It’s unbelievable how vocal the minority of conservatives on reddit have suddenly gotten in the one sub where a large demographic of important voters often interact. Hmmm. Coincidence?
They even try to do this on Lemmy. I’ve seen a few accounts recently that were obviously created with the sole purpose of spreading right-wing propaganda.
As someone who is routinely accused of being a bad actor, I have to say I find this speculation to be somewhat paranoid.
I think people generally overestimate the commonality of their own perspective.
I’m sorry you’ve had a bad experience. Nevertheless, I think that a certain basic skepticism is important in social media, because it is simply a fact that many interest groups on the internet are fighting for sovereignty of interpretation and use enormous resources to assert themselves - even with very questionable methods. This of course makes it difficult to build trust and have an open discourse. The advantage of Lemmy, however, is that at least the platform itself does not interfere too much, like Meta, X or TikTok do. Therefore, it seems to me that there is a much higher probability that you will be heard with your opinion, message or whatever, if you can provide good arguments for your point of view. Sure, there are some viewpoints that users reject despite good arguments, but from my Lemmy experience so far, that seems to me to be the exception rather than the rule.
There are several things that lots of bad actors and bots say frequently enough that if someone says it, it may be faster to assume paid shill than to take the extra time to vet someone or give their opinion real thought.
This extends to more than just politics.
what makes you think they aren’t sincerely held beliefs being posted by real people?
Oh a 17 day old account just in here defending shills? Blocked.
i didn’t defend anyone or the general act of shilling.
What makes you think they are?
this is a platform for people to discuss topics that interest them. i have every reason to believe it’s populated by people discussing topics that interest them.
There are still plenty of people that have gone so far left that they crossed the prime meridian and landed on the right.
what is this enlightened centrist bullshit. Horseshoe theory is bunk
I could rephrase and say their beliefs are not the same, but their behaviors are. Think of some of the worst qualities of far right posting. Memes that pigeonhole non-believers, co-opting language to mean things other than what the majority of people understand it to mean, facts-optional diatribes. Now read any number of Hexbear threads.
equality extremists wanting an egalitarian society are not just as bad as fascists and theocrats even if they both have bad memes …
Looks they are getting shutdown kind of hard too. We ain’t dumb
You’ve been duped.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Millennials/
Seems to be the “real” subreddit.
https://old.reddit.com/r/millenials
With a missing second “n” seems to be a bot filled hell hole.
But also, I only left reddit a year ago and have never heard of the sub so who knows.
Also remember that Reddit as a whole is only going to get worse. The only goal is to make as much money as possible before it crashes in a cesspool of pure garbage like Facebook or Twitter.
I wonder what the ratio of Russian to American bots is.
Do you have a few examples of American bots, I’m intrigued now…
Meanwhile on the r/JordanPeterson sub right now, there’s a complaint about leftwing bots on r/millennials
https://www.reddit.com/r/JordanPeterson/comments/1e8cwwh/uptick_in_propaganda_bots_or_post/le6m8jo/
…oh r/millennials says there’s two subs… r/millennials and r/millenials with one n… Maybe that’s part of what’s going on.
What’s a ‘reddit’?
