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

241–250 of 256 posts

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#241

Post by Max-Ganz-II »

lynndotpy wrote: post #111
kridsdale3 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been there for 17 (!) years, and I could have written pretty much the same message as you since around 2012. Dennis Kucinich was a huge campaign! But I agree, since the API thing, it has sucked HARD.

I agree, the API change was the last nail in the coffin, honestly. Reddit was always bad for several reasons, but it always had some availability of smart people that placed it alongside StackExchange and Hacker News. But 2022 and 2023 really saw a mass exodus of expertise from Reddit (and Twitter, etc.) Lots of smart people left to Mastodons, at least.

My account on Reddit, and so as I was the founder also the sub r/AmazonRedshift, was in Sep 2023 banned by an automated system.

The sub was working normally, I posted about the Amazon Redshift Serverless PDF, and then Reddit began behaving oddly.

After some investigation, and some guesswork, I concluded my account had been silently shadow-banned, and the sub banned (and then shortly after, deleted).

Two years of posts and the sub disappeared, instantly, abruptly, without warning, reason, appeal process or notification, and Reddit was trying by shadowbanning to lead me into thinking my account was still active.

I used a utility to scramble (you can't delete) all the posts I'd ever made to Reddit, and closed my account.

(There's a bit of a happy ending - about a year later someone who was doing work with Reddit and had an archive of all my poss sent them to me, as a thank you. I processed the JSON and put them up on my Redshift site.)

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#242

Post by os2warpman »

fkyoureadthedoc wrote: post #189
os2warpman wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> now it is against banning AI Art AI art does not exist. There is only slop stolen from artists.

Gatekeeping the definition of art probably doesn't help your cause. Even if you convince everyone to say, I don't know, "algorithmically generated images" instead, have you really improved the situation from the artists perspective?

The only thing that matters is ridiculing people who think typing something into a text entry field and receiving a shitty image in return is art.

edit: now that I think about it, a public performance where an artist generates "algorithmically created images" in real-time and they and the audience bask in the shit would be fantastic! Maybe coupled with some shitty AI music, narrated in that shitty Attenborough rip-off AI voice.

It could be called "requiem for a techbro".

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#243

Post by stevenAthompson »

pas wrote: post #237
PaulKeeble wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

for anyone interested: https://alisoncrosthwait.substack.com/p/a-ketamine-addicts-p...

Thanks for sharing that.

The section on conspiracy thinking was interesting to me. I've been trying to understand the ever increasing amount of it in our society, and my thoughts keep going back to the rise in marijuana legalization. I can't help but feel that there is a link.

Like ketamine, other psychedelics can trigger mild psychosis and with it conspiratorial thinking, grandiosity, and all of the other symptoms described here.

The rise in legalization seems, anecdotally, to match the "normalization" of tin-foil hat thinking in society. Years ago Dan Quayle was essentially disqualified from office for misspelling potato, now Marjorie Taylor Greene publicly decries the Jewish Space Lasers and nobody blinks. I feel like there has to be more to societies changes over the last ~25 years than "the internet".

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#244

Post by red-iron-pine »

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…

social media is either making money via ads, or making money by shaping consensus.

what approach do you think HN takes, and how many bots do you think are here? Cuz I don't see any ads...

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#245

Post by seanw444 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #193
seanw444 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like how you both responded to GP's roast of "I agree" comments by saying "I agree". Maybe that was intentional. Anyway, I agree. I used Reddit fairly regularly before the API change, though I was already starting to get disenfranchised by the political hive mind by that point. The death of FOSS third party clients that made the platform bearable to use was the straw that broke the camel's back, for me. I've comple…

The complaint was about comments that are functionally an overly large upvote, not comments that have the word agree in them.

I know, but it's still funny.

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#246

Post by jsbg »

miltonlost wrote: post #23
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?

If your complaint is that the right-wing lies of the laptop story weren’t amplified, then you desire propaganda to be spread. We should, as a society, want to stop liars from lying.

> We should, as a society, want to stop liars from lying.

Does that include the lie that the story was "Russian propaganda"?

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#247

Post by notfed »

w10-1 wrote: post #105

Is the title ironic? Is this helping? "Manufacturing consent", the book by Chomsky and Herman, details techniques that are largely unused in this situation. Chomsky's book by disclosing the hidden editor works against the effect rather than for it. Here it's closer to a state-run media outlet, with the exact ambiguity that implies: a known editor pretending to be objective, except here the editor only really cares ab…

"Manufacturing consensus" is, at least, the title of a separate book more appropriately fitting the theme of the article.

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#248

Post by cogitovirus »

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…

really appreciate the constructive criticism — you're totally right, i should’ve highlighted the sources more clearly.

there were three main pieces of actual evidence i leaned on:

1. the nytimes story on account silencing, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/04/23/business/elon...

2. the visible boost of low-value tweets (though i should have connected to the x api hose and quantify the data),

3. this paper — https://github.com/timothyjgraham/AlgorithmicBiasX/blob/3f4c...

which actually didn’t make it to the the post because the essay was basically finished by the time i remembered i had it. I should have included it. it shows an algo change that boosts elon’s reach specifically.

every other source was speculative:

superbowl fiasko - https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/feb/15/elon-musk... - little evidence

elon forced 100 engineers to boost his tweets ? - hearsay

there are also supposed whistle blowers - https://substack.com/@theconcernedbird/p-154577954 - but again. no evidence.

And the algorithm is still closed source.

i’m sorry the writing beyond the graph didn’t land for you.

mr gruez - I'll do better next time.

-- the author

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#249

Post by bigbadfeline »

stevenAthompson wrote: post #243
pas wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

for anyone interested: https://alisoncrosthwait.substack.com/p/a-ketamine-addicts-p...

Thanks for sharing that. The section on conspiracy thinking was interesting to me. I've been trying to understand the ever increasing amount of it in our society, and my thoughts keep going back to the rise in marijuana legalization. I can't help but feel that there is a link. Like ketamine, other psychedelics can trigger mild psychosis and with it conspiratorial thinking, grandiosity, and all of the other symptoms d…

> The section on conspiracy thinking was interesting to me. I've been trying to understand the ever increasing amount of it in our society, and my thoughts keep going back to the rise in marijuana legalization.

Are we switching the horse and cart places here? It's highly likely that people resort to drugs in order to cope with the distress caused by conspiracy talk. Musk is using drugs as stimulants to increase his "productivity" which is the other common reason for taking drugs. BTW, his "productivity" isn't the source of his success, but that's tangential here.

In both cases, conspiracies aren't the root cause and fighting them ends up fighting free speech without reducing either conspiracies or drug use.

The same is true for the normalization of wild conspiracies - MTG followers aren't engaging in them because of drugs, they are doing it because MTG is promoting them from a place of authority and bot-love. If you think she's not playing by a script but simply spilling out the contents of her concerned heart... you know very little about propaganda.

Post reply on HN