[HN Gopher] Manufactured consensus on x.com
___________________________________________________________________
Manufactured consensus on x.com
Author : cogitovirus
Score : 257 points
Date : 2025-04-24 16:57 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (rook2root.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (rook2root.co)
| MaxPock wrote:
| X is once again full of bots selling crypto and financial
| services .
| josefritzishere wrote:
| It's really degenerated into a trash heap. I quit years ago.
| mmastrac wrote:
| I pop in from time to time but I only ever see right-wing
| rage bait (??) and my old timeline is completely gone. I
| don't engage with any of it either, just scrolling until I
| finally catch a name I recognize and maybe dropping a like.
| FredPret wrote:
| There's also left-wing rage bait if you scroll down.
|
| It's sad that these social media companies supplanted
| proper journalism, only to then rot into this.
|
| What do we have now?
| arrowsmith wrote:
| Hey, that's not fair! It's also full of porn bots and Holocaust
| denial.
| jjeaff wrote:
| Don't forget the graphic fight videos with comments full of
| racial undertones. I have literally never engaged with nor
| watched more than a few seconds of those types of videos yet
| my feed is full of them.
| vvpan wrote:
| Ah yes the "look at what brown people are doing to our
| cities" accounts... One of the main reasons I am not on
| there anymore.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| It's to radicalize people into becoming racists.
| dismalaf wrote:
| Every platform has Holocaust denial because that's the one
| thing that the far-left and far-right both agree on...
| RankingMember wrote:
| The far-left denies the Holocaust? On what grounds?
| dismalaf wrote:
| It's usually some mental gymnastics related to Israel,
| Gaza, etc... Because many Muslims deny the holocaust,
| much of the far-left has co-opted that rhetoric. It's
| super visible on TikTok, for example.
|
| Edit - some comments below this seem to doubt. Just go on
| TikTok to politically charged posts about Palestine. This
| whole thread is about social media. Not holocaust denial
| on the mainstream left, specifically the _far-left on
| social media_
| seadan83 wrote:
| Sounds like sampling bias TBH. The 'far-left' and the
| 'twitter-left' (or the tik-tok left) are not all quite
| the same thing either. I don't think you can draw much
| conclusions about people outside of a platform based on
| either Twitter or TikTok.
| DFHippie wrote:
| In my many decades as a political observer I have never
| seen Holocaust denial on the left. I guess it's a pretty
| niche sub-movement. Where does one pick these nuts?
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| I've seen a lot of anti-Israel stuff but I've never seen
| holocaust denial on the far left. What I have seen is an
| assertion that the holocaust is one of many horrendous
| genocides that continue to this day, and comparisons
| between early holocaust actions by nazi germany (ghettos,
| destruction of the ghettos, resettlement, etc) against
| the Jews and Israel in Gaza. Personally I think it's all
| absurd. The holocaust is uniquely horrific, and every
| horrific thing doesn't have to be comparable or have
| parallels to be horrible. In fact each genocide is its
| own unique horror, be it in Armenia, Cambodia, etc.
| Israel and Gaza is also its own situation and the
| relationships to the holocaust is irrelevant other than
| in the space of fallacy. The comparison helps no one -
| left, right, Jew, Palestinian. Every tragedy is its own
| tragedy and can and should be examined in itself for the
| lessons they teach, and anyone who uses violence at scale
| is wrong no matter what happened prior. Perpetuation of
| industrialized horrors should shame everyone as human
| beings. But, I was raised Quaker, and we've always been
| persecuted in some way for believing and standing up for
| the fact you shouldn't hurt others.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| Yeah, am damn far left by US standards, keep up with
| actually-left sources like The Nation and Democracy Now!
| (I also listen to right wing nut job AM radio in the car,
| because I'm a masochist and a politics nerd in general--
| I'm "fair and balanced"!). Was involved in some left-of-
| Democrats political organizing in college.
|
| I can't recall ever seeing holocaust denial from that
| side. I'm sure examples can be found, but I don't think
| it's a staple there like it is when you veer even a
| little off the (formerly...) best-trod paths on the
| right.
| jandrese wrote:
| Typically this means someone who claims that Israel's
| policies towards the Palestinian population is causing a
| humanitarian crisis that is counterproductive to long
| term stability in the region is labeled as anti Jew and a
| Holocaust denier.
| stetrain wrote:
| It never really stopped. All of Elon's crying about bots
| stopped as soon as he took ownership.
| sojsurf wrote:
| I went back recently. Maybe I'm in the wrong circles, but I'm
| seeing neither of these.
|
| I _am_ still seeing lots of recycled content looking for
| clicks.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| He fixed the bot problem, the problem of Twitter banning Elon's
| bots.
| fouc wrote:
| Reading that I couldn't help but think there's parallels to HN.
| At least HN tries to be transparent about "the algorithm", and
| it's essentially a dumb algorithm compared to what X/FB/etc use.
| joseda-hg wrote:
| I think it's fundamentally different in HN, everyone sees the
| same posts/comments (Barring settings / mod privileges), but in
| X everyone can get a slightly tailored feed
| Clubber wrote:
| I'm sure there's coordinated efforts to up/downvote content
| on HN. The political articles are way up and certain
| reasonable comments seem to be unreasonably downvoted. It
| seems like it's ramped up since the election. Either that or
| HN is becoming a natural echo chamber, I'm not quite sure.
|
| If people don't already know, the internet is easily
| manipulated and people tend to get ideas and reassurances of
| ideas based on what their group's opinions are, and those
| opinions are manipulated. It's easy to create multiple
| accounts, easy to change IP addresses, easy to bot comments;
| anyone can do it and it's easy to automate.
|
| The earliest example I can recall was manipulating the Amazon
| ratings system, now it's everywhere.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| "The Algorithm" on most social media platforms to which people
| apply that term is, crucially, personalized, and (usually)
| heavily driven by engagement metrics. That's what makes them
| dangerous and shitty, not just _having a voting system_ or
| sorting by latest post ( "technically an algorithm!" as some
| posters will helpfully point out in these kinds of discussions)
| kuschkufan wrote:
| on hn the algorithm boosts/hides posts and comments based on
| the popularity of the user account that upvoted/downvoted? i
| thought all accounts had the same voting weight.
| bikezen wrote:
| You even even downvote on HN until you pass some bar
| Philpax wrote:
| Is it that transparent? I did not know about the vast majority
| of the items on this list until I encountered it:
| https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| Certainly more transparent than some black box machine
| learning monstrosity.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I'd like HN to indicate somewhere on the page when mods
| override flags or make other moderation decisions.
|
| They won't because it would reveal moderation biases and
| trends.
| gruez wrote:
| I'm surprised how many upvotes this got (40 points as of me
| writing this comment), given how little "meat" is actually in
| this article. The author presents a graph where views for a given
| user dropped precipitously after a "feud with musk". That's
| certainly suspicious, and was worth bringing up, but the rest of
| the blog is just pontificating about "social engineering" and
| "perception cascades", backed by absolutely nothing. Are people
| just upvoting based on title and maybe the first paragraph? This
| post could have been truncated to the graph and very little would
| be lost.
| freehorse wrote:
| Yeah I also hoped that the article had some more backing for
| these arguments. The nytimes article, which is cited and from
| which the first graph is from, is more interesting, as it also
| includes a couple more cases:
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/04/23/business/elon...
|
| or from webarchive
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20250423093911/https://www.nytim...
| janalsncm wrote:
| EM directly manipulates the algorithm to suit his interests.
| Here's one we know about:
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/feb/15/elon-musk...
| ruleryak wrote:
| This article does not offer any proof. It's hearsay, from the
| title saying he "reportedly" forced it, in turn citing a
| Platformer article that itself also provides no proof and
| instead accepts the stories from fired engineers as gospel.
| The platformer article then goes on to say that views still
| fluctuate wildly, and that it isn't in line with a supposed
| 1000x boost. The same Platformer article then says that they
| believe the supposed 1000x boost is no longer in effect, but
| they guess something else must be in place. The Guardian
| article doesn't bother to mention that part.
| janalsncm wrote:
| > This story is based on interviews with people familiar
| with the events involved and supported by documents
| obtained by Platformer.
|
| I think you might want to check the article again. The
| interviews were not just based on fired engineers. EM did
| fire one engineer after he told Musk that interest in Musk
| was declining.
| Fidelix wrote:
| They are upvoting because they hate Elon Musk. It's not that
| deep.
| hashstring wrote:
| Agree about meat, however, the article still made me think.
