The longer you are on lemmy, the more you can step back and see the ebb and flow of manipulative posts in and out of circulation to create rifts between people and create short-lived topics of ‘conversation’ to busy the people here. The general anti-capitalism direction is pandered to singing the tune people think they want to hear and is no different I’m sure to the many bot posts aimed at facebook users to play the tune they also want to hear to manipulate, and get them to come back.

I’m sure facebook, twitter, and the other shitty social sites are far worse but for over a decade, a deep level of warfare has been fought online via manipulation and disinformation and young people are far too easily manipulated by a post because well, obviously a real person wrote it, right? Right? There’s even a picture of their face and everything!

So, I’d like to ask lemmy users to be particularly on guard, both here and any other site they visit with ‘user’ postings on in the future, and to perhaps step back, stop visiting sites, posts, forums, etc outside of your hobbies, and ignore it all. That’s the only way to be immune to the noise and to lead a better life. Whatever that direction is for you. Also, help your friends ignore the noise and help them focus on visiting information about just their hobbies.

Early internet was just information about hobbies and for the betterment of people and furthering knowledge. Let’s take that back.

  • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.catEnglish
    2·
    14 days ago
    1. It’s not clear exactly what you mean, what are some examples of posts that you think are being made by bots?
    2. IDK man, there is definitely a problem of misleading and disinformative posts and I will 100% agree with it as a problem, but just abandoning the idea of being able to talk about anything of substance because the disinfo is trying to fuck it up is not the answer, to me. I like being able to talk about politics / anti-capitalism / geopolitics / whatever. I don’t find it “stressful” or the way some people receive it. If they don’t want it presumably they are not subscribed to that stuff, but I really value being able to find out what’s going on in the world and talk with a wide variety and population of people about it.
    3. The early internet was wild. It was not for hobbies and betterment, it was for ludicrous conspiracy theories, arguments between creationism and evolution, far flung neo-Nazis finally being able to communicate with each other, and snuff videos. That was what made it awesome. I think you are thinking of early Facebook.