Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Manufactured consensus on x.com

rook2root.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 256 posts

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#161

Post by CSMastermind »

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.

I feel so old that I remember the post-2016 election when Reddit started down this path. It's been particularly bad in the last few years but agree. Ever since the_donald and the admin's reactions to it, it's been bad.

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#162

Post by piperswe »

o1inventor wrote: post #138

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

I mean, the fascists today are basically the same people as the fascists 10 years ago. It wasn't crying wolf, it was seeing what was going to happen in the future.

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#163

Post by kmeisthax »

numpad0 wrote: post #139
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?

No, 4chan was hacked because hideyuki has terrible security hygiene and didn't update shit. Same thing happened to 2channel a decade prior.

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#164

Post by jandrese »

stevenAthompson wrote: post #109
razster wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That dynamic of influence compounding certainly echoes the historical patterns we’ve seen with capital—those who have it can shape systems to acquire more. But it’s worth remembering that this only holds power if we choose to participate. Personally, I’ve stepped away from anything associated with X.com or Elon Musk. I deleted my accounts, disconnected from the ecosystem entirely—and life is better for it. No doomscr…

I was going to buy a Tesla. My brother had one and I coveted it. They make neat stuff. Then Elon started taking testosterone (or whatever it was that jacked up his aggression), using psychedelics, and became incapable of keeping his mouth shut. To compound it he then got involved in politics. Now I will never buy a Tesla, starlink, or anything else he's involved in because his behavior represents a real risk that any…

Many years ago I was really rooting for Tesla and Elon as they dragged the auto industry kicking and screaming towards electrification. How they focused on the underserved whole home battery market. He even kept his manufacturing domestic unlike most other big companies.

Some cracks started to form in this when he made a reckless wall street bet that he could make a million cars in a year or something and had his employees working double shifts in tents to get it done. In the end he won the bet and got an enormous payout. I remember calculating that if he divided the award in half and split that half evenly among every single Tesla employee that it would amount to about $40,000 per person, a life changing amount of money for most people. Instead he kept it all for himself and gave a press conference about how big of a genius he is.

But the turning point is when there was a kid trapped in a cave and he received some mild criticism over his ill conceived rescue solution and the result was to baselessly claim that the critic was a pedophile.

He's exactly the kind of guy who looks like a god when you only measure things in dollars. He takes big risks and they've paid off more often than not, but he's not someone anybody should really look up to.

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#165

Post by jandrese »

guywithahat wrote: post #50
mrdoops wrote: post #20

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

For all the negative things one can say about X, their fact checking (community notes) has actually gotten pretty good, which is something Reddit has yet to implement. Pew has also been ranking them more politically center than most social media sites, although I suppose that's subjective

I like the community notes as a concept, but they're often a day late and a dollar short. By the time the community note appears the post has been squeezed of all of its juice and was already on the way out. It's better than nothing, but the entire mechanism runs slower than the speed of propaganda.

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#166

Post by PaulKeeble »

stevenAthompson wrote: post #109
razster wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That dynamic of influence compounding certainly echoes the historical patterns we’ve seen with capital—those who have it can shape systems to acquire more. But it’s worth remembering that this only holds power if we choose to participate. Personally, I’ve stepped away from anything associated with X.com or Elon Musk. I deleted my accounts, disconnected from the ecosystem entirely—and life is better for it. No doomscr…

I was going to buy a Tesla. My brother had one and I coveted it. They make neat stuff. Then Elon started taking testosterone (or whatever it was that jacked up his aggression), using psychedelics, and became incapable of keeping his mouth shut. To compound it he then got involved in politics. Now I will never buy a Tesla, starlink, or anything else he's involved in because his behavior represents a real risk that any…

Based on some of the videos of him it looks like its Ketamine.

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#167

Post by PaulKeeble »

jandrese wrote: post #165
guywithahat wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For all the negative things one can say about X, their fact checking (community notes) has actually gotten pretty good, which is something Reddit has yet to implement. Pew has also been ranking them more politically center than most social media sites, although I suppose that's subjective

I like the community notes as a concept, but they're often a day late and a dollar short. By the time the community note appears the post has been squeezed of all of its juice and was already on the way out. It's better than nothing, but the entire mechanism runs slower than the speed of propaganda.

They also don't seem to last. I don't know quite how it happens but you see a lot of these community notes disappear 24 hours after they appeared. They act on the tail end of the posts exposure and then are removed for the long term for when the news comes along and uses it as a reference. But all the people who spotted the misinformation see the post and the community note and so everyone walks away "happy".

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#168

Post by viraptor »

fourseventy wrote: post #155
Tireings wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a propaganda platform since Musk bought it. Im saying this for ages and never joked. Plenty of real situations happening like blocking certain people, stoping of fact checking, bot protection and detection etc. There is a reason why Twitter needed more people before

[flagged]

I doubt you have any proof of that happening...

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#169

Post by jandrese »

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…

> 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 deleted. When it started, it was averaging 20% or so. By the end, it was at 50/50 or 49/50 deleted almost every single 12 hour period.

Is this "mods run amok" or is it the bots gaming the algorithm more effectively and now account for nearly half of all new popular content?

In general my advice to anyone considering Reddit is to start with the default list of subreddits that you get when not logged in. Delete all of those from your list, and track down the small subreddits that interest you. The defaults are all owned by professional influence peddlers now, and what little actual content seeps through is not worth the effort to filter out.

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#170

Post by aaronbaugher »

trollied wrote: post #18
arrowsmith wrote: post #11

Not to defend Musk but it's not like "X" was a bastion of neutrality and even-handedness before he took over (the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story being one prominent example.) Nor are the platforms Musk doesn't own yet. Does the author of this piece take a principled stand against censorship and bias? Or is he just upset that the censorship and bias isn't going in his preferred direction?

HN certainly leans one way. X has gone more central. BUT remember that what you see is driven by the people you follow, mostly. Don’t like what they say or their political persuasion? Unfollow.

That's what my liberal friends told me from 2017 to approximately the day Musk bought Twitter: "They're private companies, bro, they can do what they want. Just don't use them if you don't like it." They never said that before 2017, and they've stopped saying it now. Welcome back to the "censorship is bad" side, I guess; just don't tell me it was ever about a principle.
Post reply on HN