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Manufactured consensus on x.com

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Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#51

Post by adeeds »

richwater wrote: post #31
mrdoops wrote: post #20

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

> The worst by far is Reddit The website is truly unusable unless you directly go to small niche subreddits and even then you roll the dice with unpaid mods with a power complex.

The smaller niche subreddits dedicated to a hobby or type of product are actually some of the worst for astroturfing from what I've seen. It only takes a few shills to start building consensus.

There's a really interesting pattern where you'll see one person start a thread asking "Hey, any recs for durable travel pants?" Then a second comment chimes in "No specific brands, just make sure you get ones that have qualities x, y, and z". Then a third user says "Oh my Ketl Mountain™ travel pants have those exact traits!" Taken on their own the threads look fairly legit and get a lot of engagement and upvotes from organic users (maybe after some bot upvoted to prime the pump)

Then if you dump the comments of those users and track what subreddits they've interacted on, they've had convos following the same patterns about boots in BuyItForLife, Bidets in r/Bidets, GaN USB chargers in USBCHardware, face wash in r/30PlusSkincare, headphones, etc. You can build a whole graph of shilling accounts pushing a handful of products.

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#52

Post by tough »

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

tik tok recently added Footnotes

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#53

Post by RankingMember »

janalsncm wrote: post #9

The low effort boosting replies are what get me. A lot of tech billionaires (who supposedly work harder than any mortal) spend a ton of time with one word / emoji replies. At least this is visible boosting. The next step is to boost behind the scenes, entirely unauditable. All of the power (and more) of an editor, none of the accountability.

The "author_is_elon" flag in Twitter's source code comes to mind

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#54

Post by ty6853 »

cmdli wrote: post #42
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.

In the few days following the election, there was a flood of conservative posters all over the place. After about a week, they all disappeared and Reddit returned to its usual politics. I think the difference you are seeing is an atypical amount of conservatism, not the other way around. Most people who voted for Harris still do not think that the lack of a primary was the issue.

Probably not, but as someone who didn't vote for either major party, nor am I a conservative, it was glaringly obvious that ramming through without lube someone who totally dive-bombed the prior primary might have avoided a sanity check to filter primary issues.

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#55

Post by tonetegeatinst »

Wouldn't that random tweet about the tariff pause that caused a market crash be an outlier if not proof this isn't always true?

Random obscure account tweets about a 90 day pause...a few people talk about it....and suddenly news outlets ran with it and the markets freaked out.

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#56

Post by janalsncm »

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...

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#57

Post by vvpan »

jjeaff wrote: post #29
arrowsmith wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, that's not fair! It's also full of porn bots and Holocaust denial.

Don't forget the graphic fight videos with comments full of racial undertones. I have literally never engaged with nor watched more than a few seconds of those types of videos yet my feed is full of them.

Ah yes the "look at what brown people are doing to our cities" accounts... One of the main reasons I am not on there anymore.

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#58

Post by dismalaf »

RankingMember wrote: post #44
dismalaf wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every platform has Holocaust denial because that's the one thing that the far-left and far-right both agree on...

The far-left denies the Holocaust? On what grounds?

It's usually some mental gymnastics related to Israel, Gaza, etc... Because many Muslims deny the holocaust, much of the far-left has co-opted that rhetoric. It's super visible on TikTok, for example.

Edit - some comments below this seem to doubt. Just go on TikTok to politically charged posts about Palestine. This whole thread is about social media. Not holocaust denial on the mainstream left, specifically the far-left on social media

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#59

Post by jampa »

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 that add nothing to the discussion, like "I agree," getting hundreds of upvotes.

Re: Manufactured consensus on x.com

#60

Post by raverbashing »

richwater wrote: post #31
mrdoops wrote: post #20

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

> The worst by far is Reddit The website is truly unusable unless you directly go to small niche subreddits and even then you roll the dice with unpaid mods with a power complex.

And use old, the only interface not designed with the tiktok brain in mind

(and the mobile app is just atrocious, RIF was way better in usability, etc)

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