I’m not new to Lemmy anymore… but this place remains something of a mystery to me. At Reddit we met mostly A-holes… but here some how there are genuinely intelligent, kind, empathic individuals who share valuably and vulnerably from their experience with, I believe, the sole intention of helping perfect strangers.
Your comment here stood out to me so much that I did something I almost never do… I mosied into your contributions. I’ll share why: when certain folks here are so intelligent and spot on, I worry it’s AI. Forgive me. Why someone should be trying to run AI bots in the Fediverse is beyond me, but there, now you have peeked at a little of my own toxic narrative. I confess that I noticed you do not create original posts… choosing to drop insightful comments when interested. If I may, and I hope you will pardon my curiosity about an interesting person, how do you find yourself un compelled to ever make a post? Or do you have a lessermeancow account where you drop a meme every so often?
It’s more important than ever to check into the things you see on the internet that make you feel things, both good and bad. AI and bots have been poking around Lemmy a little, I expect it will get worse, it’s a spreading infection. For now though, it’s still a place with a lot of humans looking for connection.
Reddit is beyond help, I had a 12-year account there, I did make a lot of posts, in the early days I actually had contests with other “power users” to see how many gold awards we could collect, I was a moderator of several communities, some quite large. All that got flushed when an admin flipped a switch because they sided with some toxic child over someone without a single mark or warning, and honestly I didn’t care that much, I was just puzzled why they are purging their most dedicated users so indiscriminately, that’s when I peeled back the surface and saw how bad the AI/bot problem was, as well as the credible conspiracy that the site is being developed in association with some government agencies as a psy-op to control or at least steer social narratives. (Check out the rabbit-hole of Eglin Air Force Base sometime.)
I still have accounts there, I have accounts all over every social media platform for the purpose of pushing back on toxic, hateful narratives, for antagonizing users to break narrative controls, and to have my finger on the pulse of both sides of the major issues.
Part of what I do on Lemmy is antagonize the “sheltered” users here who are creating their own bubble worlds, which are incredibly damaging to society. I don’t post memes or posts because I don’t care about attention or points anymore, I fully expect I’ll be banned at some point because that seems to be our default coping strategy in the 2020’s for dealing with people who make you uncomfortable.
But I often get stuck just trying to share emotional and social pointers with people. A lot of people need a lot of help in life, and I’ve been through so much shit for so long, I feel like I have to DO something with it all before all my experiences return to entropy.
Don’t let this go to your head, but as I read the first comment you left me and others I read from your profile, I thought, this person was a star at Reddit and left when everyone else did. I’m glad you’ve embraced your mission.
I’ll say, I don’t share stuff for popularity — I share it because I want others to know about it or I want to know if they agree or disagree with it.
I’m a big fan of typewriters and I think sometimes about starting an r/typewriters here… that and r/idiocracy are what i miss most from Reddit.
I say go for it, I don’t know how much of a typewriter community is out here, but this is the waning days of online communities, might as well try to enjoy it and connect with others while you still can.
Waning… you could be referring to the rest of vapid mainstream socials… and I agree that’s waning or already lost, but I have great faith in the Fediverse. You do not?
I think this is a good alternative to spaces like reddit, but so far this reminds me a LOT of early reddit or digg, meaning it will go in one of two directions - fade off into obscurity or get popular enough to get eyed by capital and political forces and eventually digested. Eventually all online spaces are going to be either completely compromised by populations of grifters and bots, or they will be the last holdouts of “pure” online communication, slowly declining in numbers until they’re like so many empty servers and forums out there already.
I mean, it could very well hold out if there are enough dedicated people who work to preserve the space and moderate it effectively, but my experience in moderating tells me that it’s often a losing game once there’s blood in the water. People have a hard time keeping up with and staying dedicated to upholding consistent values in moderation. I’ve seen huge spaces fall just because the mods got tired of pruning and shepherding the flock, so they get replaced by less dedicated people, who then get replaced by subversive forces with entirely different motivations.
I suppose it’s possible we could train and maintain benevolent AI systems to guard against the armies at the gates, but even that is just an escalation of a back-and-forth war between the last vestiges of human creativity and collaboration, and the tidal forces of commercialization, political manipulation and mental manipulation, which are going to be far more powerful than we can even imagine.
I remain hopeful that spaces like this will subsist long into the century, but more and more I am doubting our abilities as biological beings, products of evolution, to preserve anything that matters.
(My old days of reddit fame were a lot more optimistic and cheery. A lot has happened.)
Yeah… seeing in the century time frame… I’m barely able to fathom six months or a year. I can see Lemmy growing at its current rate for a decade without becoming dog shit for certain.
There is a percentage of the mainstream getting fed up with dogshit. They are sniffing around.
I’ve imagined that there may yet be a strange “golden age” of underground, tightly controlled “human internet” using new methods to verify users across a network of sites and forums. It would be small, with some kind of gatekeeping system like a one-time fee you pay just like the glory days of Somethingawful, and maybe some kind of video-chat with administrators to get cleared to participate if you’re a human and an adult who can form coherent sentences. If it works well and people participate and form even a somewhat active community, I could envision such a network becoming an incredibly trendy, underground movement that would feel a lot like the olden days of usenet and IRC and AOL messenger/chat rooms, but with today’s access to technology and communication tools.
