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Manufactured consensus on x.com

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Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#221

Post by jandrese »

viccis wrote: post #203
jandrese wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

In the past I would spot check them and there were plenty of submissions that were neither bot submitted nor obviously rule breaking that were deleted. My best guess was that mods of sufficiently large subreddits just like to shape the content that's shown. In most places, there seems to neither be the power user nepotism of late-era Digg nor the Eastern Germany level narrative censorship of subs like worldnews. Rath…

All politics are local, which is a damn shame because the smaller the constituency the worst the politics are.

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#222

Post by andrepd »

CSMastermind wrote: post #161
andrepd wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Damn, 2016 was almost 10 years ago. When I said 10 I was more thinking 2010-2011

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#223

Post by chneu »

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…

Lol dude reddit has been heavily manipulated since like 2013, if not earlier.

I was heavily involved in buying/selling spam accounts for years on reddit. If you think it wasn't heavily manipulated, at least the frontpage, then lol you were buying it like everyone else.

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#224

Post by guywithahat »

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.

While I agree, they still notify everyone who liked it of the community note, so there is some feedback after the fact.

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#225

Post by TacticalCoder »

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…

[dead]

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#226

Post by Shekelphile »

mmastrac wrote: post #13
josefritzishere wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really degenerated into a trash heap. I quit years ago.

I pop in from time to time but I only ever see right-wing rage bait (??) and my old timeline is completely gone. I don't engage with any of it either, just scrolling until I finally catch a name I recognize and maybe dropping a like.

And even on tweets that don't seem to be outwardly ragebait the top replies will always be from blue checked right wing accounts, of course.

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#227

Post by Shekelphile »

neilv wrote: post #149

> When an account with 219 million followers interacts with a smaller one — not by blocking or arguing, but simply by muting — the consequences are immediate. The smaller account’s visibility drops from 150,000 views to 20,000 overnight. Is this true on Twitter/X? If so, what is the rationale?

There were more than a few cases at the time around acquisition where Musk publicly got into autistic manbaby slapfights with people on twitter and ended up banning them publicly. Presumably he is choosing to avoid doing this to mask what is happening to the victim and to avoid more bad press about it - it directly harms his thinly veiled persona as a free speech absolutist.

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#228

Post by _DeadFred_ »

rayiner wrote: post #88
selectodude wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If twitter is “central”, what on gods earth do you consider “right of center”?

X users say that the content they see is roughly equally likely to be liberal or conservative: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2024/06/12/how-x-users-... (look at the chart: Political content users see on X)

This was last June. As of March 2024 Musk was still saying he wouldn't donate to either candidate.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/musk-says-he-wont-donate-ei...

and it wasn't until July that Elon made himself a liar and endorsed/funded Trump. Not sure how relevant your link is in light of Elon effectively going back on everything he said/committed to previously and buying the Presidency.

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#229

Post by Veserv »

jandrese wrote: post #164
stevenAthompson wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 emp…

He did not baselessly claim a critic was a pedophile. He baselessly claimed the first foreign rescuer called to the scene [1], who called in his friends who successfully navigated and mapped the caves and found the kids, a pedophile.

[1] https://www.thetimes.com/uk/article/exclusive-interview-with...

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#230

Post by agensaequivocum »

alabastervlog wrote: post #69
ty6853 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most glaring example of this was how reddit did a total 180 before/after the election. Before the election questioning putting a candidate in without a primary was sacrilege. Afterwards it was a popularly supported reason for the loss. It was like watching an inflated balloon of propaganda deflate.

That's bizarre. Putting her at the top of the ticket was very clearly the better of two bad options (it was too late for the better options, by the time the call was made). There exist people who think Biden had a better shot and replacing him with Harris was a mistake? Did they not look at his approval ratings earlier that year, then look up what that's historically meant for presidential re-elections? Dude was gonn…

Yes parts of the older working class Midwest would have supported him but didn't support Harris.
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