|
| > What people see feels organic. In reality, they're engaging
| with what's already been filtered, ranked, and surfaced.
| Naturally, I-- and I think many humans have this too- often
| perceive comments/content that I see as a backscatter of
| organic content reflecting some sort of consensus. Thousands of
| people replying the same thing surely gives me the impression
| of consensus. Obviously, this is not necessarily the truth (and
| it may be far from it even). However, it remains interesting,
| because since more people may perceive it as such, it may
| become consensus after all regardless.
|
| Ultimately, I think it's good to be reminded about the fact
| that it's still algorithmic knobs at play here. Even if that's
| something that is not news.
| qnleigh wrote:
| Do we know that this is how the algorithm actually works? The
| article only shows one plot of one specific instance, and there
| could be more than one explanation for the sudden drop in
| viewership (especially given the involvement of Twitter's owner).
| a2128 wrote:
| Below the chart there's a link to a NYTimes article it was
| sourced from, which has more plots of more instances of this
| janalsncm wrote:
| Their "for you" feed is engagement bait. In other words, it
| appears to be running almost entirely on CTR. It seems to pull
| from a pool of posts that are engaged with by those you follow.
| Limit seems to be 24h.
|
| It's not a very sophisticated algorithm, likely because the
| best people aren't super keen on working there for WLB reasons.
| jsheard wrote:
| > Do we know that this is how the algorithm actually works?
|
| Funnily enough we _should_ know that, since Elon promised to
| open source the algorithm in the name of transparency. But what
| actually happened is they dropped a one-time snapshot onto
| GitHub two years ago, never updated it, and never acknowledged
| it again. Many such cases.
| hashstring wrote:
| Yes, this 100%.
|
| And never forgot the, isElon boolean var that would increase
| post visibility. lol, what a shame.
| jandrese wrote:
| It was enough info that people who professionally post on
| X/Twitter can play the algorithm like a fiddle. They can get
| anything they want to the top, and often can even get Elon to
| re-tweet it.
| a_c wrote:
| Neuro network mimics human brain, what fires together wires
| together. X mimics human psychology (still brain). Call it halo
| effect, appeal to authority, selection bias. Some say it is a
| bug, some say it is a feature, a feature in decision making that
| developed under limited time and energy. Selecting X, but not
| other social network, as the subject of the article is a
| selection bias, it is also a feature, so is X's selection of
| sorting criteria
| janalsncm wrote:
| The low effort boosting replies are what get me. A lot of tech
| billionaires (who supposedly work harder than any mortal) spend a
| ton of time with one word / emoji replies.
|
| At least this is visible boosting. The next step is to boost
| behind the scenes, entirely unauditable. All of the power (and
| more) of an editor, none of the accountability.
| RankingMember wrote:
| The "author_is_elon" flag in Twitter's source code comes to
| mind
| riffic wrote:
| It's hilarious to look back at old threads on the orange site
| where people made wild claims, like calling Twitter a "public
| utility" without much thought. But honestly, I always saw the
| company as vulnerable to these issues. That's why Masnick's
| article "Protocols not Platforms" is still so spot-on.
|
| https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a...
| sorcerer-mar wrote:
| Pretty sure people calling it a public utility was always an
| aspirational claim and not an earnest belief that it had a
| governance structure that made it immune to such an attack...
| riffic wrote:
| poorly thought out aspirations then.
|
| Many of the communication outlets through this _utility_ have
| as well their own web infrastructure, hopefully serving as a
| single source of truth, whether that looks like wsj.com or
| whitehouse.gov. Interestingly enough the W3C has a
| recommendation to _publish_ _activities_ through an
| interoperable manner. There 's even talk of putting the
| Bluesky protocol through whatever process the IETF uses to
| create a request for comments.
| sorcerer-mar wrote:
| It's "poorly thought out" to want there to exist truly
| public infrastructure that's of the rough shape of Twitter?
|
| I personally would love not having _every_ viable tool of
| propaganda owned by private interests totally free of any
| Constitutional obligations.
|
| A public utility Twitter would surely be inferior in many
| ways, but IMO would be a useful counterbalance to have in
| the mix of platform options.
|
| Your comment makes sense if the social value of Twitter was
| exclusively posting links from other actual sources of
| truth, but it's not. That's not even the primary source of
| social value in a free society (it's the dialogue).
| woooooo wrote:
| Also, have the key "public utility" factors changed? Do
| politicians and journalists still get their news/engagement
| there?
|
| Honestly asking. For me, a former "public utility" poster, it
| seemed like the public square for elite opinion and that was
| what made it a utility. I don't think anyone was saying we
| need public utility microblogging in general.
| ty6853 wrote:
| I think it's in reference to pre-internet 1A 'protection'
| even when using publicly available private property.
|
| >See Marsh v. Alabama for this -- a company town was
| prohibited from barring picketing and pamphleting on private
| sidewalks. [user?id=rabite]
|
| >https://www.oyez.org/cases/1940-1955/326us501
| sorcerer-mar wrote:
| Ah, good point. Very possible!
| arrowsmith wrote:
| Not to defend Musk but it's not like "X" was a bastion of
| neutrality and even-handedness before he took over (the
| suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story being one prominent
| example.) Nor are the platforms Musk doesn't own yet.
|
| Does the author of this piece take a principled stand against
| censorship and bias? Or is he just upset that the censorship and
| bias isn't going in his preferred direction?
| trollied wrote:
| HN certainly leans one way. X has gone more central.
|
| BUT remember that what you see is driven by the people you
| follow, mostly. Don't like what they say or their political
| persuasion? Unfollow.
| selectodude wrote:
| If twitter is "central", what on gods earth do you consider
| "right of center"?
| dpedu wrote:
| 4chan or any of the chans, or the site the /r/the_donald
| folks moved to after reddit banned it? Or Voat, but that's
| gone now?
| rayiner wrote:
| X users say that the content they see is roughly equally
| likely to be liberal or conservative:
| https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2024/06/12/how-x-
| users-... (look at the chart: Political content users see
| on X)
| MOARDONGZPLZ wrote:
| > BUT remember that what you see is driven by the people you
| follow, mostly. Don't like what they say or their political
| persuasion? Unfollow.
|
| It would be nice if this were true, but I did an experiment
| where I created a new account on a VM with a new IP not
| previously connected to me and it almost immediately started
| serving me right wing slop regardless of who I followed. It
| seems obvious to me from this anecdote that it's not as
| simple as following or unfollowing.
| trollied wrote:
| Really? Crikey. I am happy to be wrong.
| asadotzler wrote:
| My exact experience. I spent months trimming my follow list
| down from hundreds to about 25 very carefully selected
| people and blocking and muting words and accounts, all
| trying to make my feed about the people I followed instead
| of what ever the so-called influencers and Musk toadies
| were peddling. It didn't help much so I created a brand new
| account from an email address on a different domain using a
| different web browser on a different machine and the
| content was no different except that new account also got
| and about a dozen Tesla sycophants occupying every 4th or
| 5th post in the feed. So, new accounts get all the same
| garbage as old accounts with the added benefit of a bunch
| of Tesla simp pseudo-ads.
| aaronbaugher wrote:
| That's what my liberal friends told me from 2017 to
| approximately the day Musk bought Twitter: "They're private
| companies, bro, they can do what they want. Just don't use
| them if you don't like it." They never said that before 2017,
| and they've stopped saying it now. Welcome back to the
| "censorship is bad" side, I guess; just don't tell me it was
| ever about a principle.
| miltonlost wrote:
| If your complaint is that the right-wing lies of the laptop
| story weren't amplified, then you desire propaganda to be
| spread. We should, as a society, want to stop liars from lying.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| I thought the entire story was suppressed at the request of a
| government agency, not just specific opinions about it.
| bikezen wrote:
| Unconsensually shared graphic images of Hunter Biden were
| removed, there were lots of people covering the laptop
| story, mostly about how it was a non-story when looking at
| the actual chain of custody and its contents.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| People don't want neutrality and even-handedness. They used to
| think that they did, but at some point in my lifetime they
| stopped lying to themselves.
| xp84 wrote:
| Idk about the author but I don't even think it's a problem.
| It's just Elon Musk's website. It is as important as readers of
| it want it to be. As someone else said, expecting real social
| interaction or authenticity on a for-profit website is folly.
| Of course at best it'll be optimized for clickbait/rage bait
| etc, and in practice probably that plus the pure bias of
| whoever controls it.
