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Manufactured consensus on x.com

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Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#131

Post by unethical_ban »

jampa wrote: post #59
mrdoops wrote: post #20

Manufactured consensus is everywhere there is enough attention to incentivize such an effort. The worst by far is Reddit.

I've been using Reddit for 12 years. After the API fiasco, the quality dropped a lot. Most popular subreddits are now astroturfed, where every week there is a crusade against something (First it was for banning Twitter, now it is against banning AI Art). Even in regular posts, Reddit has been a hive mind lately. If you scroll through the comments, most of them will have the same opinion over and over, with comments t…

The API shutdown allows a flooding of bots, crippled 3rd party apps and the moderator tools that kept things clean.

But I don't think the "crusades" are always bot related. Movements get momentum.

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#132

Post by ein0p »

Looking at the comments, the blowback to this is pretty wonderful to see. There's hope for HN after all. More and more people are realizing that they don't have to blindly subscribe to the "current thing".

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#133

Post by Fidelix »

gruez wrote: post #6

I'm surprised how many upvotes this got (40 points as of me writing this comment), given how little "meat" is actually in this article. The author presents a graph where views for a given user dropped precipitously after a "feud with musk". That's certainly suspicious, and was worth bringing up, but the rest of the blog is just pontificating about "social engineering" and "perception cascades", backed by absolutely n…

They are upvoting because they hate Elon Musk. It's not that deep.

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#134

Post by omneity »

viccis wrote: post #79
mrdoops wrote: post #20

Manufactured consensus is everywhere there is enough attention to incentivize such an effort. The worst by far is Reddit.

Reddit is SO MUCH WORSE than most people understand. Ignoring for a moment that peoples frontpage Best sort uses engagement metrics rather than upvote/downvotes since 2021, the moderators there have an iron grip over what is allowed. r/redditminusmods used to track this. Every 12 hours they'd take a snapshot of the top 50 posts and then check ones from the previous 12 hour snapshot to see what percentage had been del…

This would be such an interesting experiment to perform on other social platforms as well alongside some rough semantic analysis to understand which topics are being silenced.

I already got quite a lot of the data pipeline setup for this, so if anyone wants to collab hit me up!

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#135

Post by Swoerd »

627467 wrote: post #123

The article’s angst over X’s “manufactured consensus” is overblown. Influence has always been curated—editors, town criers, or whoever grabbed the mic were the analog algorithms. X’s sin isn’t some evil algo: it’s just running at planetary scale. We’ve ditched thousands of small communities for one global shouting match, so naturally mega-influencers steal the show. Algorithms are just the gears keeping this chaos mo…

[dead]

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#136

Post by ruleryak »

janalsncm wrote: post #56
gruez wrote: post #6

I'm surprised how many upvotes this got (40 points as of me writing this comment), given how little "meat" is actually in this article. The author presents a graph where views for a given user dropped precipitously after a "feud with musk". That's certainly suspicious, and was worth bringing up, but the rest of the blog is just pontificating about "social engineering" and "perception cascades", backed by absolutely n…

EM directly manipulates the algorithm to suit his interests. Here’s one we know about: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/feb/15/elon-musk...

This article does not offer any proof. It's hearsay, from the title saying he "reportedly" forced it, in turn citing a Platformer article that itself also provides no proof and instead accepts the stories from fired engineers as gospel. The platformer article then goes on to say that views still fluctuate wildly, and that it isn't in line with a supposed 1000x boost. The same Platformer article then says that they believe the supposed 1000x boost is no longer in effect, but they guess something else must be in place. The Guardian article doesn't bother to mention that part.

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#137

Post by DustinBrett »

andrepd wrote: post #125
jampa wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using Reddit for 12 years. After the API fiasco, the quality dropped a lot. Most popular subreddits are now astroturfed, where every week there is a crusade against something (First it was for banning Twitter, now it is against banning AI Art). Even in regular posts, Reddit has been a hive mind lately. If you scroll through the comments, most of them will have the same opinion over and over, with comments t…

> Reddit has been a hive mind lately. If you scroll through the comments, most of them will have the same opinion over and over, with comments that add nothing to the discussion, like "I agree," getting hundreds of upvotes. That has been the case for over 10 years now. It's absolutely not a new phenomenon.

It got much worse a few years ago. I am a daily Reddit user and it was a big difference.

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#138

Post by o1inventor »

Spend a decade crying wolf or "muh fascists" at every little thing we disagree with, and suddenly everyone is surprised when the public tunes it out and we get fascists.

"who made you this way?"

"you did."

- american politics circa 2025

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#139

Post by numpad0 »

casenmgreen wrote: post #124

It looks like Twitter is suppressing posts until they are spammed by hate bots and then making those posts visible. https://bsky.app/profile/willhaycardiff.bsky.social/post/3lk... I've also seen evidence of posts Twitter likes (violent and hateful anti-immigration posts - literally a photo of a dummy tied to a chair being shot in the back of the head) being spammed by love bots. Twitter seems to be a propaganda chann…

Yeah, artificial delays in content delivery is silently spreading. It's not just Twitter.

Edit: is this why 4chan was hit with the disruption - because there's no room for this delay mechanism?

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#140

Post by Aurornis »

jampa wrote: post #59
mrdoops wrote: post #20

Manufactured consensus is everywhere there is enough attention to incentivize such an effort. The worst by far is Reddit.

I've been using Reddit for 12 years. After the API fiasco, the quality dropped a lot. Most popular subreddits are now astroturfed, where every week there is a crusade against something (First it was for banning Twitter, now it is against banning AI Art). Even in regular posts, Reddit has been a hive mind lately. If you scroll through the comments, most of them will have the same opinion over and over, with comments t…

> I've been using Reddit for 12 years. After the API fiasco, the quality dropped a lot. Most popular subreddits are now astroturfed, where every week there is a crusade against something (First it was for banning Twitter, now it is against banning AI Art).

This didn’t start with the API change drama. The API change protests were their own crusade. The calls to ban Twitter links or AI art are just the next iterations of the same form of protest.

Many of the big subs were thoroughly astroturfed long before the API changes. The famous ones like /r/conservative weren’t even trying to hide the fact that they curated every member and post

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