Taking the fight to Reddit... FOR MONEY.
Taking the fight to Reddit... FOR MONEY.
200 comments
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There absolutely no way this isn't an ad for upvote buying services lol this is so insane and transparent and the worst part is it'll work
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Have to respect someone getting in on grifting conservatives without even endorsing their views in the process.
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In this case they do very much help those views though. Either they create the appearance of public appeal, which draws more people to these views, or they manage to disrupt spaces that formerly fostered a different political culture.
If we look at Twitter we see the second aspect particularly strongly.
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Keen observation skills. I wouldn’t have caught on, I’m sad to say.
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How to milk the conservatives.
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Thats exactly what I believe. I know there is no limits to stupidity, but don’t you use bots to make it seem legit? Who would go around saying, “hey guys we’re losing. We should use BOTS. We should buy BOTS ACCOUNT AND UPVOTES from BOTSFORSALE.org”
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It screams Steve Bannon.
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The all caps gave it away
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I mean, it's an ad but it's also thought-provoking and interesting. Before now we all knew what was happening we just didn't know the details also kind of interesting to see proof it's a conversation starter. I think I would have preferred it if the author would have redacted the URL though.
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"It is unambiguous clear that our message is toxic and the majority of people reject our ideology and us with it. Therefore, the most logical solution is to create an artificial narrative via manipulation and vote-buying that makes it appear that people like us." -these people probably
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Capitalism™
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Or... I run a reddit botnet, and Christmas is coming up. What's the easiest group of rubes to fleece?
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probably the group that follows repub politics
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That's what they've been doing for decades. And unfortunately they've been very successful at it.
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“Our opinions are wildly unpopular to the point where even if a bunch of us showed up we’d struggle to make a difference so we’re gunna need to buy upvotes!”
Like…c’mon.
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Have you seen the content there?
Yeah they're gonna need lots of money to get any attention
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Fuckin’ yikes.
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I love the conservatives think that's such cutting slander when really having a male politician who understands the need for feminine hygiene products by uterus havers everywhere is such a breath of fresh air
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The right may not have good ideas, organizational skills, charm, ethics, understanding of economics, history, or politics, or strength in numbers, but they do have the one thing more important than all of these.
Money!
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Gasp, you all surely don't believe that conservatives would ever engage in voter manipulation tactics... r-r-right!?
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No definitely not. They've been wanting "fair elections" all this time.
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This must be why Trump said they people only need to vote one more time, and then they'll never need to do so ever again.
One election, to rule them all... and in the darkness bind them
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Why do I have a feeling this person has a vested financial interest in one of those upvote buying farms.
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Who grifts the griftmen?
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This is what they do in real life too though. They know the US is mostly liberal (based on the popular vote) so they have to abuse money and historical power to manipulate the votes into their favor.
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"Ignore morality and get shit done", aka The Ends Justify The Means
God or something, probably?
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Probably a scam, but congrats on discovering the Russian disinformation strategy from 2016.
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Not exactly a scam. I still browse Reddit, and the Jordan Peterson Memes sub has been popping up in Popular for a few weeks, it had been a completely obscure sub before. The posts are ALL about US politics too...on a meme sub for a Canadian 'life coach'
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That's because Jordan Peterson is one of the entry points to the alt-right rabbit hole. Despite being from Canada, his brand of grift is intricately tied to U.S. politics. If you have a very short amount of time, some people have put together some very short videos talking about Peterson:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIK-x5uT6oS9EnO9-D6ePsWKOxtFhDZdF
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Ender’s Game was prescient text, regardless of Orson Scott Card’s personal beliefs.
Locke and Demosthenes are now armies of manipulative bots (but often real humans), shaping political discourse throughout the world. The Internet gave mind control powers to people with money, ambition, or both. We saw it with the Bernie Sanders and Trump movements in 2016 on Reddit, all too clearly for those who lived through an era where bullshit detection was a critical skill.
I was once fairly defeatist on this subject: the bad guys won, got Trump elected, and kicked off a new era of 80s conservatism that demonized progressive values like environmental conservation, freedom of choice in a number of matters, and equality.
But now, I’m starting to see young people stand up to their boomer relatives at Thanksgiving and bring facts and logic to social media discussions. And I have regained some hope that we will once again find a way to make the progressive “line go up“. Our society seems to swing like a pendulum between the right and left, over decades, and it feels like the Trump era was a swing too violent for most of us. It’s time to swing back.
