Not surprising at all.
In other news, GTA Online is awesome! I am definitely not a plant or anything like that, go check out GTA Online!
Or something like that.
lol
I remember when /r/HailCorporate was a trending sub and then it just sort of got strangled to death.
Also remember the periodic waves of “Hillary is bae! Mother of dragons! Yas Queen!” and “I love Mayor Pete” and “KHive ftw!” and even a smattering of Mitt Romney fanboi-ism on /r/politics, as their campaigns rose and fell.
Nevermind the absolutely sycophantic corporate ghoul AMAs. Bill Gates, Ann Coulter, and Don Lemon all leap to mind. Just the absolute worst moderation imaginable for these guys. Then there was the Elon Musk AMA. Jesus fucking Christ.
I remember one specific account that spammed everything pro Tulsi into the politics subreddit. It was glaringly obvious that they were paid.
Just checked on him, 5 months ago he was posting to sports subreddits… which also feels like a red flag.
The only subreddit I still check is /r/cfb because it’s by far the best college football specific part of the internet and my Fanactus account seems to have been deleted. I’m not disclosing what my old account was but I was a upper mid level account there for about 7 years, not bragging just framing, it has gotten really fucking shilly in comparison to even last year although itd been happening for a while. It crescendoed with the release of the new college football madden analog, which does make logical sense for why, but there was some hard corporate dick riding. I don’t care for sports video games that don’t involve Mario or have the word Jam in the title so I don’t know if the game is any good but it was obviously paid
Is it a possibility that shill accounts are using sports subreddits to obfuscate the fact that they are still accounts? Like “Hey there fellow citizens, I’m totally a normal poster and a red blooded American who really likes sports!”.
oh yah, I remember the absolute torrent of crypto shills that started spamming the place when crypto shill posts from other subs started getting posted there.
They were proper angry that they got called out.
Also remember the periodic waves of “Hillary is bae! Mother of dragons! Yas Queen!” and “I love Mayor Pete” and “KHive ftw!” and even a smattering of Mitt Romney fanboi-ism on /r/politics, as their campaigns rose and fell.
Literally no, I was there and I don’t recall that at all.
Perhaps the record was corrected after you left.
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Those of us who noticed when HailCorporate first got shadowbanned could see that particular train a coming. Reddit was always going to strangle its own content to death in order to make it more advertiser friendly. I’m honestly surprised it took as long as it did.
Seen this post over and over. This is not a new study at that point
New study: 15% of Lemmy posts are studies about 15% of all Reddit content
:D
those are some low numbers. between corporate, state, and anonymous shills and trolls, I wholly believe at least 50% of all reddit content is paid for or manipulative for agenda based groups. the sheer number of repetitve posts with repetitve comments constantly being on the front page is pure propaganda. Of course I rmemebr back in the old days when the reddit feed was in (almost) real time where you couldliterally wait every 10 minutes and refresh for an almost completely new front page. Now it’s all about repetivie agendas and narratives operating in cycles to manipulate public opinions. the same lame post will sit on the front page for entire days.
I’d say there is a huge amount of bots, then the smart bots, then the actual shills. The smarter ones run complex operations and are able to use their own power to self propel their own stories. And there are a lot of similar ‘power users’ who are not wholly paid for by someone but would do work for the highest bidder. I’d bet that yes, 50% of what’s on the front page of major things is reputation management or Hail Corporate stuff, then I’d wager the mostly less popular stuff is actual people, with a ton of bad posts from all sides at the low popularity
“At least” doing a lot of lifting here.
The next 65% are political trolls
Well, you’ve gotta leave enough of a percentage for all the Russian and CCP sockpuppets.
Yeah I was surprised the state propagandists left the corpos that much market share.
I just hope that the next new study doesn’t end up being “New Study: At Least 15% of All Lemmy Content is Corporate Trolls Trying to Manipulate Public Opinion”, otherwise I would be wondering WTF is going on, is Lemmy on the way of being enshittified by Corporate Morons?
Hey, good to see you around! How is your koala community going?
Remember the_donald started out as a meme sub that got taken over? I fell victim to astroturfing that election season. Thankfully it has made me more skeptical about online interactions now.
