It was generally being called astroturfing when it got more apparent on Reddit in the early 2010s, and definitely didn't get less after.

This is a special addiction because most of us are community starved. Formative years were spent realizing we could form digital communities, then right when they were starting to become healthy and pay us back, they got hijacked by parasites.

These parasites have always dreamed of directly controlling our communities, and it got handed to them on a silver platter.

Corporate, monetized community centers with direct access to our mindshare, full ability to censor and manipulate, and direct access to our community-centric neurons. It is a dream come true for these slavers which evoke a host of expletives in my mind.

Human beings are addicted to community social interaction. It is normally a healthy addiction. It is not any longer in service of us.

The short term solution: reduce reliance on and consumption of corporate captured social media

The long term solution: rebuild local communities, invest time in p2p technology that outperforms centralized tech

When I say "p2p" I do not mean what is currently available. Matrix, federated services, etc are not it. I am talking about going beyond even Apple in usability, and beyond BitTorrent in decentralization. I am talking about a meta-substrate so compelling to developers and so effortless to users that it makes the old ways appear archaic in their use. That is the long term vision.

Also don’t reply to this.

My impression of the joke is that intelligent and knowledgeable people willingly engage with social media and fall into treating what they see as truth, and then are shocked when they learn it's not truth.

If the allegory of the cave is describing a journey from ignorant and incorrect beliefs to enlightened realizations, the parent is making a joke about people going in reverse. Perhaps they have seen first hand someone who is educated, knowledgeable and reasonable become deceived by social media, casting away their own values and knowledge for misconceptions incepted into them by persistent deception.

I'm not saying I agree entirely with the point the joke is making but it does sort of make sense to me (assuming I even understand it correctly).

Leaving social media can be thought of as emerging from the cave: you interact with people near you who actually have a shared experience to yours (if only geographically) and you get a feel for what real world conversation is like: full of nuance and tailored to the individual you’re talking to. Not blasted out to everyone to pick apart simultaneously. You start to realize it was just a website and the people on it are just like the shadows on the wall: they certainly look real and can be mesmerizing, but they have no effect on anything outside of the cave.

> Walk willingly into platos cave, pay for platos cave verification, sit down, enjoy all the discourse on the wall.

Homer pays to get the crayon put back up his nose

> Spit your drink out when you figure out that the shadows on the wall are all fake.

Homer gets annoyed/surprised if someone calls him stupid.

It’s ironic but also completely typical.

Same way so many people publicly freaking out about homosexuality turn out to be gay. There’s something in human nature that makes people shout about the dangers of the things they themselves do, some kind of camouflage instinct I guess.

Remember that China blocks Western social media, yet posts a lot of Chinese government propaganda on Western social media. Making VPNs illegal for the general public does not entail making VPNs inaccessible to government agents.

How do you know this as a fact?

Or maybe they are able to link carrier-sourced cellphone location datasets to particular twitter accounts. Those aren't going to be real-time though, so something like that could explain the lag.

They would most likely use residential proxy/vpns that show your traffic coming out of a regular household ISP. They can be purchased for cheap.

I don't do this with every topic unless I'm interested in discussing something just so I'm more informed just to reduce bias.

It's really fucked how the online content providers have moved from letting you seek out whatever you might fancy towards deciding what you're going to see. "Search" doesn't even seem like an important feature anymore many places.

X and Reddit are no different.

I really don't as far as social media goes. If I see a link here the account posting it likely doesn't play any part, trust comes from the source of the content more than random user.

Yeah, but basically nobody is capable of evaluating those sources themselves, outside of very narrow topics.

Reading a wikipedia page about Cicero? Better make sure you can read Latin and Greek, and also have a PhD in Roman history and preferably another one in Classical philosophy, or else you will always be stuck with translations and interpretations of other people. And no, reading a Loeb translation from the 1930's doesnt mean you will fully understand what he wrote, because so much of it all hinges on specific words and what those words meant in the context they were written, and how you should interpret whole passages and how those passages relate to other authors and things that happened when he was alive and all that fun stuff.

And that's just one small subject in one discipline. Now move on to an article about Florence during the Renaissance and oh hey suddenly there are yet another couple of languages you should learn and another PhD to get.

Or hasn't covered yet. It's interesting to watch the cycle of "shows up on social media" then "shows up in industry-specific press" then "shows up in mainstream press", with lag in each step.

These days, Fediverse is providing the same thing for some industries. You see stuff show up there first, then show up on X and industry press a little later, then mainstream press a little later.

A town square in Cologne where 90% of participants don't hail from Cologne but London, Mumbai and San Francisco aren't going to solve the problems of Cologne or have any stake in doing so.

Which also reveals of course what Twitter actually is, an entropy machine designed to generate profit that in fact benefits from disorder, not a means of real world problem solving, the ostensible point of meaningful communication.

the linkedin effect seems more due to the nature of corporate culture where everyone's profile is an extension of their persona optimized for monetary/career outcomes so you get this vapid superficial fakeness to it that turns people off.

this X feature does make it interesting like for example engaging with US politics while shouldnt stop commentary from foreigners it definitely should contain the limits of perception meddling

My small neighborhood has a non-anonymous chat group, which is 2-3 streets (~50 houses) inside a village which is inside a city. It is basically just a mini nextdoor but without ads or conspiracies.

I wonder how much more expensive per post it would be for the bad guys if social networks required the most draconian verification technology, like a hardware-based biometric system you have to rent, and touch or sit near when posting on social media. And maybe you have to read comments you want to post to a camera.

Even at such a ludicrous extreme, state actors would still find ways to pay people to astroturf. But how effective would extraordinary countermeasures like that be, I wonder.

(Also I think high global incomes would greatly mitigate the issue by reducing the number of people willing to pretend they genuinely hold views of foreign adversaries and risk treasony kinda charges.)

I'm thinking Nikita is falling out with Elon as they both seem to have diverging goals with the platform. Advertisement revenues on X isn't that great and neither are conversions on X so you can't really get consistent payouts that match Youtube. Premium subscriptions don't bring in as much dough as advertising did during Twitter days.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/mar/13/facebook-...

What political interest does a Nigerian have in swaying US opinion?

That is exactly what is happening and what is being reported on. The thing you attribute to "weird personal bias" is being widely exposed.

We should probably examine your weird personal bias. Weird, because you could just read the article!

The Department of Homeland Security, for one.

Edit: Link removed as I was disinformed by a /pol/ PsyOp.

I'd make the assumption that posters located in Russia, China, NK, etc. are likely to be in some way tied to the state, where posters in India, random African nations, etc. are more likely to be private actors of which some will be US-based outsourcing to low-cost labor.

The "control the narrative" stuff is mostly a PR campaign by social media intelligence companies trying to make their services seem more valuable than they are.