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Didn't Clinton spend $40m on shareblue forum sliding?
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the Russian disinformation strategy
I'll never understand why people attribute to the Russian government what was in the obvious best-interests of the Republican Party and the conservative movement.
If you asked who owns and operates the FOX News Channel, or Sinclair Media, or Clear Channel Radio, or any of the other dozen right-wing propaganda projects, I have to wonder how many people would reflexively insist "Russia" despite all of the money spilling in from the UK, Australia, Canada, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and the O&G Industry.
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I’ll never understand why people attribute to the Russian government what was in the obvious best-interests of the Republican Party and the conservative movement.
Maybe because there was a demonstrated and provable coordinated effort by the Russian government in the 2016 election to get Trump elected? Look up project lakhta. Russian election interference and the efforts of the domestic conservative movement can (and do) exist simultaneously.
What do you have against attributing to the Russian government actions that are demonstrably attributable to the Russian government?
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Their values are aligned, theirs strategies are aligned, and so their efforts are aligned.
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Hey, remember what happened to Digg? Why a bunch of people moved over to Reddit in the first place?
I guess not a lot of people remember, so let me tell you.
Bunch of dipshits ran upvote brigades. Stories they didn't like got buried really fast.
Now, Digg was a hive mind site to begin with - good luck posting anything the hive mind didn't care about. But add blatant political machinations on top of that, and the site got unusable real fast.
Take a few guesses which political views those groups were trying to futilely promote while quashing opponents. Go on. (I'll give a hint, some of them retreated to Conservapedia)
So that's what killed Digg. ...that, and the Digg admins were being dicks and the site redesign sucked ass. (...insert comparison to modern Reddit here)
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Those who don't learn history are doomed to repeat it. Thanks for the quick lesson
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But conservatives want to repeat history.
Just not the good parts.
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I don't remember Digg being infiltrated by right wing conservatives. What I do remember was a website with a community that dickrode its power users so hard that unless you were a figure like MrBabyMan, your content would not get a single vote. The only people who actually used Digg's social features (i.e. Friends lists) were blog spammers.
IIRC Digg v4 tried to address the issue by making users subscribe directly to news websites and dedicated content creators. They hated it and flocked immediately to their competitor.
Reddit has the same power user problem, albeit 1000x worse. Say what you want about the people who gamed Digg's front-page, but they didn't have the power to be judge, jury and executioner when moderating communities.
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That's only part of what killed Digg. The final nail in the coffin was when they redesigned the website to give power users even more power to control the front page than they already had.
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Yep, as I tried to hint in the last paragraph. 😆
Digg's biggest sin was that the votes were all that mattered, and the admins just leaned into that by coddling the power users. That's why Digg got so toxic to random people who just wanted to share something cool they found. The last redesign just made it official that there are those whose votes matter and the unwashed plebs. Everyone already knew people were fucking with the votes, and the admins just said "go right ahead".
So what Reddit offered was at least some assurance that the algorithm would combat blatant vote manipulation by power blocs and that people could share cool stuff fairly. Digg users promptly voted with their feet.
Now, to Reddit's credit, the system worked for years. Admins absolutely condemned vote manipulation and actively fought it. People were actively against all sorts of vote brigading, and the admins listened.
Problem is, it all changed. Corporate media influencing came in, under radar. Political memefluencers came in, under radar. It's all allowed unless it's blatantly against policy and everyone pretends it's just organic random users.
Now, you don't see the Reddit admins talking about what made the site work so well back in the day. I'm not sure they're interested in maintaining the anti-brigading and anti-manipulation algorithms. They're this close to saying "fuck it, it's a free-for-all" and going full Digg publicly.
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That's not what happened at all imho.
What killed digg realistically is that it had less control than Reddit and because Kevin Rose blocked posts about the DVD encryption codes and people over reacted to that block. For days digg was full of people simply reposting them (as Digg was worried about getting sued which was fair enough)
Didn't really have anything to do with politics.
Don't forget, this was back in the day of fat people hate and Reddit hosting child porn. Reddit administration was never great
Digg admins were actually ok and I never had an issue with them
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Don’t forget, this was back in the day of fat people hate and Reddit hosting child porn. Reddit administration was never great
Reddit in the earliest days was basically 4chan but less controlled and more spread-out. There were thousands of illegal and horrifyingly abusive subreddits. Every single time one got taken down, it was this massive, whinging drama show from thousands of chuds screaming about their "rights" and "censorship."