|
| If people want to post their ideas on the internet, they can do
| so on their own websites for nearly nothing. Getting someone to
| _listen_ to you? That's much more expensive... everyone who's
| been used to getting that free from social media should
| consider that it used to be much harder to get attention for
| one's ideas, which used to be assumed to be uninteresting by
| default.
| jsbg wrote:
| > Does the author of this piece take a principled stand against
| censorship and bias? Or is he just upset that the censorship
| and bias isn't going in his preferred direction?
|
| Right. Did everyone forget about the twitter files already?
| aeturnum wrote:
| > _Social proof used to reflect crowd wisdom. Now it reflects
| algorithmic endorsement -- triggered not by consensus, but by
| proximity to influence. A single interaction can distort scale,
| making selected content appear widely supported._
|
| I think this is barking up the right tree with the wrong lesson -
| these things are the same. Elon Musk, for worse mostly, is a
| social influencer. You can tell because a lot of people follow
| him. I am sure the algorithm in unreasonably kind to him (as he
| can write it) but it's also true that a lot of people care what
| he does and what he does changes what people care about.
|
| The real question here, to me, is: does this kind of mass social
| calculus make any kind of real sense? Can we actually extend the
| idea of interest to 219,000,000 people or do we leave the
| coordinate system at some point? I suspect it doesn't hold up.
|
| I am a long time believer in the need for good algorithmic
| filtering. There is more happening in the world than I have
| attention for and I want a machine to help me. Most solutions are
| quite bad because they are focused on how much money they can
| make instead of how much they can help. But I think it's a real
| problem and the bad, money-grubbing algorithms that surround us
| now are making our lives much worse.
|
| Ultimately I think this comes back to operationalizing human
| relationships. What does it _math_ for Musk to have that many
| followers? This is distasteful but real, I fear, in the age we
| live. Social influence is clearly real and we are measuring it in
| flawed ways and we should try and improve those flawed
| measurements.
| janalsncm wrote:
| Jake Paul is a social influencer. His posts show up from
| organic engagement.
|
| Elon Musk owns the platform. He directly dictates how it works.
| He ordered engineers to boost his posts by a factor of 1000.
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/14/23600358/elon-musk-tweets...
|
| Whether some people like EM's posts is beside the point. It's
| manufactured.
| derektank wrote:
| Elon Musk had 85 million followers in 2022[1] before he
| acquired Twitter. He obviously has some organic engagement /
| grassroots appeal, separate from whatever benefits he derives
| from owning the platform.
|
| [1] https://www.britannica.com/money/Elon-Musk
| RiverCrochet wrote:
| > What does it math
|
| This is a super interesting way of looking at it.
|
| The math works because of the two-party system.
|
| American politics due to the two-party system is fundamentally
| dishonest. Issues are packaged across parties and you have to
| buy everything the party is selling. For example there's
| probably lots of Republicans that would not mind decently run
| government-subsidized healthcare and there's lots of Democrats
| that think the government should respect their right to be
| armed. But because the parties don't really support these
| positions, it creates significant pressure for people outside
| of the party buckets to twist their public political talk.
| Fundamentally this makes political talk and political social
| media activity dishonest as well. When owners of social
| networks become political figures, it basically turns all
| coefficients in this equation to exponents.
| mrdoops wrote:
| Manufactured consensus is everywhere there is enough attention to
| incentivize such an effort. The worst by far is Reddit.
| ty6853 wrote:
| The most glaring example of this was how reddit did a total 180
| before/after the election. Before the election questioning
| putting a candidate in without a primary was sacrilege.
| Afterwards it was a popularly supported reason for the loss. It
| was like watching an inflated balloon of propaganda deflate.
| cmdli wrote:
| In the few days following the election, there was a flood of
| conservative posters all over the place. After about a week,
| they all disappeared and Reddit returned to its usual
| politics. I think the difference you are seeing is an
| atypical amount of conservatism, not the other way around.
| Most people who voted for Harris still do not think that the
| lack of a primary was the issue.
| ty6853 wrote:
| Probably not, but as someone who didn't vote for either
| major party, nor am I a conservative, it was glaringly
| obvious that ramming through without lube someone who
| totally dive-bombed the prior primary might have avoided a
| sanity check to filter primary issues.
| krapp wrote:
| The strongest candidate for either party to field would
| be an incumbent President, especially one who has already
| beaten the other party's frontrunner. They have the
| advantage of celebrity, a record and the bully pulpit.
| The second strongest candidate would logically be an
| incumbent Vice President.
|
| The Democratic Party may have been a shitshow but Harris
| was the best possible option once Biden was no longer in
| contention. And the margin between her and Trump turned
| out to be slim, so a Harris win wouldn't have been
| impossible.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Harris was pretty much the only option. The primary was
| already over and there were real questions on who could
| spend campaign funds with Biden's step down.
|
| That said, I really blame her lose on her and the biden
| campaign more than anything. They chased hard for
| disaffected republican voters at the expense of the base.
| They failed to win those voters and lost some of their
| base voters.
| ethagknight wrote:
| Ive noticed very clearly a material change even on this
| site, where a comment with a conservative viewpoint would
| get downvoted into oblivion, and now I seem to see far more
| diversified opinions. Which is great, I want that.
| like_any_other wrote:
| 'Disappeared' of course means that they were banned.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| That's bizarre. Putting her at the top of the ticket was very
| clearly the better of two bad options (it was too late for
| the better options, by the time the call was made).
|
| There exist people who think Biden had a better shot and
| replacing him with Harris was a mistake? Did they not look at
| his approval ratings earlier that year, then look up what
| that's historically meant for presidential re-elections? Dude
| was gonna lose, and by the time of the replacement he was
| likely gonna get _crushed_. The replacement probably helped
| down-ballot races, given how badly Bien was likely to
| perform, so was a good idea even though she lost.
|
| Like, yes, it was _per se_ bad but people blaming that for
| the defeat is... confusing to me.
| fkyoureadthedoc wrote:
| No I don't think people are saying Biden was the better
| option. At first, as I recall, people were fairly outraged
| that they were left with two bad options.
|
| The general tone very quickly shifted to Kamala's brat
| summer, Kamala is bae type shit.
|
| Even after the fact nobody was questioning Kamala's
| qualifications. Why, at the 11th hour, were we left with
| demented grandpa and someone that couldn't win a primary
| the first time? Whose fault was this? What consequence did
| they suffer?
|
| The dialogue was mostly around trying to figure out who to
| blame for people not voting for Kamala. Men? Black dudes?
| Mexicans? Misogynists? Anyone but whoever was actually
| responsible for the situation? Idk what it's like now
| though, I haven't used Reddit in months.
| meroes wrote:
| After the election, the amount of [Removed by Reddit] went
| from very little, to EVERYWHERE.
|
| That's what did it for me, zero Reddit unless I can't find
| the information anywhere else, and even then it's for viewing
| a single post and then I'm gone.
| dmonitor wrote:
| That's just hindsight being 20:20
| richwater wrote:
| > The worst by far is Reddit
|
| The website is truly unusable unless you directly go to small
| niche subreddits and even then you roll the dice with unpaid
| mods with a power complex.
| RankingMember wrote:
| It's great for web searches for answers to very specific
| questions. "search term" + "reddit" typically gives me a good
| starting point if not the answer itself to the odd question I
| have.
| adeeds wrote:
| The smaller niche subreddits dedicated to a hobby or type of
| product are actually some of the worst for astroturfing from
| what I've seen. It only takes a few shills to start building
| consensus.
|
| There's a really interesting pattern where you'll see one
| person start a thread asking "Hey, any recs for durable
| travel pants?" Then a second comment chimes in "No specific
| brands, just make sure you get ones that have qualities x, y,
| and z". Then a third user says "Oh my Ketl Mountain(tm)
| travel pants have those exact traits!" Taken on their own the
| threads look fairly legit and get a lot of engagement and
| upvotes from organic users (maybe after some bot upvoted to
| prime the pump)
|
| Then if you dump the comments of those users and track what
| subreddits they've interacted on, they've had convos
| following the same patterns about boots in BuyItForLife,
| Bidets in r/Bidets, GaN USB chargers in USBCHardware, face
| wash in r/30PlusSkincare, headphones, etc. You can build a
| whole graph of shilling accounts pushing a handful of
| products.
| tengbretson wrote:
| The worst part is that in a lot of niche communities
| knowing the "best" brand for a given activity then becomes
| a shibboleth, so it really only takes a few strategic
| instances of planting these seed crystals for the group
| opinion to be completely captured, and reinforced with
| minimal intervention.
