmy.world
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            5 days ago

            yo - upvote it if you think it’s worth it for other people to see it, whether you agree with it or not. it might spark a debate. it might sway opinion. but either way, voting for visibility is the best thing to do on a SMALL forum like this. Appreciate lemmy while it’s still small!!!

            AND fwiw - your upvotes should probably not be monitored. that would just be a huge dick move (sorry, it took me a sec).

            • quazar@lemmy.world
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              5 days ago

              Im not going to upvote something if I don’t agree with it. I understand the power of voting, it increases or decreases visibility. But I am not going to willingly increase the visibility of something I don’t agree with.

              • OpenStars@discuss.online
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                3 days ago

                Imagine if someone comments with what you see as a stupid take, but phrases it as a legitimate question indicating a willingness and even eagerness to learn: I often upvote such, bc that’s an attitude that I’d like to see more of. The alternative for them would be to keep silent and remain in their ignorance?

                Conversely, someone that says “^This” - I may likewise agree with whatever they responded to, but that’s what upvotes on the latter content is for, and there’s no need to also upvote the former along with that.

              • brbposting
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                5 days ago

                Considering e.g. a thoughtful, insightful, well-researched post with a conclusion we completely disagree with and feel is likely to lead to negative outcomes - but is still a perspective that should be understood if we want to be well rounded:

                Binary up/downvotes have a really hard time of capturing what we want to see reflected as our assessment.

                Edit: blessed be thy highly-voted child comment

                • Whats_your_reasoning@lemmy.world
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                  5 days ago

                  As someone from the U.S., it seems like that concept has practically disappeared from the country. The nuances of civil debate, including the acknowledgement of differing opinions as valid, don’t exist in most of our popular media (both traditional and social.) We’ve been conditioned to react to things immediately and intensely using our emotions instead. There has been a slide toward this state for decades, but it’s come to the point where a lot of people genuinely struggle with separating “thing they personally disagree with/don’t like” from “thing that shouldn’t be said/heard/shared.”

                  (Not saying that’s the case with OP, just that it’s definitely a thing that’s been going on.)

    • FrostBlazer@lemm.ee
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      5 days ago

      I feel like the admins over there really take for granted how much people care about Reddit. The more they degrade the sense of community, the more it continues to crumble until users feel that there’s no point in going back.

      With how many posts are just pure AI generated rage bait, it’s becoming more clear by the day how little worth there is left on Reddit.

        • FrostBlazer@lemm.ee
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          5 days ago

          Did they change the way things are formatted? Such as the [removed] comments now just appearing as [deleted]? Deleted would imply the users removed their own content while removed would imply the mods or admins removed it, at least that’s how things have always been. However, I have only been seeing a sea of [deleted] lately.

          • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮 @pawb.social
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            5 days ago

            After the API kerfuffle, a lot of users who left also used tools to completely erase their content from the site, which explains the sea of [deleted] posts and users. You may also see comments and text body posts that are full of incoherent gibberish because one of the tools didn’t delete the content in the normal way, it simply edited the content to be a bunch of random gibberish.

            • aesthelete@lemmy.world
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              5 days ago

              it simply edited the content to be a bunch of random gibberish.

              I used a tool that did this. I also used it on purpose because I figured it would make the content more difficult to farm. Lots of software doesn’t actually delete anything when you delete it, but it’s a lot more work to put versioning in and then you’d have to go search the version history to find a version that wasn’t mangled to farm it…so that’ll all theoretically make it more difficult for them to find what I originally wrote.

              • Ledericas@lemm.ee
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                5 days ago

                i just ended up deleted all my comments on my last 2 accts, so they cant be farmed, unless reddit undeletes them. wonder when reddit is going to pull a FB ressurection, revives your account but controlled by AI bots for right wing disinformation.

                • OpenStars@discuss.online
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                  3 days ago

                  They’ve already been caught doing that - well, not for disinformation spreading but for engagement appearance, around the time Reddit was doing its IPO so needed to hike its stats to give to advertisers as quickly as possible. While entire posts, comment for comment, though with different usernames but the identical responses to the identical questions, and then deeper responses to those, and so forth.

                  So they don’t need the appearance of older accounts - they can manufacturer whatever they need, from scratch already. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if they created “10 year old” accounts at will.

      • OpenStars@discuss.online
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        3 days ago

        It likely looks to them as if the accounts that remain to be moderated are humans, the same as it was in the past, even though it’s no longer that way now.

      • Ledericas@lemm.ee
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        5 days ago

        worldnews was a plague, i had to block that sub. i was also reminding people in pics sub how the pict was about gaza and it wash bashing on biden pushing propaganda, and also gaza conflicts in the past had very little effect on elections, i just block and report those people. mostly it was inappropiate for that sub too.

        • tischbier@feddit.org
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          5 days ago

          I never understood WorldNews. I said back in November pretty plainly that Trump won and so I fear that America would eventually leave or attack NATO. I said I was afraid that Trump would side with Russia outright. That we would abandon our allies in the Pacific, too. That our inaction would create a gap for China to fill. That the gap might be big enough to embolden China who then might make moves on Taiwan.

          And I was downvoted (which is fine) but the comments I got were kind of bewildering. The people who engaged with me were trying to convince me that Trump would never side with Russia and there is no evidence ever of this.

          And of course here we are now. And all of these things are happening.

          The whole Gaza thing you mention—I understand the outrage—but I wonder how much of it online was manufactured in places like Pics because of the election.

          Seeing the conversations here on Lemmy makes me think…there’s something very weird going on on Reddit. I’ve rode out Reddit drama over the past 12 years. This is not the narwhal at midnight website. This is something very dark.

          • OpenStars@discuss.online
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            3 days ago

            Yes, but note that it was happening here as well. Certain places here were HIGHLY active in the BoTh SiDeS sAmE activity, just prior to the USA election, and similarly influenced other elections world-wide. Learn which places these are, so that you can take full advantage of the Fediverse, which isn’t “a place” so much as a forum software that allows many many places to share their content - but all sides here are NOT equally dedicated to truthiness.

            Here is one example:

            img

            Judge for yourself what you think might be the intention for making and spreading it… although if we are going by the mantra of the effects that it may have caused possibly being the reason for which it was made, it looks to me to suggest that people in the USA should not be enthusiastic about voting or encouraging others to vote for Kamala Harris.

            Edit: to be clear I’m not suggesting that Lemmy is “the same” as Reddit - in some ways we are worse here, being even more authoritian than Reddit was (or rather “is” I guess:-P), but in other ways it’s so, so much better, in that we can pack up and move to another instance and simply carry on, having access to the vast majority of content as before (exceptions include defederations and a DM directed to our old account won’t follow us), which was (oops, “is” again:-) not true for Reddit.

      • Ledericas@lemm.ee
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        5 days ago

        rather suspicious since only bots have those types of accts, i have a hunch reddit is actually accessing those accts or allowing bots to take over the accts. i heard people couldnt log back into thier old accts

        • morrowind@lemmy.ml
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          5 days ago

          There are bots too but you can tell a bot. Usually anyway.

          They didn’t all leave. It’s not a hive mind. Especially since reddit got popular and the original base got fragmented and whatever.