By the time admins came for the less overtly evil ones, like the weirdly prevalent communities dedicated to fantasizing about punching particular people in the face, reddit had very much become the WalMart of the internet. Not the cleanest or nicest place to visit, but it certainly had everything and was convenient if you needed a fix at odd hours.
I don't even remember Digg but I remember it seemed relatively short-lived in the early days of the explosion of forum sites. A lot of people were trying to strike gold with the next big thing as internet popularity was soaring. There are likely hundreds of other big sites like Digg that people used to frequent that have also since died in the mass-extinction events of the 2010's and beyond.
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That's pretty much US politics summed up, isn't it? Ignore what they people say and throw money into it to get what you want.
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"How dare the left accuse us of fascism, they're the fascists! Now c'mon everyone, let's conspire to fake vote totals so we can assert authority we didn't earn."
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Everyone with a Reddit account, let's sell upvotes to conservatives on Jordan_Peterson_Memes. It's income redistribution with zero impact.
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Point me to the sign up sheet
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Subvert the will and desires of the majority using money and shitty practices....how very GOP of them.
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Subvert the will and desires of the majority
Come on, dude. This is Reddit, not a vote in parliament. The site's entire business model revolves around astroturfing.
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this is not reddit. nor was the screenshot from reddit so you make no sense. you are blaming what they say on reddit yet they are just saying let's do this on reddit.
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Remember guys "no brigading" is only a reddit-wide rule and does not apply to brigade efforts that originate from outside of reddit. Also, koboldcpp is great for self-hosted text generation ai. I don't know who needs to read this so go crazy with that information.
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They'd fit right at home on r/Asmongold. That place has become a KotakuInAction offshoot in recent months. So much right wing, anti-woke and anti-trans content gets posted there that I'm surprised the admins haven't quarantined or banned it.
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so i'm not very familiar with asmongolds content, but I know someone who keeps posting his videos into a group chat I'm in together with anti-woke "why are there minorities in my video games" comments.
is that the type of content asmongold produces or is my acquaintance just extremely dense?
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I've watched asmongold a bit on and off over the years, and I don't think that he himself is really right wing (unless that changed recently), more just a no-filter, full-on basement dweller but mostly apolitical. Can't say it's really surprising if some of the audience has the 4chan vibe though. Never participated/cared about the chat or the subreddit though.
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Counter argument: Reddit is predominately American. These upvote sites use low cost foreign slave labor to generate their output. Buying upvotes is outsourcing jobs. Keep Reddit American. Don't buy upvotes!
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I'm not American and I am a Redditor!
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I'm sure that they don't have an economic agreement with that fake up votes website
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Owning an "upvote company" is literally the only reason on God's Earth that anyone could give seven shits about content and voting on reddit.
It may have had cultural impact back in 2016, but that was almost a decade ago and the world is different, reddit is different.
Now it's just bots arguing with bots and every post is a surreptitious paid ad for something. People haven't quite "move on" but they certainly don't give reddit communities the relevance they once had. People broadly roll their eyes at reddit. In the last couple offices I worked in, the people joked that you're "never allowed to share something on Teams if it came from reddit" and "reddit is a dirty secret, everyone knows we browse it, but it's shameful to admit it."
Sorry reddit, the cool factor has left the building a long, long time ago.
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Ngl I don’t know why he’s here but I fuck with his vibe
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Same I like him
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You're telling me I could be getting paid for this shit?
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Yes, but you have to be dead inside.
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Way ahead of you
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Reddit was taken over by the right wing a long time ago. This person is out of the loop
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I get the feeling that the Admins and management are pretty right leaning, but the mods and users are left.
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The mods of the main subs have been getting progressively more right wing. And I consider the mainstream of the democrats right wing.
They’re not MAGA but they’re basically moderate repubicans these days. And that is what has taken over the main subreddits.
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What are you smoking, reddit is a liberal echo chamber.
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Depends on the subreddit. Conservatives have made a conscious effort to take over moderation on various subreddits that represents individual cities often in blue states. Some have succeeded in that, others have failed.
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Does anyone else feel like setting up a scam site that claims to sell upvotes, and donates all the profit to the Harris/Walz campaign?