| thmsths wrote:
| How is that not treated as fraud? As you pointed out, with
| a little bit of detective work (which is well beyond the
| means and motivation of a casual internet user, but well
| within reach of a consumer protection agency) it's fairly
| easy to expose these manipulative tactics. Commercial
| communication ought to be clearly labelled as such.
| adeeds wrote:
| I think it is fraud but
|
| a) Is the current FTC going to care?
|
| b) The tricky part is probably proving a business
| relationship. Otherwise someone could be a jerk and start
| shilling for their _competitors_ just to get them fined.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Because the cyberspace was lawless for far too long.
| Justice systems worldwide were too ill-equipped to handle
| _anything_ involving computers logically, effectively
| nullifying broad ranges of laws.
| raverbashing wrote:
| And use old, the only interface not designed with the tiktok
| brain in mind
|
| (and the mobile app is just atrocious, RIF was way better in
| usability, etc)
| baq wrote:
| This had been as true when I joined ~15 years ago as it has
| been true on the day they made me quit cold turkey when they
| took the API away.
| raffraffraff wrote:
| I detest having to keep an account, but unfortunately there a
| bunch of different products that use it as a semi-official
| support forum.
| ethagknight wrote:
| Manufactured consensus is literally the name of the game for
| the big news networks. News is/was paid vast sums by the
| government to tell a certain story. That is Manufactured
| Consensus. Some countries do a better job making the news seem
| like a separate arm from the government. The entire point is to
| direct the populace. That is not the core focus of X, even
| though it is entirely susceptible to it, and will be
| encountered on any such platform. yes Reddit is horrible, but I
| would say Wikipedia is even more dangerous because it presents
| as basic facts. Reddit at least you know it's some obscene
| username giving geopolitical strategy rants.
|
| Important to note, I first saw this specific chart and claim of
| Musk's heavy handed influence _via X_. Also, I see plenty of
| dissenting opinions (in a general sense on Trump, Tariffs,
| Musk, DOGE, etc) on X. Alternative views definitely have reach.
|
| Also important to note, my posts, where I am very knowledgeable
| in my domain and will spend an unreasonable amount of time
| authoring posts to make various points, will garner mere double
| digit views, so when someone cries about no longer have
| millions of views for their uneducated hot takes... spare the
| tears.
| seadan83 wrote:
| Outside of PBS, do you have evidence for this claim: "News
| is/was paid vast sums by the government to tell a certain
| story"?
|
| > Alternative views definitely have reach.
|
| Yes, but are we in a 1984 situation where that reach is
| managed behind the scenes. Reach, but perhaps not too much
| reach. With respect to the chart, how do we know that Twitter
| users are not largely partitioned? How representative is the
| fact you saw something compared to other "communities" on X?
|
| All the while, even if you saw a 'dissenting' chart, the fact
| the chart exists is direct evidence to the power of a subtle
| shadow-ban effect. It's not about tears and whining, it's
| that a single act by 'powerful' accounts can control who gets
| visibility, and who does not. The point is that it is not
| you, the community that controls what is popular, but it is
| the powerful accounts that do. That is the issue.
| alabastervlog wrote:
| > Outside of PBS, do you have evidence for this claim:
| "News is/was paid vast sums by the government to tell a
| certain story"?
|
| Yeah, they wouldn't have to rely so much on Madison Avenue
| if they were just paying the news agencies to report
| whatever they want.
|
| Incidentally, I'm not sure I'd characterize even PBS'
| government funding as "vast sums", either absolutely or
| relatively (to the rest of their funding).
| DFHippie wrote:
| > Outside of PBS
|
| How much influence do you imagine PBS wields and how much
| money do you suppose is in these vast sums they are paid?
|
| PBS is mostly known for Sesame Street and nature
| documentaries. Their government funding has been whittled
| down to almost nothing over years of relentless attack from
| the Republicans.
|
| Here's some discussion from PBS itself on the topic:
|
| https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/a-look-at-the-history-
| of-p...
|
| A pull quote:
|
| "The U.S. is almost literally off the chart for how little
| we allocate towards our public media. At the federal level,
| it comes out to a little over $1.50 per person per year.
| Compare that to the Brits, who spend roughly $100 per
| person per year for the BBC. Northern European countries
| spend well over $100 per person per year."
| ethagknight wrote:
| I get and agree that 'super accounts' like Musk or Taylor
| Swift or Barack Obama can have an outsized impact that is
| too powerful.
|
| Strongly argue that TODAY has far more diversity of thought
| being communicated on various media than 2024. Disagree on
| being "in 1984 situation," the whole "Biden is sharp as a
| tack" -> replaced without primary "Campaign of Joy" is as
| 1984 is you can get. Very clear evidence of syndication
| occurring across various news outlets, and those syndicated
| stories don't happen for free. The hard evidence you
| request is thoroughly concealed and hard to follow as it
| gets washed through non profits and NGOs. USASpending shows
| $2mm direct in 2024 to NYT as an example, but it's no
| stretch to assert indirect sources as well.
| the_optimist wrote:
| Reddit mgmt itself has significant concerns, according to
| anonymous sources. You heard it here first.
| smallmancontrov wrote:
| Musk didn't just put a thumb on the scale in favor of far-
| right content, he sat his entire pre-ozempic ass on the
| scale.
| jandrese wrote:
| > News is/was paid vast sums by the government to tell a
| certain story.
|
| In the US it is not the government paying these sums, it is
| the billionaires who bought the media outlets. When you look
| for editorial bias in the US it's not pro-government, it's
| pro-wealth. Or more specifically pro-wealthy people.
|
| > I would say Wikipedia is even more dangerous because it
| presents as basic facts.
|
| Can you give some examples of political bias in Wikipedia
| articles?
| guywithahat wrote:
| For all the negative things one can say about X, their fact
| checking (community notes) has actually gotten pretty good,
| which is something Reddit has yet to implement. Pew has also
| been ranking them more politically center than most social
| media sites, although I suppose that's subjective
| tough wrote:
| tik tok recently added Footnotes
| kridsdale3 wrote:
| And Mark pushed it through for FB and IG, at the same time
| he wound down the Fact Check system (which only hit like
| 0.0001% of contentious posts). Liberals reacted very
| negatively to this change.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| Reddit has stickied posts at the top of each thread. Well-
| moderated subreddits use them to great effect. Badly
| moderated subreddits just shadowban everything that doesn't
| match with the mods' politics.
| jandrese wrote:
| I like the community notes as a concept, but they're often a
| day late and a dollar short. By the time the community note
| appears the post has been squeezed of all of its juice and
| was already on the way out. It's better than nothing, but the
| entire mechanism runs slower than the speed of propaganda.
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| They also don't seem to last. I don't know quite how it
| happens but you see a lot of these community notes
| disappear 24 hours after they appeared. They act on the
| tail end of the posts exposure and then are removed for the
| long term for when the news comes along and uses it as a
| reference. But all the people who spotted the
| misinformation see the post and the community note and so
| everyone walks away "happy".
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| This. It's technically a solution but not a solution at
| all. It's like giving a calorie count AFTER someone's eaten
| a meal (or in this case after the tweet has been viewed by
| the majority of people that are going to view it).
| jampa wrote:
| I've been using Reddit for 12 years. After the API fiasco, the
| quality dropped a lot. Most popular subreddits are now
| astroturfed, where every week there is a crusade against
| something (First it was for banning Twitter, now it is against
| banning AI Art).
|
| Even in regular posts, Reddit has been a hive mind lately. If
| you scroll through the comments, most of them will have the
| same opinion over and over, with comments that add nothing to
| the discussion, like "I agree," getting hundreds of upvotes.
| kridsdale3 wrote:
| I've been there for 17 (!) years, and I could have written
| pretty much the same message as you since around 2012. Dennis
| Kucinich was a huge campaign!
|
| But I agree, since the API thing, it has sucked HARD.
| polynomial wrote:
| Missing the Kucinich connection here, what's the lore?
| kridsdale3 wrote:
| First major presidential campaign astroturfing on a
| social media site. If you looked at Reddit (I dont
| remember what year it was, 2008? 2012?) you'd think 60%
| of America was dead set on the guy. It was less than 1%.
| lynndotpy wrote:
| I agree, the API change was the last nail in the coffin,
| honestly. Reddit was always bad for several reasons, but it
| always had some availability of smart people that placed it
| alongside StackExchange and Hacker News. But 2022 and 2023
| really saw a mass exodus of expertise from Reddit (and
| Twitter, etc.)
