this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2024
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I saw a post earlier today suggesting quite a lot of those political posts may be coming from bots or paid actors. And considering those post more often than not also carry stigmatization and faith-like views, even if it's made by actual users, I think it's still a good call to at least keep a lower tolerance, maybe avoiding the rage-click posts and communities and sticking to more informative posts instead.
Do you think Lemmy is big enough to attract that kind of attention? I would be genuinely surprised if it does.
My theory was that the content just floods over from other sources. Where there are bots / paid people. Anecdotally I've not seen the classic bots like you see on Twitter and Reddit here yet.
Yes.
Lemmy has gotten quite a bit bigger since the Reddit API fiasco about a year ago, a lot of people who left reddit for lemmy tended fairly progressive/left leaning, seeing the writing on the wall and how enshitification was going to get so much worse as reddit was preparing for its IPO. These are the kinds of people that various special interest groups want to discourage voting. I mean most of the subreddits I was a part of devolved into awful botspam as mlre and more people left, and reddit really only exists for weirdo right wingers, and even the porn subreddits really degraded in quality or were just shuttered for being unmoderated.
Even though this lemmy instance is a global site with users from all over the world, users from the US still likely makes up a signification population here, and by extension, makes this instance a big target for election propaganda trying to dissuade the generally progressive potential voters here from voting by reminding us how bad genocide Joe is for slow rolling weapons to Israel or how he's forgotten about Ukraine because its not still in the headlines or some other propaganda.
If size is of matter, I would imagine it's due to being small, but with great potential for growth and diffusion, instead.
But like you said, and perhaps in a lighter point of view, it may indeed just be that same diffusion picking communities with established cultures already, instead of potential bots and paid actors.
I think it is, as it lacks bot detection, not quite as bad as Reddit, but you see people make arguments which sound good but don't stay on topic.
A big factor is the lack of barriers. They already have the complex software from other platforms, the only new code is to alter the interaction scripts. The "make post" script for Facebook becomes the "make post " script for Lemmy. The problem domains are so similar I bet you can use the same numerical sociology (a good topic to look up to learn about how governments make these bots) models/code across the platforms. Though you may need a few extra features to accurately express our love of Linux, star trek, and beans.
Do I dare ask? Beans?
It was similar in scope to the meme about holding your poop in to impress a new suiter, if you remember that. A silly meme that had forum wide appeal. It gave the site an early Internet charm vibe to me that made me fall in love
It was one of the first lemmy based meme phenomenon to blow up. Along with that guy that was trying to hold in their shit for 3 days.
~Anti~ ~Commercial-AI~ ~license~ ~(CC~ ~BY-NC-SA~ ~4.0)~
Context: I heard that lemmy will upvote anything. This is literally just a can of fucking beans
And then there was weeks and weeks of bean posts.
It had the vibe of something someone really wanted to "be a meme" and therefore it was flogged extremely aggressively. But, you know, there was beans. God, so fucking hilarious. Especially the millionth one, that was the best of the lot.
Still unironically better than the jeans shit that followed shortly after, though.
So this might make me seem surly, my excuse is that I watched "rage comics" get run into the ground over on Reddit, along with that hideous narwhal bullshit, and cringe like that sticks with you.
I wouldn't be surprised at all, I suspect that's what's happening on most social media platforms like Facebook, X, Reddit, and so on. You'll see completely crazy and extreme takes with tons of upvotes that no one you know irl would agree with.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing