• niktemadur@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      A chronic compulsive content-stealer creature like gallowboob might have encompassed that 15% all by himself.

          • Vaquedoso@lemmy.world
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            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

            • Nicoleism101@lemm.ee
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              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.

    • vxx@lemmy.world
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      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.

    • jettrscga@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      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.

    • neo@lemy.lol
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      4 months ago

      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]!

      • slaacaa@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        Absolutely disgusting that someone would sell out like that. Not me, my integrity is strong like the legal protection I get from litigatenow.com, where you can sign up for a free consultation today, if you use my referral code #loveads2024

    • hakunawazo@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Ha, I’ve discovered your hidden advertising like I discovered the great taste of a crunchy Big Kahuna Burger.
      Let’s check out some random customer opinions:
      Jules W.: “Mm-hmm! This is a tasty burger!”

      Marvin: “Mind-blowing!”

      • Nicoleism101@lemm.ee
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        4 months ago

        Ad comment in reality:

        ^453 u/DrJamieSmith34:
        Actually fast food isn’t that bad for you. A Big Mac for example has everything you need nutrition wise. Carbs, veggies, protein.

  • nilzen@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    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.

    • Aolley@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      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

  • Margot Robbie@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that in terms of marketing, reddit has a disproportionately high level of return in interaction relative to its size, while Twitter has traditionally had a low level of return relative to its size.

    For some reason, comments on reddit has always been viewed as more trustworthy relative to other social media platform, despite reddit or’s general reputation for being confidently incorrect on many subjects.

    There are certain people whose entire career was made by their reddit posts, yet, it was always odd to me that reddit never managed to effectively capitalize on this other than making their platform worse with every update.

    Testing out this theory has been interesting.

    • Potatos_are_not_friends@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      I worked at startups and I’m not going to deny that I was absolutely horking my company as a solution for years on Reddit. Especially with niche products.

      This was from 2014-2018, and then I left startups and worked in corps.

      When Google has plans to slurp reddit comments, I bet I could gamify reddit even more.

    • SleezyDizasta@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Reddit’s strategy is genuinely brain dead. Just think of the shit they’ve been up to:

      • Jacking up API prices to unreasonable levels and killing off third party apps that brought millions of users on to your platform
      • Continuously make the UI shittier and shittier to the point where it’s unusable
      • Do the same with the app
      • Kill off old Reddit which is the sole reason millions of users still use the site
      • Add awards and expand the feature to basically become paid reaction emojis
      • Remove awards even though they were one of the biggest revenue streams
      • Announce it was a mistake and add the awards again
      • Add avatars that nobody asked for and make some of them paid
      • Add a premium subscription that does nothing and do absolutely nothing to improve it
      • Add a bunch of useless features that nobody uses like Reddit live

      Truly the works of geniuses.

  • egeres@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    I’ve said this before, but we also need to be cautious about this on lemmy and devise ways to empower mods and the community to fight back against this, I’m not entirely sure how since it’s a very complex problem

    • Starayo@lemm.ee
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      It’s bloody difficult.

      I used to mod on /r/videos years and years back. We had this one guy who was not very active as a mod in the day to day stuff, but was respected because he’d basically disappear for a few months and then reappear with a huge post in our modding sub basically going “so these are all spammers/malicious actors, here’s their profiles, the accounts were created in these waves, here’s where they’ve copied existing posts / the identical generic comments and things they use to get around our posting requirements, the targets they’ve been promoting, etc”. Just huge pages of thoroughly researched proof.

      This was well before we had huge awareness of situations like Russia manipulating social media - it was usually those viral video places that buy up rights to videos and handle licensing and promotion. It’s why for a long time any licensed videos from places like viralhog etc were outright banned - they were constantly trying to manipulate reddit postings in bad faith, and even trying to socially engineer the mod team in modmail, so any videos that mentioned a licensing deal in the description were automatically banned from posting.

      If we didn’t have that one guy spotting the patterns, most of it would have gotten by easily. Unfortunately he did eventually disappear for good. No clue what happened to him, hope he just cut out social media or something. But with the spamming and astroturfing stuff… Even after fighting it for years I can’t tell you what to do to counter it besides “have more of that guy”.

    • AhismaMiasma@lemm.ee
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      4 months ago

      I agree, this is a very complex issue. As a community we should come together and brainstorm ideas while quenching our thirst with a nice can of Diet Pepsi, the zero-sugar alternative to being thirsty!

      • m13@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        No. The goal of capitalism is to turn all things into commodities to be bought and sold. It has the growth pattern of cancer. Communism is a moneyless, stateless, classless society where would be free to focus on human-centred objectives like feeding and housing all people, making our environment sustainable, pursuing scientific and academic goals without need for a profit to be generated just for the sake of endless commodification.

          • cschreib@lemmy.world
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            4 months ago

            That is cynical. Been hearing this all my life as an excuse for why we can’t have nice things. If you don’t try, you don’t get.

            • TheDorkfromYork@lemm.ee
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              4 months ago

              The Soviet Union threatened my parents and grandparents lives. My country did try it, we decided against it. All the issues that capitalism has, communism still has. Add centralized power, and human exploitation is worse. Communism will not solve your problems.

              • EatATaco@lemm.ee
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                4 months ago

                This is what people don’t seem to get. Human nature is when things are bad we band together, when things are good, we compete against each other. Capitalism leverages the latter while communism just tries to ignore that it exists.

                Capitalism certainly has its flaws, but it’s a far better starting point.

              • Aux@lemmy.world
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                4 months ago

                Yeah, only privileged people from Western countries who never knew struggle dream about communism. No one who went through communism will ever support that shit.

            • AutistoMephisto@lemmy.world
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              4 months ago

              Well, while Marx does call for a “winnowing of the State” after the workers seize the means, a problem we saw, in countries such as the USSR, once some of these revolutionaries got their hands on the levers of power, they found they rather liked it, and would not have let go willingly.

              • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
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                4 months ago

                I maintain that the issue is that they keep trying to have someone like a president. That doesn’t work. You need a council that has executive power, that way if one person starts getting corrupted, they can be winnowed out. If you really want it to work, you need to outlaw political parties from day one, and require that no one that wants to hold political office is eligible to do so.

                • AutistoMephisto@lemmy.world
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                  4 months ago

                  So, more like a sortition system, like how most Western courts select people for jury duty. Now that I think about it, it probably could work. We have wonders of technology that were once the realm of science fiction. These technologies could be leveraged positively in a communist system, I believe. AI in particular could solve things like the Numbers Problem. In a moneyless society, resources are allocated according to what is most necessary. I once watched a video where a problem was asked of the viewer. The scenario is as follows:

                  You are now the leader of a communist country. All markets and prices and money have been abolished. You want to build a train between City A and City B. There is a mountain between the two cities. You have two options. Option 1: Build a tunnel through the mountain, and Option 2: Build the track around the mountain.

                  1 will require less steel, but will take more manpower, as you will need more engineers to design and construct the tunnel.

                  Option 2 will require less manpower, but far more steel. That steel may be needed for other things, like appliances, medical equipment, homes and hospitals.

                  So, how do you prioritize resources? How do you know what your fellow citizens value more as a society?

                  You could do a survey, but then you run into the Numbers Problem. Your country has a lot of people. That’s a lot of survey responses. You’ll need nearly all of the available manpower in your country to sort them all. But with AI, that might not be necessary. The algorithm could collect all the responses and then output solutions to resource allocation based on those responses. To do this would require a massive surveillance network, though. People would no longer have much in the way of privacy.

                • UltraGiGaGigantic@lemm.ee
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                  4 months ago

                  I was under the impression that the nation state should be dissolved and everyone forms communes that reflect their values.

                  Direct democracy can work way better with smaller communities.

                  The problem is, you would need a large federation of these communes to band together to defeat a hostile nation state level threat.

                  The federation! Oh shit

                • Aux@lemmy.world
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                  4 months ago

                  It is exactly that. Otherwise Marx wouldn’t praise the Taiping massacre, which led to tens of millions of deaths.

          • m13@lemmy.world
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            4 months ago

            No shit. That’s why it’s a constant ongoing effort to build communism. The current system is leading us to certain annihilation.

            • TheDorkfromYork@lemm.ee
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              4 months ago

              Why wouldn’t communism lead to cancer like growth? Wouldn’t political leaders be incentivized by the masses for never ending quality of life improvements?

              Money is not the problem, it’s people. If replace the system, nothing changes. If we want sustainability, that needs to be desired by the masses, and that is achievable without communism.

              • m13@lemmy.world
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                4 months ago

                “People” are not the problem. That’s Malthusian garbage. Capitalism is the problem.

                Human beings use complex language and are capable of learning and developing culture.