|
| Lots of smart people left to Mastodons, at least.
| seanw444 wrote:
| I like how you both responded to GP's roast of "I agree"
| comments by saying "I agree". Maybe that was intentional.
|
| Anyway, I agree. I used Reddit fairly regularly before
| the API change, though I was already starting to get
| disenfranchised by the political hive mind by that point.
| The death of FOSS third party clients that made the
| platform bearable to use was the straw that broke the
| camel's back, for me. I've completely left it behind
| since.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| The complaint was about comments that are functionally an
| overly large upvote, not comments that have the word
| agree in them.
| kridsdale3 wrote:
| I hate that they took Apollo app from us.
| os2warpman wrote:
| > now it is against banning AI Art
|
| AI art does not exist. There is only slop stolen from
| artists.
| fkyoureadthedoc wrote:
| Gatekeeping the definition of art probably doesn't help
| your cause. Even if you convince everyone to say, I don't
| know, "algorithmically generated images" instead, have you
| really improved the situation from the artists perspective?
| dmonitor wrote:
| > banning Twitter
|
| This is just practical given you can't see tweet threads (and
| sometimes even tweets) without an account.
|
| > against banning AI Art
|
| I think you mean to say reddit is pro-banning AI art?
|
| Anyway, banning AI art is absolutely good for curating
| quality posts. AI art is incredibly low-effort, easily
| spammable, and has legitimate morality concerns among artist
| communities (the kind that post high quality content). Same
| goes for obviously AI-written posts.
|
| I agree content quality on the site has fallen drastically,
| but those are both measures to try and save it.
| andrepd wrote:
| > Reddit has been a hive mind lately. If you scroll through
| the comments, most of them will have the same opinion over
| and over, with comments that add nothing to the discussion,
| like "I agree," getting hundreds of upvotes.
|
| That has been the case for over 10 years now. It's absolutely
| not a new phenomenon.
| DustinBrett wrote:
| It got much worse a few years ago. I am a daily Reddit user
| and it was a big difference.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| I feel so old that I remember the post-2016 election when
| Reddit started down this path. It's been particularly bad
| in the last few years but agree. Ever since the_donald and
| the admin's reactions to it, it's been bad.
| DustinBrett wrote:
| Happy to see posts like this, I have the same experience. It
| fell apart a few years ago with the fiasco's and it's a shell
| of what it was now. Total echo chamber. Sadly seems to be
| spreading to HN in some comment sections. And X has it's
| problems in the other direction. There aren't many places
| left like how it was, when up and down votes meant something.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| The API shutdown allows a flooding of bots, crippled 3rd
| party apps and the moderator tools that kept things clean.
|
| But I don't think the "crusades" are always bot related.
| Movements get momentum.
| gruez wrote:
| >The API shutdown allows a flooding of bots, crippled 3rd
| party apps and the moderator tools that kept things clean.
|
| I thought they backed down on the API changes for
| moderators?
| Aurornis wrote:
| > I've been using Reddit for 12 years. After the API fiasco,
| the quality dropped a lot. Most popular subreddits are now
| astroturfed, where every week there is a crusade against
| something (First it was for banning Twitter, now it is
| against banning AI Art).
|
| This didn't start with the API change drama. The API change
| protests were their own crusade. The calls to ban Twitter
| links or AI art are just the next iterations of the same form
| of protest.
|
| Many of the big subs were thoroughly astroturfed long before
| the API changes. The famous ones like /r/conservative weren't
| even trying to hide the fact that they curated every member
| and post
| gruez wrote:
| >This didn't start with the API change drama
|
| The proximate cause IMO is that the protests (ie.
| moderators shutting down their subreddits) resulted in some
| moderators being deposed, causing new subreddits and
| moderators to come in power, which were easier to astroturf
| or whatever.
| viccis wrote:
| Reddit is SO MUCH WORSE than most people understand. Ignoring
| for a moment that peoples frontpage Best sort uses engagement
| metrics rather than upvote/downvotes since 2021, the moderators
| there have an iron grip over what is allowed.
|
| r/redditminusmods used to track this. Every 12 hours they'd
| take a snapshot of the top 50 posts and then check ones from
| the previous 12 hour snapshot to see what percentage had been
| deleted. When it started, it was averaging 20% or so. By the
| end, it was at 50/50 or 49/50 deleted almost every single 12
| hour period.
|
| Of course, reddit couldn't allow this level of scrutiny, so
| they banned that subreddit for unstated reasons, and now the
| only good google result for it actually leads back here. See
| for yourself how bad it was:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36040282
|
| That only goes to two years ago. It feels like it's gotten even
| worse since then. That's not even going into some subreddits
| (worldnews, politics, etc.) creating the illusion of consensus
| by banning anyone with an opinion outside of a _narrow_ range
| of allowed ones.
| omneity wrote:
| This would be such an interesting experiment to perform on
| other social platforms as well alongside some rough semantic
| analysis to understand which topics are being silenced.
|
| I already got quite a lot of the data pipeline setup for
| this, so if anyone wants to collab hit me up!
| viccis wrote:
| >alongside some rough semantic analysis to understand which
| topics are being silenced
|
| You'd have to find somewhere on reddit that wasn't 100%
| deleted haha
| jandrese wrote:
| > r/redditminusmods used to track this. Every 12 hours they'd
| take a snapshot of the top 50 posts and then check ones from
| the previous 12 hour snapshot to see what percentage had been
| deleted. When it started, it was averaging 20% or so. By the
| end, it was at 50/50 or 49/50 deleted almost every single 12
| hour period.
|
| Is this "mods run amok" or is it the bots gaming the
| algorithm more effectively and now account for nearly half of
| all new popular content?
|
| In general my advice to anyone considering Reddit is to start
| with the default list of subreddits that you get when not
| logged in. Delete all of those from your list, and track down
| the small subreddits that interest you. The defaults are all
| owned by professional influence peddlers now, and what little
| actual content seeps through is not worth the effort to
| filter out.
| viccis wrote:
| In the past I would spot check them and there were plenty
| of submissions that were neither bot submitted nor
| obviously rule breaking that were deleted. My best guess
| was that mods of sufficiently large subreddits just like to
| shape the content that's shown. In most places, there seems
| to neither be the power user nepotism of late-era Digg nor
| the Eastern Germany level narrative censorship of subs like
| worldnews. Rather it just seems like a ton of cooks in the
| kitchen (huge modlists) with some of the mods seeming to
| just take action for action's sake. Either way the point is
| that users aren't really dictating the content.
|
| Don't even get me started about local city subreddit
| busybody moderators with their online fiefdoms and their
| "Daily Discussion" post graveyards.
| raffraffraff wrote:
| Was just gonna say this. Reddit is dreadful. Anything remotely
| contentious has a single narrative, and if people try to
| present any alternative perspective, comments get locked.
| Disagreement = "hate".
| austin-cheney wrote:
| I deleted my Reddit account years ago because of echo chamber
| effect and other people intentionally using that to direct
| opinion. In all fairness though there is an inherent
| narcissistic incentive to influence popular opinion
| irrespective of evidence or consequences. This will continue to
| be true so long as people rely upon social acceptance as a form
| of currency.
| timewizard wrote:
| Genuine social interaction is not profitable.
|
| Trying to achieve this on a for profit platform is pure folly.
|
| These are time wasting machines and were never truly capable of
| being more than that particularly once their use base reached a
| size where monthly churn no longer impacts the bottom line of
| advertising revenue.
| devrandoom wrote:
| X is a cult. People I know are being totally brainwashed.
|
| There so much misinformation, fabrication and half truths out
| there. Repeateted over and over again in various forms.
|
| When the full story surfaces two days later, they'll never see
| that on their cult hub.
| zoogeny wrote:
| It is a bit chilling because of the compound interest that this
| kind of policy incentivizes. Once you have a handful of powerful
| X accounts, you have the ability to generate more. So not only
| can you work to silence others, you can work to increase your
| capacity to silence others by promoting like-minded allies.
|
| We are at the early stages of this, so we are watching the
| capture of influence. There is some discussion that influence is
| the new capital. And we are replicating the systems that allow
| for the accumulation of capital in this new digital age.
| Jordan-117 wrote:
| It reminds me of Voat.co, a social news aggregator that
| promoted itself as a free-speech haven in an attempt to pick up
| disaffected Redditors during a series of moderation crackdowns
| circa 2015. It was initially pretty normal:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20150501033432/https://voat.co/
|
| But then they instituted karma-based throttling on
| participation:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20170520210511/https://voat.co/v...
|
| That, plus the influx of racists and misogynists chased off of
| Reddit, led to a snowball effect where the bigots upvoted
| themselves into power-user status and censored anyone who stood
| against them, which discouraged normies from sticking around,
| which further entrenched the bigotry. Within a few years,
| virtually every single new post on the site was radically
| right-wing, blatantly racist/sexist/antisemitic neo-Nazi shit:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20200610022710/https://voat.co/
|
| The site shut down by the end of 2020 from lack of funding.
|
| You can see basically the same thing happening on Xitter, it's
| just slower because the starting userbase was so much larger,
| and Elon (for now) can continue to bankroll it.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| AKA the "Nazi bar" problem.
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Nazi_bar
| kmeisthax wrote:
| One problem I have with the Nazi Bar framing - or perhaps,
| how people read it - is that it assumes the behavior is
| accidental. That is, that the sites that have become Nazi
| bars did so purely out of a misguided sense of free speech
| absolutism that has been abused.
|
| In practice, most Nazi bars _are_ run by people actively
| choosing to kick people out: just the ones wearing the
| trans pride buttons instead of the ones wearing iron
| crosses. The kinds of online spaces run by free speech
| nutters or moderators asleep at the wheel tend to devolve
| into calling everything cringe, including the Nazis.
| Actually, Nazis are a particularly easy target for trolling
| and harassment, both because it is never unethical to laugh
| at Nazis and because critique makes them jump off the deep
| end.
|
| During the Jack Dorsey era of Twitter, Twitter was a dive
| bar. Problematic users rarely got removed off platform,
| neither left nor right[0]. If people did get banned, it was
| for egregious offenses even Twitter management couldn't
| excuse. When Musk bought it, he changed it into a Nazi bar,
| making sure him and his favored far-right commentators got
| all the algorithmic boosts while left-wingers got
| shadowbanned.
|
| Same with all the right-wing communities that forked out of
| Reddit. /r/The_Donald, Voat, etc. I bet you $10 they all
| had active policies to ban or bury left-wing content while
| actively screaming their heads off about "freedom of
| speech".
|
| And there's a parallel with the actual rise of Hitler as
| well. I think a lot of Americans have this incorrect
| picture of a stupendously angry and racist German public,
| all voting in a landslide for the state-sponsored murder of
| six million Jews. The reality is that the people who owned
| the bar - both in Germany _and_ abroad - were rallying
| behind Hitler since day one, in ways that persisted even
| beyond the fall of the Nazi state. They 're the bits of the
| deep state[1] that ensured Hitler's insurrection against
| the Weimar Republic was given a light sentence and that
| Americans were kept in the dark about the nature of the
| Holocaust until it was undeniable. Nobody ever actually
| voted Hitler into office. He took advantage of a
| technicality and a frightened owner class to seize power
| for himself.
|
| Yes, it is true that Nazis are malware[2]. Yes, Nazis _can_
| independently worm their way into a system and ruin it.
| However, more often than not, the people who own the Nazi
| bar don 't merely tolerate Nazis, they accept and embrace
| them.
|
| [0] Before you mention Donald Trump's ban in 2021, keep in
| mind Twitter had made a policy specifically to justify
| keeping Donald Trump on platform even when he was breaking
| rules.
|
| [1] Informal ruling hierarchy parallel to the formalized
| one we vote for. This term usually also alleges that the
| informal hierarchy has subverted the formal one; but I'd
| argue that's almost never necessary for a deep state to
| exist. _All_ states start deep, formal hierarchy is a
| transparency mechanism to make it shallow.
|
| See also https://xkcd.com/898/
|
| [2] Fun fact: if you fine-tune an AI to write malicious
| code unprompted, it becomes a Nazi. See
| https://www.emergent-misalignment.com/
| noboostforyou wrote:
| Very well said. And in relation to your [2] I remember
| that happening before the boom of "AI" -
| https://www.cbsnews.com/news/microsoft-shuts-down-ai-
| chatbot...
| razster wrote:
| That dynamic of influence compounding certainly echoes the
| historical patterns we've seen with capital--those who have it
| can shape systems to acquire more. But it's worth remembering
| that this only holds power if we choose to participate.
|
| Personally, I've stepped away from anything associated with
| X.com or Elon Musk. I deleted my accounts, disconnected from
| the ecosystem entirely--and life is better for it. No
| doomscrolling, no algorithmic nudging, no subtle behavioral
| conditioning. Influence may be the new capital, but opting out
| is still a form of agency. Disengagement can be a powerful act.
|
| We often forget: participation isn't mandatory.
| stevenAthompson wrote:
| I was going to buy a Tesla. My brother had one and I coveted
| it. They make neat stuff.
|
| Then Elon started taking testosterone (or whatever it was
| that jacked up his aggression), using psychedelics, and
| became incapable of keeping his mouth shut. To compound it he
| then got involved in politics.
|
| Now I will never buy a Tesla, starlink, or anything else he's
| involved in because his behavior represents a real risk that
| any of those companies might cease to exist if Elon gets high
| and does something stupid, then I'll be stuck without
| support.
|
| Similarly, a social media account is an investment. I would
| never invest my time into building relationships on a
| platform like X. Even if it does survive Musk, the community
| is broken permanently.
| jandrese wrote:
| Many years ago I was really rooting for Tesla and Elon as
| they dragged the auto industry kicking and screaming
| towards electrification. How they focused on the
| underserved whole home battery market. He even kept his
| manufacturing domestic unlike most other big companies.
|
| Some cracks started to form in this when he made a reckless
| wall street bet that he could make a million cars in a year
| or something and had his employees working double shifts in
| tents to get it done. In the end he won the bet and got an
| enormous payout. I remember calculating that if he divided
| the award in half and split that half evenly among every
| single Tesla employee that it would amount to about $40,000
| per person, a life changing amount of money for most
| people. Instead he kept it all for himself and gave a press
| conference about how big of a genius he is.
|
| But the turning point is when there was a kid trapped in a
| cave and he received some mild criticism over his ill
| conceived rescue solution and the result was to baselessly
| claim that the critic was a pedophile.
|
| He's exactly the kind of guy who looks like a god when you
| only measure things in dollars. He takes big risks and
| they've paid off more often than not, but he's not someone
| anybody should really look up to.
| gruez wrote:
| > In the end he won the bet and got an enormous payout. I
| remember calculating that if he divided the award in half
| and split that half evenly among every single Tesla
| employee that it would amount to about $40,000 per
| person, a life changing amount of money for most people.
| Instead he kept it all for himself and gave a press
| conference about how big of a genius he is.
|
| You call the bet "reckless", but are seemingly only
| opposed to it because he didn't share the winnings? Which
| one is it? Also, I can't find the source for this bet,
| only some bets about covid, and whether the tesla
| roadster could be built at all.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > You call the bet "reckless", but are seemingly only
| opposed to it because he didn't share the winnings? Which
| one is it?
|
| What's the conflict? I can call something reckless
| without the recklessness itself making me particularly
| opposed to it.
|
| Also it's not just that he didn't share the reward, it's
| that he forced a whole lot of extra difficult work _and
| then also_ didn 't share the reward.
| gruez wrote:
| >What's the conflict? I can call something reckless
| without the recklessness itself making me particularly
| opposed to it.
|
| see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekhov's_gun
|
| If you start off a sentence with "Some cracks started to
| form in this when", and then describe a situation using
| negative adjectives (ie. "reckless"), it's fair for most
| assume that the "recklessness" was your justification for
| the aforementioned claim. If that detail is irrelevant to
| your argument, then you shouldn't include it.
|
| As for the object level question of whether taking such a
| bet is "reckless" at all. It's entirely impossible to
| tell without knowing the bet amount, and his finances at
| the time. Musk was recently able to take a $40B hit to
| his finances when he was forced to buy twitter (after
| trying to back out), with seemingly little consequence,
| so it's unclear whether an absurdly large bet would
| actually be "reckless".
|
| >Also it's not just that he didn't share the reward, it's
| that he forced a whole lot of extra difficult work and
| then also didn't share the reward.
|
| Bosses telling non-equity owning subordinates to work
| harder is hardly a phenomenon limited to Musk.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| You can argue that it hurts the flow of the comment, but
| I wouldn't act like a play has a huge plot hole because
| it had a gun that never got used. The comment said X,
| then it said Y, and those things don't conflict. "Which
| one is it?" doesn't make sense as a question.
