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New Study: At Least 15% of All Reddit Content is Corporate Trolls Trying to Manipulate Public Opinion (medium.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/reddit@lemmy.world
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[–] 48 points 2 years ago (5 children)

Makes me miss the wild west days of the internet. Everything felt more... human. Now it feels like a soulless corporate husk. It's wild that covid babies won't know what those days were like.

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  • [–] 32 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Agreed, but Lemmy feels like the old Internet for the most part. I suspect that 90% ish of comments here are actual humans. The remaining 10% is pushing some kind of agenda.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I agree. There's also a pervasive feeling that lemmy is unaffected by manipulation and misinformation.

    If Lemmy continues to grow sooner or later it will become a large enough target for manipulation, and I wonder how federation will fare at that time.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Idk, hexbear content comes up in my feed and I feel that’s all manipulation and misinformation

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Alright. I been afraid to ask for fear of getting banned from other communities hosted on their instance, but what is the deal with hexbear? The chat community seems like satire, but it gives off the same kind of vibes as the_donald, just far-left instead of far right. Like, I consider myself a lefty, but their community just seems self-destructive and toxic. Maybe that's the point, though? Honestly unsure, and afraid to ask on their instance cuz I don't wanna get accused of "just asking questions" and banned.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago

    It really does feel like the_donald doesn’t it? I have no idea what they're about. They claim to far left but when you look at what they’re actually saying it’s all hate for any position on the left. Even the word “left” is a dirty word there. They're probably trolls trying to muddy the water. Maybe it’s some astroturfing or a space to experiment and generate new misinformation content. Idk, it sucks though, it feels all so toxic.

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  • [–] -2 points 2 years ago

    Definitely more than 10%. The only really unbiased info I'm finding here is related to obscure coding stuff, or Linux tips.

    Reddit has a lot of shills, but that's their business model and they guard access cuz they want to get paid. Lemmy has no moat, and no filter outside of individual mods

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago

    For me, it was AIM chatrooms and ebaums forums, maybe the super early days of Skype (before being sold to Microsoft obviously). Shit did feel more real, and while content maybe didn't come out at the same frequency, and there sure was shit, you just knew you were talking about it with other people. Made some good friends back then, would've been cool to stay in touch, but 20+ years is a long time.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    You're right in that it will never be like it was, but there are still fringes and niche communities that have that human feel. The thing is they're much less engaging without algorithms and UX driving engagement, we're not drawn to them in the same way.

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  • [+] -6 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Nostalgia fallacy

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    A two word rebuttal naming the argument type someone is using, does not constitute a valid argument.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Check out https://wiby.me/

    The Internet gained steam through hobbyists and is now that corporate shell as described. In my opinion it absolutely was a better place 25 years ago. Today the internet is filled with social engineering everyone's trying to influence something and it's terrible.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago

    The Internet started as this kinda long-haired hippy fella who thought it would be great if everyone could share knowledge and have conversations with everyone else regardless of where they are geographically. Then the corpos made him cut his hair, put on a suit and tie and get a damn job! And 25 years later, he's a yuppie corpo slave. I want my hippy back!

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