                Capitalism is a system that teaches and enforces greed, competition and exploitation. Capitalism is a system that demands infinite growth for the sake of growth. It’s nonsensical, and obvious that such a system leads to over-exploitation and collapse. We are currently the way we are because we’ve been forced to under this system.

                We are capable of change, and learning to build communities and societies based on mutual aid, cooperation, and living in harmony with the world we live in.

                If we start to build such communities we will learn to cooperate just as the capitalist system has taught us to be greedy and exploit each other for fear of ending up without the means to house and feed ourselves.

                Why wouldn’t communism lead to cancer like growth? Because the objective isn’t endless expansion to make some imaginary line go up and hand over all the wealth to a small number of people. It’s to manage our world based on good science and achieving objectives that lead to a sustainable world in which all people’s basic needs are met.

                There are countless ways of building communism, and all of them require constant work. And yes it’s true that if implemented in an authoritarian manner it would lead to a bad outcome (still not as bad as our certain extinction under any capitalist system). Anarchism (and there are many schools of thought within anarchism) gives us many tools to build communism in a libertarian manner where we keep each other in check, ensuring that no one person gains power over others.

                Look at Rojava, revolutionary Catalonia, the Ukrainian Free Territory, the Shinmin Autonomous Region. These societies can work, expanded, and built upon if given half a chance.

        • SleezyDizasta@lemmy.world
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          Utopias don’t exist and never will, that’s why Marxism, and by extension communism, is such a colossal failure.

        • Aux@lemmy.world
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          No, communism is an authoritarian regime fuelled by a never ending genocide. Because there are always enemies of communism and they all must be killed.

      • SuperSpruce@lemmy.zip
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        Yes, which is why a delicate mixture of both is best because they spend their efforts fighting each other rather than fighting your freedom.

  • ashok36@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    The director of marketing at my company just got out of a meeting with reddit and is super hyped at funneling all our Facebook and Twitter dollars into reddit instead. I didn’t have the heart to tell him he’s five years too late.

  • Snapz@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    Uh, this post is a bummer and I don’t even know if I actually believe the premise… Whatever I guess, lett’s all actually just get out of here and go get some Sprite® brand family products, you guys.

    • 11111one11111@lemmy.world
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      According to backlink.com there is 265,500,000 active users per week so 15% of those weekly users means there is 39,825,000 corporate whores per week. To have the corporate whores filled with real people you would need the entire population of the following cities to even come close:

      New York, NY 8,258,035

      Los Angeles, CA 3,820,914

      Chicago, IL 2,664,452

      Houston, TX 2,314,157

      Phoenix, AZ 1,650,070

      Philadelphia, PA 1,550,542

      San Antonio TX 1,495,295

      San Diego, CA 1,388,320

      Dallas, TX 1,302,868

      Jacksonville, FL 985,843

      Austin, TX 979,882

      Fort Worth, TX 978,468

      San Jose, CA 969,655

      Columbus, OH 913,175

      Charlotte, NC 911,311

      Indianapolis, IN 879,293

      San Francisco, CA 808,988

      Seattle, WA 755,078

      Denver, CO 716,577

      Oklahoma City, OK 702,767

      Nashville, TN 687,788

      Washington, DC 678,972

      El Paso, TX 678,958

      Las Vegas, NV 660,929

      Boston, MA 653,833

      Detroit, MI 633,218

      Portland, OR 630,498

      Louisville, KY 622,981

      Memphis, TN 618,639

  • Nicoleism101@lemm.ee
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    People are literally defenceless vs propaganda. Me too. It takes extraordinary effort to decipher the fake from true and whether the true is a full truth or some small piece on silver platter.

    At this point I gave up and I just try to find out motives of every… player and align myself with these that best serve my interests.

    I don’t read much news because it’s all leftist or alt right propaganda drivel and while I align myself with the left because it serves my interests the best I won’t waste my time listening to their whatever narrative they crafted last week…

    Just observe their actions and try to find out the motives and then ask if their motives align with yours. Their words or narrative are worthless drivel at this point, mostly.

    Alt right drivel however is especially toxic and insulting but that is specifically done to evoke emotions. Anti gay propaganda crafted by closeted bisexual priests that want a piece from the table. It’s a bit like these email scammers who filter out less naive by making lots of grammar errors on purpose. You are supposed to be enraged either way.

    • UltraGiGaGigantic@lemm.ee
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      4 months ago

      Have you ever seen Adam Curtis’s “Century of the Self”? Super long, but it goes on about how marketing and politics intertwined.

      I think it’s on YouTube for free