|
| > Bosses telling non-equity owning subordinates to work
| harder is hardly a phenomenon limited to Musk.
|
| I don't see how this affects anything the GP said.
| jandrese wrote:
| Oh it was reckless. That was the era when built quality
| was rock bottom. People were getting cars that were
| missing parts, or where things were attached completely
| wrong.[1] He was expanding production so fast that it
| caused a serious liquidity crunch at Tesla. But he got
| lucky and managed to squeeze through the problem.
|
| I will have to look harder to find the name of the
| investor whom Elon made the production bet against, but I
| think this article is talking about it:
| https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-
| transportation/teslas...
|
| [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/15/tesla-workers-in-
| ga4-tent-de...
| gruez wrote:
| >I will have to look harder to find the name of the
| investor whom Elon made the production bet against, but I
| think this article is talking about it:
| https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-
| transportation/teslas...
|
| Unless there's something the article totally omitted,
| your original retelling of the story was heavily
| misleading. For one, it's not a bet and is seemingly
| actually a performance bonus, which nearly every F500
| company has for their executives. As such, there was very
| little downside if he lost the bet. It's also unclear why
| CEOs trying to hit aggressive performance targets is a
| bad thing in and of itself. You could still object to it
| on the basis of bad working conditions for workers, or
| corners cut on the product being made, but you mentioned
| none of that in your original comment, which seems to
| imply you were fine with all of those things, and was
| only upset that Musk didn't share in the rewards (???).
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| Based on some of the videos of him it looks like its
| Ketamine.
| zoogeny wrote:
| I think we should be careful of too much cynicism (although
| too little is bad as well). There is the old Aesop tale of
| the fox and the grapes. Being unable to reach the grapes the
| fox sulks away saying "they were probably sour".
|
| There is a lot to gain for the powerful if they can convince
| those that they wish to hold that power over that the "grapes
| are sour", so to speak. That leaves less people fighting for
| the few grapes available, as we stretch this analogy to its
| breaking point.
|
| No man is an island, and all that. If the holders of
| influence decide to start a war, you are in it if you like it
| or not.
| grey-area wrote:
| There's no probably here, and it is healthy to avoid social
| media platforms run by people who perform nazi salutes in
| public and attempt to destroy democracy.
| tyleo wrote:
| Agreed, I don't think the analogy holds in this case.
| Elon is grape maker and he can dole out sour or sweet
| grapes as he pleases. No point in eating them if you
| don't favor him because he often gives out sour ones to
| those folks.
| jandrese wrote:
| It's hard to see how this wasn't by design. Elon loudly
| released the source code to the algorithm so SEO engineers
| could optimize their systems to have total control over the
| narrative. Sure "anybody can read it", but realistically only
| propagandists are going to go to the trouble and then have the
| time and resources to act on it.
|
| He basically handed the site over to the IRA and told them to
| go nuts.
| gruez wrote:
| >IRA
|
| Irish republican army?
| jdeibele wrote:
| Presumably
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency
| tclancy wrote:
| The 'ra? Did I miss a step here?
| hadrien01 wrote:
| The images from the article don't seem to load, I get a
| NS_ERROR_REDIRECT_LOOP according to the devtools
| tonetegeatinst wrote:
| Wouldn't that random tweet about the tariff pause that caused a
| market crash be an outlier if not proof this isn't always true?
|
| Random obscure account tweets about a 90 day pause...a few people
| talk about it....and suddenly news outlets ran with it and the
| markets freaked out.
| bromuk wrote:
| Interesting
| renewiltord wrote:
| What's fascinating about Twitter is watching as everyone who
| claimed it was going to collapse without a few SREs is now
| talking about how it's too powerful and controls opinion.
| w10-1 wrote:
| Is the title ironic? Is this helping?
|
| "Manufacturing consent", the book by Chomsky and Herman, details
| techniques that are largely unused in this situation. Chomsky's
| book by disclosing the hidden editor works against the effect
| rather than for it.
|
| Here it's closer to a state-run media outlet, with the exact
| ambiguity that implies: a known editor pretending to be
| objective, except here the editor only really cares about certain
| topics, and others are encouraged to roam freely (if traceably).
|
| In Chomsky's case, the editor's power comes from being covert,
| but only if people are fooled, so the book works to diminish it.
| In this case, the power comes from the editor being known
| unstoppable. You have to accept it and know yourself as accepting
| it -- which means you have to buy in as a fan to avoid seeing
| yourself as herded, or out yourself as an outsider. Since most
| people take the default step of doing nothing, they get
| accumulating evidence of themselves as herded or a fan. It's a
| forcing function (like "you're with us or against us") that
| conditions acceptance rather than manufacturing consent.
|
| In this case, articles (showing what happens when you oppose the
| editor) and ensuing discussions like this (ending in no-action)
| have the reinforcing effect of empowering the editor, and
| increase the self-censuring effects. They contribute to the aim
| and effect of conditioning acceptance. So they might not be
| helpful. (Better would be the abandonment of a platform when it
| fails to fulfill fairness claims, but that's hard to engineer.)
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| Exact same thing happens on Facebook. There are certain posts and
| ideas which are expressly forbidden, others which are discouraged
| and ones which are boosted.
| torlok wrote:
| Why does this article talk about generic "influential people"
| influencing "the algorithm"? Didn't Musk force Twitter engineers
| on a Sunday night to artificially boost him after he got less
| views than the president? What's the evidence that this is some
| kind of a general issue, and not just the owner being petty.
| whalesalad wrote:
| Spend ten minutes on X with a new account and this is clear as
| day. It's one of the most surreal communities on earth at this
| point. Everything is gaslighting/hyperbole.
| jandrese wrote:
| What is most amazing it to see what Elon retweets, often with
| just a single word followup. It's the most batshit stuff you've
| ever seen. Or just blatantly obvious propaganda. And people
| call him a genius. It's like the world is bowing down at the
| altar of your drunkest most racist uncle.
| whalesalad wrote:
| Have you seen "his" leaked 4chan account? Most insane shit I
| have ever read in my life. Here is a mirror ... the poster
| says multiple times that they are the owner of twitter. https
| ://archive.4plebs.org/pol/search/tripcode/%21SATANZ0Gpo...
|
| Along with many other things like heil hitler. Assuming this
| is actually his account, he is 100% a nazi.
| Joking_Phantom wrote:
| Every social media platform is manipulated by it's owners and
| elites. There's no way to get around it, not when your KPIs are
| user engagement and advertising dollars.
|
| Twitter has become a particularly nasty version of it. In the
| before times, Google, Twitter, Reddit, etc. usually spent their
| efforts trying to manipulate things in a mostly benign way.
|
| If you like free markets, then you must be opposed to Twitter.
| This is a market controlled by a few. Competition is rigorously
| hunted down. Lies and fake social proof packaged into "free
| speech." Only the chosen ones are allowed audience.
|
| This is the opposite of capitalism. This is the worst of
| cronyism.
|
| Force switching all accounts to unfollow Democracts and follow
| Republicans and Elon, signal boosting right wing conspiracy
| theorists, blocking or suspending left or liberal accounts, it's
| just naked power centralization all the way down...
| 627467 wrote:
| The article's angst over X's "manufactured consensus" is
| overblown. Influence has always been curated--editors, town
| criers, or whoever grabbed the mic were the analog algorithms.
| X's sin isn't some evil algo: it's just running at planetary
| scale. We've ditched thousands of small communities for one
| global shouting match, so naturally mega-influencers steal the
| show. Algorithms are just the gears keeping this chaos moving
| because we crave instant, worldwide chatter. Some folks pretend a
| perfect algorithm exists (bsky, IG/fb) but it doesn't come from
| one team, one database, or one set of criteria. The "perfect"
| system is a messy web of different algorithms in different
| spaces, barely connected, each with its own context. Calling out
| X's code misses the mark. We signed up for this planetary circus
| and keep buying tickets.
| throwaway7783 wrote:
| But there is no denying that there is a shift in narrative in X
| posts since its acquisition. So there is certainly more going
| on than just planetary scale. It was planetary scale before
| acquisition too. Algorithms have the power to nudge the
| narrative one way or another at planetary scale.
| EcommerceFlow wrote:
| Yes, the natural order (that was mass censored for 10+ years)
| got uncensored. Look at who won the presidency.
