Voats problem wasn’t engagement. It was literal nazis.
They tried to prop up a thin veneer of legitimacy but at some point they just stopped caring. The front page became blatant “kill all [whatever]” type posts. That’s when engagement completely collapsed.
Lemmy has some clearly in bad faith instances which are probably run by nazis. Federation seems to be doing its job of resilience.
The goal has always been engagement prisons. Where people never leave the platform. With generated content this must seem like a final step. They don’t need to make people to interact with each other in ways that keeps both of them engaged. They don’t need to leech content from other sites while preventing people from going to the site. With generated content people will interact with themselves while engaged in completely fabricated content. It’s even more dystopian than ever.
Also neither side necessarily knows the others filter chain. Generational loss could grow exponentially. Not only loss but addition by fabrication. Each side trading back and forth indeterminate deletions/additions. It’s worse than traditional generational loss. It’s generational noise which can resemble signal too.
So if I receive a long form then how do I know if the substantial text is worth reading for the nuance from an actual human being. I can’t tell that apart from generated filler. If a human wrote the long form then maybe they’ve elaborated some nuance that deserved long form.
On the flip side of the same coin. If I receive a short form either generated by me or them. Then to what degree can I trust the indeterminate noisy summary. I just have to trust that the LLM picked out precisely the key points that the author wanted to convey. And trust that nuance was not lost, skewed, or fabricated.
It would be inevitable that two sides end up in a shooting war. Proverbial or otherwise. Because two communiques were playing a fancy game of telephone. Information that was lost or fabricated resulted in an incident but neither side knows which shot first because nobody realized the miscommunication started happening several generations ago.
This is a common tactic. I’ve seen people describe the same process many times before.
They usually trot this out when they see a comment or account they want to silence. That’s how the fascists do censorship on reddit.
It’s happened to me too. Since then I’ve seen people saying the same general thing has happened to them. They must know that reddits content moderators, the “Anti-evil Operations” or whatever bullshit, is on their side. It’s the only explanation. Probably the nazis went and got jobs there. Or maybe it’s just that spez is a nazi himself. Reddit beneath the thin veneer of default subreddits has always been a very right leaning platform.
It wasn’t hard to foresee. We knew these kind of things could happen. The internet used to be very out spoken about it. That ethos is long gone. What’s equally disappointing is tech nerds selling out for bigger paychecks.
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The colloquial use of “AI” is basically the Hollywood concept of a conscious computer. Nobody knows about AI as it’s used in computer science industry. Nor does it matter in regular discourse. In this sense it’s not AI. It’s a disservice to lead the on laypeople to believe it’s something it’s not.
I don’t rule it out. The prior era of “reddit alternatives” in the Voat era was quickly overrun too even though they were very small. The key to the internet has always been first mover advantage. If they have enough power to manipulate the top sites, it would take very little to hedge bets on budding platforms. They risk losing their advantage if a replacement platform establishes itself without them. That’s pretty much the whole history of modern tech. To actively seek and snuff out your competitors.
They’ve been increasing the ad load the whole time. The most I’ve seen so far is 5 ads. Streaming will return to broadcast TV convention sooner than people think probably. 15 minutes of ads per hour.
It’s in its afterlife phase right now. Much of the comment sections on any given subreddit are full of newbies using colloquialisms from other platforms. e.g. Users call subreddits “groups” which I think originates from Facebook. Or users trying to “bump” posts. There’s a lot of signs that the core userbases are gone.
Reddit was very monoculture in the beginning. The neckbeards upvoted each other because they generally agreed on the same opinions. That gets mistaken for adherence to reddiquette.
It became a rhetorical tool to prove whatever an individuals political or social adversaries are dummies because they don’t use reddit properly in current year unlike some glory day that never existed.
If they really did use reddit back in the day as they claim then all of the self referential satire about reddits pseudo-intellectualism must have gone over their head. It was like the second most popular type of content. Second only to the actual circle jerking.
Nothing happened. It was always like this. Geeks got unduly put on a pedestal. They got a reputation that was never earned. They’re not any different than your typical psychopath executive.
I grew up in a town where a lot of these types of guys have become multimillionaires since 2010s tech boom. One person manages some hundreds of millions of dollars AI investment portfolio. That was before the GPT explosion. I have no idea how big they are now but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s billions.
Growing up they were almost all psychopathic. Lying, cheating, backstabbing type of people. Nothing like the timid altruistic geek that pop culture proliferates. The more normal people did not go into tech. The actual timid types have had modest middle class careers in tech.
Another way to look at this is a back channel method of breaking down the big tech oligopoly.
I’m all for this. Kids are smart. They start using the rest of the internet. They’ll become tech savvy.