2y ago

Gonna need a bigger bowl!

Context: https://medium.com/collapsenews/new-study-at-least-15-of-all-reddit-content-is-corporate-trolls-trying-to-manipulate-public-b249bd42ab42

Without paywall/tracking: https://freedium.cfd/https://medium.com/collapsenews/new-study-at-least-15-of-all-reddit-content-is-corporate-trolls-trying-to-manipulate-public-b249bd42ab42

20 comments

Just 15%? Idk boss
- At least. That's the bare minimum they could definitively determine.
  
  It's based off of redditors self-reporting what they think - I don't know how reliable their opinions really are.
- The black bars make it look like you censored the image.
- That’s disgusting. Is it OC? Awful. Like who is the artist, specifically?
  People are the worst. Where can I find more of this to avoid?
  
  Search for the text spez is saying, you'll find a number of variations. The chinless Tate one is pretty funny too.
Calling out shills used to be like a sport.
- Wow those SpezTech goggles sound great! Where can I get a pair?!
  
  This is a masterpiece
- r/hailcorporate was great back before it became one big ads platform.
  
  I loved hailcorporate until it was taken over by crypto bros.
15% we know of. But they still pale next to the army of pompous dumbasses.
- The niche story/support communities were a real staying power for me until they started taking a nosedive ~5+ years ago. Suddenly power-users were showing up, posting their creative writing exercises in all tangentially related subs, and it got ate up because over the top drama is more entertaining to some than true (or at least very plausible) stories.
  It began with users policing others. You called out a fake story and you got half a dozen people playing devils advocate asking how you knew the story was fake. The poster being a serial poster who has dozens of box-ticking ragebait stories (per week) across multiple subs isn’t a clear enough indicator that this is a creative writing exercise for them.
  Before long, subs were seeing much more engagement due to copycats and drama seekers; suddenly the rules prohibited calling out fake stories. Suddenly your support subreddit for offloading about your abusive parents has turned into the personal playground for creative writers with 58 part epics about their mother getting arrested for the fifteenth time for brandishing a knife at a baby at the family dinner.
  I’ve already unsubbed from a community on Lemmy because I’ve seen one creative writer is cross-posting to Lemmy under the same name.
Lol oh, they are not TRYING. They've been succeeding for YEARS. Reddit was absolutely lousy with that shit well before Spez shit in our cereal.
How much did Cap'n Crunch pay you for this?
- Less than Samsung pays to AstroTurf r/android over there.
On the one hand, I look forward to a bigger lemmyverse. On the other, so do corporate trolls.
- This makes me wonder, is there a way to make communities that are inherently immune to trolls? Lemmy is for sure an improvement from r*ddit, since if an instance's admins become corrupt, users have the freedom to relocate to another instance. Would a social media platform with no reputation/voting system be even more resistant? On one hand, it would wipe out karma bots and account trading. But on the other hand, it would make it easier for someone to push propaganda by spamming from multiple accounts. Currently, imageboards seem to generally have less shilled content, but that may just be because imageboards tend to produce smaller and more niche communities (not to mention places like /pol, which most advertiser simply don't want to associate with)

20 comments