| throwaway7783 wrote:
| No way of telling one way or another, no? Unless you
| actually work at X and know exactly how it works.
|
| Note - My original comment was not about whether now is
| worse than before or vice versa. It is just that narratives
| shifted in a different way, that had nothing to do with
| scale. Algorithms are just as likely as uncensored (or
| censored - how does one know?)
| ljsprague wrote:
| It was completely transparent and unbiased before its
| acquisition.
| watwut wrote:
| It was a little right wing biased. Now the bias moved a lot
| to the right.
| throwaway7783 wrote:
| I can't quite tell if this is sarcasm :). I'll assume it
| is.
| casenmgreen wrote:
| It looks like Twitter is suppressing posts until they are spammed
| by hate bots and then making those posts visible.
|
| https://bsky.app/profile/willhaycardiff.bsky.social/post/3lk...
|
| I've also seen evidence of posts Twitter likes (violent and
| hateful anti-immigration posts - literally a photo of a dummy
| tied to a chair being shot in the back of the head) being spammed
| by love bots.
|
| Twitter seems to be a propaganda channel, run by Donald/Elon/et
| al.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Yeah, artificial delays in content delivery is silently
| spreading. It's not just Twitter.
|
| Edit: is this why 4chan was hit with the disruption - because
| there's no room for this delay mechanism?
| kmeisthax wrote:
| No, 4chan was hacked because hideyuki has terrible security
| hygiene and didn't update shit. Same thing happened to
| 2channel a decade prior.
| OmarShehata wrote:
| important notes from the essay, this not unique to twitter:
|
| > And if you think this only happens on one social network,
| you're already caught in the wrong attention loop.
|
| > The most effective influence doesn't announce itself. It
| doesn't censor loudly, or boost aggressively. It shapes
| perception quietly -- one algorithmic nudge at a time.
| readhistory wrote:
| FWIW, I don't think the person you are responding to said it
| only happens on Twitter. Just _that_ it happens on Twitter.
| awkwabear wrote:
| This definitely happens on other platforms as well but there
| is a key difference in noting that twitter is now privately
| owned by a single person who has shown themself to be
| insecure and prone to lashing publicly at critics.
|
| I think twitter is uniquely concentrated in its influence by
| its owner and willingness to do things so blatantly, other
| platforms need to at least pretend to not steer things so
| directly as not to upset shareholders.
| Tireings wrote:
| It's a propaganda platform since Musk bought it.
|
| Im saying this for ages and never joked.
|
| Plenty of real situations happening like blocking certain
| people, stoping of fact checking, bot protection and detection
| etc.
|
| There is a reason why Twitter needed more people before
| fourseventy wrote:
| It was a propaganda platform long before that. Before Musk
| bought it you could get banned for saying that men can't get
| pregnant.
| viraptor wrote:
| I doubt you have any proof of that happening...
| michtzik wrote:
| https://www.foxnews.com/world/spanish-politician-
| suspended-b...
| viraptor wrote:
| Suspended not banned. Also, in context the tweet was
| saying that the trans man was not a man and that was
| against the policy at the time. The pregnancy was just a
| detail there.
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| surely you realize that this is entertainment outlet is
| not a news organization, nor does this entertainment
| outlet have any obligation to report anything on a
| factual, truthful or verifiable basis? and that this
| entertainment outlet is famously bigoted?
| Llamamoe wrote:
| Yeah I mean, if the only reason you said that was to "piss
| off the libs" and hate on transgender men, you really
| shouldn't be shocked that a platform doesn't want that.
| Being unable to say hateful things without consequence on
| social media isn't the same as it being a propaganda
| machine.
| gruez wrote:
| >It looks like Twitter is suppressing posts until they are
| spammed by hate bots and then making those posts visible.
|
| >https://bsky.app/profile/willhaycardiff.bsky.social/post/3lk..
| .
|
| This could also very well be explained by a ranking algorithm
| that optimizes for "engagement". Getting spammed by hate bots =
| "engagement". This would be perfectly consistent with what the
| guy is experiencing, minus the accusation that the platform is
| suppressing anti-ukraine posts, which is totally
| unsubstantiated.
| casenmgreen wrote:
| As I understanding the timing, the post was suppressed
| _until_ the hate bots spammed it.
|
| Given the post was suppressed, how did the hate bots know
| about it to spam it?
|
| It seems to me Twitter suppressed the post until they had
| time to spam it with hate posts.
|
| Bear in mind here also this suppression did _not_ happen for
| other posts - only for the pro-Ukraine post - so Twitter at
| the least is specifically suppressing pro-Ukraine posts.
| hn1986 wrote:
| Billionaire buys social network for instant cultural and
| political influence. Including amplifying his own posts. Yet,
| hardly any alarm from the tech or mainstream
| gmd63 wrote:
| Metrics on X have lost all of their credibility since Elon took
| over.
|
| The guy likely juices his own numbers, floods posts he likes with
| botted engagement, etc.
|
| Likes are private so he can delude Trumpers into thinking they're
| popular in a sea of bots.
| ein0p wrote:
| Looking at the comments, the blowback to this is pretty wonderful
| to see. There's hope for HN after all. More and more people are
| realizing that they don't have to blindly subscribe to the
| "current thing".
| o1inventor wrote:
| Spend a decade crying wolf or "muh fascists" at every little
| thing we disagree with, and suddenly everyone is surprised when
| the public tunes it out and we get fascists.
|
| "who made you this way?"
|
| "you did."
|
| - american politics circa 2025
| piperswe wrote:
| I mean, the fascists today are basically the same people as the
| fascists 10 years ago. It wasn't crying wolf, it was seeing
| what was going to happen in the future.
| mcintyre1994 wrote:
| I wonder if the algorithm is affected by blocking the high
| profile account in these cases. Eg I blocked Musk ages ago
| because if you don't then the algorithm just constantly pushes
| his 'content' at you. So does the algorithm still prioritise
| things he's interacted with for me, or does it only do that for
| people who haven't blocked him? I definitely get stuff
| recommended that I expect he might interact with, but I don't
| know if that's actually specifically why it's being pushed at me.
| numpad0 wrote:
| They've massively raised various penalization thresholds too,
| so that organically valued content cannot gain popularity.
| Unless you've blocked everything he sees, you're still
| affected.
| jadbox wrote:
| Just my personal antidotal experience, my reach on X in the last
| six months has tanked more than 10-100x and my usage hasn't
| really changed. At this point, I feel my reach has basically
| dropped to near zero unless some "big name influencer" boosts it
| with a comment.
| neilv wrote:
| > _When an account with 219 million followers interacts with a
| smaller one -- not by blocking or arguing, but simply by muting
| -- the consequences are immediate. The smaller account's
| visibility drops from 150,000 views to 20,000 overnight._
|
| Is this true on Twitter/X?
|
| If so, what is the rationale?
| numpad0 wrote:
| Lots of people report those kinds of massive deboosting and
| visibility penalties, and constantly devising avoidance
| strategies. There are no trivially inferred rationale as with
| lots of things going on in the world, unless destruction of
| value were the goal.
| jhp123 wrote:
| I wouldn't think you need any deep insight or analysis to
| understand that a media site privately held by a government
| official is propaganda
| cadamsdotcom wrote:
| In this modern era we heave under the weight of decades of
| exponential growth. In some cases it's actually "only" compound
| growth - but the result has been the same (and very ironic):
| ossification through stratification.
|
| There are behemoths living among us. There will soon be social
| media accounts with enough sway to manufacture truth.
|
| What needs to be learned is society is like a national park. Left
| to its own devices it will end up trashed - people leave garbage,
| move in and use it for whatever they like. So, we fund a service
| that keeps parks maintained. We understand the benefits of the
| National Park Service because they are visible and we are visual
| creatures. But for some reason we have a more laissez-faire
| attitude to unchecked accumulation and its downstream effects.
|
| It's risky for power to be so concentrated. We're forced to hope
| for benevolence and there's no backup plan.
|
| What more can be done to show the orders of magnitude of
| difference between the most and least powerful?
| hammock wrote:
| This is a good summary of psyops currently in use by all sides of
| US and foreign governments and private interests against the
| American people, and applies to all forms of media, not just
| Twitter.
| -__---____-ZXyw wrote:
| Is there a curated and serious resource from any public body or
| private individual documenting specific cases of abuse by
| Twitter?
|
| Any links greatly appreciated.
| hamilyon2 wrote:
| MeowMeowBeenz or Nosedive, in real world
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