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Won’t last long unless the votes actually come in.
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That's why you tell them to only post on subs that are already a chud circle jerk like here. They upvote him and you take the money. If they don't just say the libs have a downvotes bot focused on only them and you need more money to DDOS it for Trump. They will appreciate how important they are. Like any scam, the end goal is to find egotistical idiots and this is rich soil.
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"The libs are TOO FERVENT and keep downvoting us! Donate more!!!"
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cause everyone knows if conservative replies get upvoted enough people who hate Trump will have a sudden change of heart. Is this guy in the upvote for money business or what?
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buying a bunch of upvotes on a website dominated by bot accounts is a very cost effective way to run an AstroTurf campaign
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"I thought trump was a terrible person, but the updoots be changed my mind"
Yeah sure. I mean there's probably at least one or two feeble minded redditors like that but... Not a bunch. Especially if they're confining themselves to right leaning subs.
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Astroturfing is when corpos pretend to be grassroots
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I'm not terribly against stealing money from maga dumb idiots.
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I remember, back in 2016, when the /r/The_Donald website just used a bunch of bots and other fake accounts to juice their content to the front page week after week.
And then the Mods tweaked the algorithm so you wouldn't have a wall of Trump memes on the front page every day. /r/The_Donald folks spilled into other sites and started repeating the strategy, so Mods had to tweak the algorithm again. And there was this back and forth that dragged all the way into the general election, at which point the Admins finally decided to ban the sub. But they also had to ban a slew of leftist subs, to make things fair.
And now we have Hexbear, a site composed of purged Reddit-fuges. But Reddit is still full of Trumpies, for some curious reason.
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But Reddit is still full of Trumpies, for some curious reason.
It's because conservative voices are being silenced!
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And there was this back and forth that dragged all the way into the general election, at which point the Admins finally decided to ban the sub.
My recollection is that they didn't ban the sub until after the election, like a year into his presidency, shortly after the Charlottesville protest. I might be wrong though, I wasn't really paying all that much attention to them.
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This is the equivalent of not being able to get your crush to like you, so you pay hooker just to tell people you got a girlfriend.
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I bought Canada so I always have a Canadian supermodel girlfriend who just can’t be here right now.
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"We're victims!!! 😭😭😭"
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Does they encourage people to buy upvotes in friendly subreddits? Either they are not friendly or them buying internet points is even more useless than I thought.
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I think they are posting on "friendly" subreddits so their posts dont get deleted and buy upvotes so they are recommended to people browsing r/all
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So, putting aside the questionable morals of this person. I'm not sure alt right reddit threads are the election swing spot they seem to think.
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Isn't that what got the crow guy perma-ip-banned?
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Ip bans are incredibly ineffective though. You just get a new IP from your isp
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Depends on ISP.
If IPv4 ban, it is indeed 100% ineffective. Nearly all ISPs either CGNAT or rotate addresses. If IPv6, the ISP just forwards a 64 bit block and leaves it at that. You must call and request a new IP block. In which case you'll be told yes or no. If yes, it's either free or paid.
I know with ATT Fiber, they don't offer address changes unless there is some security or service interruption reason. You have to unplug the modem for 30+ days so the lease expires if you don't want to do rounds with support. My IPv4 address has changed once, but my IPv6 address block has never changed.
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Just more conservatives casually admitting that they can't win anything without rigging the vote.
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Eww far right social media filled with racism,anti sentiment,islamphobia etc etc
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its definitely not election interference guys, trust me, it's definitely not election interference.
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Busing in those upvotes again?
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This is just sad. How will this not get people sick and tired of it?
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Lol. What’s truth social stock worth today? 12 cents and a bucket of chicken wing bones?
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I cringe every time I see someone like this say “to oblivion.”
Really? Is that really necessary? Why so consistently specific?
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Fuckin reddit out of all places too
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Karli can suck a fat dick
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There's no way buying upvotes is illegal right?
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It's against Reddit's ToS, but as far as I'm aware there's no law that says you can't pay to manipulate social media content.
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This might be the funniest thing I’ve seen today.
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People have gotten sick and tired of r/pics having loads of political content, and while some candidates are better than others, many people are sick and tired of seeing "orange man bad" yet again. The people who were supposed to be propaganda targets immediately knew this was propaganda and the rampant election posts didn't make Harris more popular. If this plan is enacted, people will see the astroturfing straightaway, and more people will see Trump supporters as bothersome cultists than as freedom fighters. It doesn't help that, if pro-Trump people can brigade the sub, so can anti-Trump people, and the whole debacle will just get shut down.
