Capitalism consumes everything.
Doesn’t communism consume everything too?
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.
That is naive. People will still fight for power and exploit others to get it.
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.
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.
It had some of the same problems but not all of them. It had universal healthcare, better rights for women, faster increase of education and literacy, less homelessness, less problems with religion interfering with politics, or companies buying politicians, etc.
It also had some new problems we didn’t have like lack of focus on small commodities or suppression of religion, but that’s not fixable or required for communism, it’s just a focus they had specifically. It also had of the same problems we have just from being human, like anti-LGBTQ attitudes, racism against certain groups, bureaucrats, and wars. But communism’s implementation changes between countries, none of those problems are necessary, it’s just stuff that has to be learned from. For example, Cuba is communist but has made great strides towards fixing LGBTQ and racist attitudes, and has eased up on religion. China is communist but has a bigger focus on small manufacturing and as a result has lots of small commodities.
Imagine if we abandoned democracy the first time it “failed” in Greece thousands of years ago or the republic in Rome. I don’t doubt that you have some relatives that suffered, but by comparison, the US and it’s capitalist allies destabilized basically all of South America and Africa. While most people who were alive in the former Soviet block would prefer to go back to when it existed because it caused a huge economic disaster when they sold the countries off for parts and privatized everything for the oligarchs.
The important part is that it’s a system not focused on things like GDP, growth, or money made by corporations to determine success, but the happiness and well-being of all the humans as a collective. Just focusing on that would go a long way, no matter which implementation we used (but imo it probably has to be an implementation of socialism or communism, because capitalism can’t imagine a society without those money and growth metrics).
We have universal healthcare and human rights everywhere in Europe. But we don’t have authoritarian regimes which kill millions for ideology. Fuck communism!
We tried many times, millions were killed each time.
I meant try for utopia. What you refer to isn’t that.
It is exactly that. Otherwise Marx wouldn’t praise the Taiping massacre, which led to tens of millions of deaths.
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.
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.
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
Used Reddit for years. There’s no way the percentage is that low.
That is probably correct. 15% of total content, but probably 70% of the content you see. Reddit has a tonne of content posted that almost nobody sees
15% of content and then fake upvoted to heaven. Could work
Lemmy wouldn’t have that problem because we’re all too busy enjoying an ice cold Coca-Cola.
Omg the amount of sneaky coke ads I saw on that site was insane
“At least…”
I feel like the 15% number is very, very low.
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
I have like 30 reddit accounts and I’m just trolling not-for-profit, so… maybe ~1,000,000? Seems legit
15% of content can easily come from under 1% of users.
Lol I shit the bed. Totally read 15% of users.
Y combinator discussion suggests this author posts completely made up garbage:
Lol nice, it’s 404’d now
Probably just an anecdote, but notice more sus medium content recently. Used to be niche Python tutorials.
The advent of ChatGPT has made those obsolete, since ChatGPT is probably trained on all of those.
Side note, it doesn’t always fuck up, but most of the time it’ll give just completely wrong matplot instructions. The recent tattoo post comes to mind.
Not surprising at all.
In other news, GTA Online is awesome! I am definitely not a plant or anything like that, go check out GTA Online!
Or something like that.
lol
I remember when /r/HailCorporate was a trending sub and then it just sort of got strangled to death.
Also remember the periodic waves of “Hillary is bae! Mother of dragons! Yas Queen!” and “I love Mayor Pete” and “KHive ftw!” and even a smattering of Mitt Romney fanboi-ism on /r/politics, as their campaigns rose and fell.
Nevermind the absolutely sycophantic corporate ghoul AMAs. Bill Gates, Ann Coulter, and Don Lemon all leap to mind. Just the absolute worst moderation imaginable for these guys. Then there was the Elon Musk AMA. Jesus fucking Christ.
I remember writing a comment about invasive advertising by Instagram. Just shared some anecdotes about how a few extremely specific conversation topics soon became the topic for the ads I was seeing on Instagram, and pointed out that if they were in fact using background conversation to target ads, it would be extremely easy to automate with the voice recognition technology available at the time, so why would they ignore the opportunity if targeted ads are their main source of revenue?
It became one of my most down voted comments at the time, and I had about twice as many replies as downvotes, claiming all kinds of wild or easily disproven shit to disprove the idea that Instagram used such tactics. Was very fishy
And remember, if THEY have thousands of bots that each ‘think independently’ but still end up downvoting your post en masse, then that’s totally fine. But if YOU try to upvote your post with one of your alts so it doesn’t get buried, that’s bannable.
Shit you can get paid?
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.
I just hope that the next new study doesn’t end up being “New Study: At Least 15% of All Lemmy Content is Corporate Trolls Trying to Manipulate Public Opinion”, otherwise I would be wondering WTF is going on, is Lemmy on the way of being enshittified by Corporate Morons?
My first realization about this problem with reddit came about a decade ago when it became undeniable that shills flooded the discourse the moment Monsanto was mentioned.
deleted by creator
Dead internet here we come!
Makes me miss the wild west days of the internet. Everything felt more… human. Now it feels like a soulless corporate husk. It’s wild that covid babies won’t know what those days were like.
Agreed, but Lemmy feels like the old Internet for the most part. I suspect that 90% ish of comments here are actual humans. The remaining 10% is pushing some kind of agenda.
I agree. There’s also a pervasive feeling that lemmy is unaffected by manipulation and misinformation.
If Lemmy continues to grow sooner or later it will become a large enough target for manipulation, and I wonder how federation will fare at that time.
And this is why I use lemmy
I worry that if/when Lemmy becomes popular enough the larger communities will be targeted in the same way…