Why is Medium conflating trolls and shills?
Paid propagandists are shills, not trolls.
True. For example I’m here for pleasure not for business.
Agreed. Trolls don’t conceal themselves
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You got me. Sometimes revanced not having ads isn’t a good thing
Wonder what the percent of AI datasets being propaganda is
Yes.
Portillos bots would camp on the Chicagofood sub and Stan about adding cheese sauce to everything and to make sure to save room for the chocolate cake. Nobody irl from the area would hype anything from that chain
Devil’s advocate here. Does not pretty much any post on the subject of politics that is not simply reporting constitute an attempt to manipulate public opinion? Are they specifically referencing nation states trying to influence public opinion?
Yeah sure but it’s the scale and sincerity.
Me telling you my opinion on something is just that. I am just some guy. I don’t have access, or even want access, to a billion bots spamming my opinion.
Also my opinion even if applied really doesn’t mean much practically. Generally speaking I am pro infrastructure so if somehow the government spent more money on infrastructure that only translates, at best, to a small raise on my part. Not the same as say a major corp.
You see a community board where people can put up ads. What you expect to see are piano lessons, apartment for rent, tutoring etc. little things that really only matter to one person. You don’t expect some megacorp to rip every sign down and turn it into a billboard that blasts from speakers each time someone walks past.
Basically it’s a question of degree not of kind. It might be that it is all the same kind but the degree is so vastly different.
Astroturfing. Ads disguised as user content.
You see an ad, you recognize it as an ad. Your opinion is probably unchanged.
You see a user saying “Hey this product is actually pretty good,” it’s more likely to sway your feelings on the product, or at least your perception of the general sentiment to the product.
I’m mostly just wondering how they’re distinguishing between astroturfing and legit posts.
Key word: At least
Used Reddit for years. There’s no way the percentage is that low.
That is probably correct. 15% of total content, but probably 70% of the content you see. Reddit has a tonne of content posted that almost nobody sees
15% of content and then fake upvoted to heaven. Could work
Right!? At least on Lemmy I can drink my Pepsi® in peace. Like for real, there’s nothing better than scrolling through some funny memes with a delicious can of ice cold Pepsi®, my fellow [insert slang term; plural]!
A chronic compulsive content-stealer creature like gallowboob might have encompassed that 15% all by himself.
A chronic compulsive content-stealer creature
Green___Cat?
We have our own version of him here on lemmy as well
We do? I see a few common posters, but no one acting like a content creator who is actually just ripping off stuff that didn’t get traction.
I’ve seen at least 2 usernames that submit A LOT, and if you search your feed i’m sure you’ll be able to spot them easily. They also comment on rising posts quite a lot and personally mod a few communities. I’ve not seen them repost content that doesn’t get traction, but they do repost content taken from reddit
Yeah the squid and Picard but they are not bots I think just ppl with no social life whatsoever or sacrificing it so we have shit to browse o7
I won’t ever post a thing cause Reddit convinced me that it is never a super good idea. There are roving human freaks out there circling the social media like vultures looking for prey. Ugly people hiding in the shadows of the web.
I’ll block them here as well.
You don’t need much content or many comments to achieve the goal, when you have thousands of votes behind it for the good placement.
You may only need a couple hundred though. Reddit’s algorithm is particularly broken and once a post is on hot it’s unstoppabe.
Looking for office equipment recommendations on Reddit recently, every single thread had fake suggestions that were clearly advertiser accounts. They sounded incredibly fake like bots that pulled descriptions from Amazon, all had similar links with tracking, and all were upvoted to the top.
Yep, Reddit continues to shit itself.
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Go to r/virtualreality and try to give a negative opinion about meta and the quest 3.
say: “i am sexually attracted ro Samsung gear vr”
To be fair it’s great value hardware if you don’t care about privacy.
good thing i care about my privacy and VR makes me nauseous.
I prefer it when someone watches.
I like to watch
The Meta OnlyFans partnership you’ve always wanted.
goto horny jail
…or battery life, or comfort, or buying batteries for your controllers…