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I would have been so confused if I was still on reddit. Back then, downvotes were proof you were right and you triggered the woke hive, and upvotes meant you said obvious information, woke opinion or funny not offensive jokes. No upvotes/downvotes meant you said something either really thoughtfull or really boring.
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Reddit culture (and lemmy by extension) changed so much in a short time. Just a few years ago you weren't downvoted just because someone disagreed with your opinion. The polarization and culture war turned reddit users completely dogmatic and as immune to arguments or facts as magats.
The same is true of lemmy. Most users prefer to defederate from socialist instances because "tankies". Which really shows how right wing "limbrols" have become. They hate socialists with a different viewpoint on US empire more than they hate fascists. The fascists have succeeded in utterly destroying reddit and lemmy as a platform for useful political discourse.
We now have the vast majority of "liberals" on lemmy upvoting comments using racist slang terms for Russians to dehumanize them, just like they did for enemies in Japan, Vietnam or Korea. The fascists have made massive inroads.
The OP meme almost seems quaint to me now. The real culture war is elsewhere now.
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Most users prefer to defederate from socialist instances because “tankies”.
To the degree that people bother to defederate from anything (most users don't) I would assume its because apologists for Putin and China are about as odious to talk to as MAGAs
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Just a few years ago you weren’t downvoted just because someone disagreed with your opinion.
Lol what? What year did you join Reddit? As someone who's been there since 2008, I promise you that this is nothing new.
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Yeah, I was on Reddit for 13 years and I don't remember that ever.
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Reddit was very monoculture in the beginning. The neckbeards upvoted each other because they generally agreed on the same opinions. That gets mistaken for adherence to reddiquette.
It became a rhetorical tool to prove whatever an individuals political or social adversaries are dummies because they don't use reddit properly in current year unlike some glory day that never existed.
If they really did use reddit back in the day as they claim then all of the self referential satire about reddits pseudo-intellectualism must have gone over their head. It was like the second most popular type of content. Second only to the actual circle jerking.
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Not sure what year but the culture definitely changed somewhere around 2008-2016. A big part was trump of course, but before that the rise in android and iphone and becoming more popular to a broader segment of the public (e.g. "boomers"). Before it was tech enthusiasts all on desktop PC. This was also before toxic gamer culture.
If you don't think it changed you must have trauma induced amnesia.
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Upvotes and downvotes have always been glorified agree/disagree buttons.
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This is simply incorrect. It's true that they now evolved completely to that, but you are wrong stating that it was always like this. It's still in the reddiquette: https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/205926439-Reddiquette
Vote. If you think something contributes to conversation, upvote it. If you think it does not contribute to the subreddit it is posted in or is off-topic in a particular community, downvote it.
This used to be understood that people often treated it as agree/disagree but that you are "supposed to be better than that". And that made a difference.
It's historic revisionism to say it was always like this because clearly there was discussion about this if you go just 10 years back: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/search/?q=downvote
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Just a few years ago you weren't downvoted just because someone disagreed with your opinion.
Yeah, no, "downvote is jot a disagree button" has always been aspirational on reddit.
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Most users prefer to defederate from socialist instances because "tankies".
I would advocate for defederation based on idiotic politics but calling tankies socialist is disingenuous. Since when is genocide denial and or worship is an acceptable behavior?
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The problem is that the mainstream is simply declaring historical events one way and any other dissenting viewpoint or evidence is suppressed. And there IS evidence.
The fascists (and Putin's propaganda trolls) have been successful in disruption any dialogue between people from the actual left: socialists. Not the neoliberal "democrats".
And now you do their work for them: You censor the socialists (marxist-leninist, maoists) because some "dirtbag left" troll once was mean to someone. You probably can't even link to an example of what you accuse entire group of. But this tankie slur gets repeated and amplified more and more. People simply call you tankie, downvote and everyone piles on without thinking.
The problem is that disinformation and post-truth doublethink on the so called "left" (=neoliberals) is almost indistinguishable from MAGA like OP.
If you check out lemmy from an instance that hasn't defederated from the socialist instances you'll see that basically half of lemmy activity is invisible - the socialist half. The result is rather predictable.
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