I can’t imagine such a thing would last too long. Maybe a few years before someone finds a way to compromise it. Humans are just too good at finding ways to tear things down rather than keep building.
I’m not new to Lemmy anymore… but this place remains something of a mystery to me. At Reddit we met mostly A-holes… but here some how there are genuinely intelligent, kind, empathic individuals who share valuably and vulnerably from their experience with, I believe, the sole intention of helping perfect strangers.
Your comment here stood out to me so much that I did something I almost never do… I mosied into your contributions. I’ll share why: when certain folks here are so intelligent and spot on, I worry it’s AI. Forgive me. Why someone should be trying to run AI bots in the Fediverse is beyond me, but there, now you have peeked at a little of my own toxic narrative. I confess that I noticed you do not create original posts… choosing to drop insightful comments when interested. If I may, and I hope you will pardon my curiosity about an interesting person, how do you find yourself un compelled to ever make a post? Or do you have a lessermeancow account where you drop a meme every so often?
It’s more important than ever to check into the things you see on the internet that make you feel things, both good and bad. AI and bots have been poking around Lemmy a little, I expect it will get worse, it’s a spreading infection. For now though, it’s still a place with a lot of humans looking for connection.
Reddit is beyond help, I had a 12-year account there, I did make a lot of posts, in the early days I actually had contests with other “power users” to see how many gold awards we could collect, I was a moderator of several communities, some quite large. All that got flushed when an admin flipped a switch because they sided with some toxic child over someone without a single mark or warning, and honestly I didn’t care that much, I was just puzzled why they are purging their most dedicated users so indiscriminately, that’s when I peeled back the surface and saw how bad the AI/bot problem was, as well as the credible conspiracy that the site is being developed in association with some government agencies as a psy-op to control or at least steer social narratives. (Check out the rabbit-hole of Eglin Air Force Base sometime.)
I still have accounts there, I have accounts all over every social media platform for the purpose of pushing back on toxic, hateful narratives, for antagonizing users to break narrative controls, and to have my finger on the pulse of both sides of the major issues.
Part of what I do on Lemmy is antagonize the “sheltered” users here who are creating their own bubble worlds, which are incredibly damaging to society. I don’t post memes or posts because I don’t care about attention or points anymore, I fully expect I’ll be banned at some point because that seems to be our default coping strategy in the 2020’s for dealing with people who make you uncomfortable.
But I often get stuck just trying to share emotional and social pointers with people. A lot of people need a lot of help in life, and I’ve been through so much shit for so long, I feel like I have to DO something with it all before all my experiences return to entropy.
Don’t let this go to your head, but as I read the first comment you left me and others I read from your profile, I thought, this person was a star at Reddit and left when everyone else did. I’m glad you’ve embraced your mission.
I’ll say, I don’t share stuff for popularity — I share it because I want others to know about it or I want to know if they agree or disagree with it.
I’m a big fan of typewriters and I think sometimes about starting an r/typewriters here… that and r/idiocracy are what i miss most from Reddit.
I say go for it, I don’t know how much of a typewriter community is out here, but this is the waning days of online communities, might as well try to enjoy it and connect with others while you still can.
Waning… you could be referring to the rest of vapid mainstream socials… and I agree that’s waning or already lost, but I have great faith in the Fediverse. You do not?
I think this is a good alternative to spaces like reddit, but so far this reminds me a LOT of early reddit or digg, meaning it will go in one of two directions - fade off into obscurity or get popular enough to get eyed by capital and political forces and eventually digested. Eventually all online spaces are going to be either completely compromised by populations of grifters and bots, or they will be the last holdouts of “pure” online communication, slowly declining in numbers until they’re like so many empty servers and forums out there already.
I mean, it could very well hold out if there are enough dedicated people who work to preserve the space and moderate it effectively, but my experience in moderating tells me that it’s often a losing game once there’s blood in the water. People have a hard time keeping up with and staying dedicated to upholding consistent values in moderation. I’ve seen huge spaces fall just because the mods got tired of pruning and shepherding the flock, so they get replaced by less dedicated people, who then get replaced by subversive forces with entirely different motivations.
I suppose it’s possible we could train and maintain benevolent AI systems to guard against the armies at the gates, but even that is just an escalation of a back-and-forth war between the last vestiges of human creativity and collaboration, and the tidal forces of commercialization, political manipulation and mental manipulation, which are going to be far more powerful than we can even imagine.
I remain hopeful that spaces like this will subsist long into the century, but more and more I am doubting our abilities as biological beings, products of evolution, to preserve anything that matters.
(My old days of reddit fame were a lot more optimistic and cheery. A lot has happened.)
Yeah… seeing in the century time frame… I’m barely able to fathom six months or a year. I can see Lemmy growing at its current rate for a decade without becoming dog shit for certain.
There is a percentage of the mainstream getting fed up with dogshit. They are sniffing around.
I’ve imagined that there may yet be a strange “golden age” of underground, tightly controlled “human internet” using new methods to verify users across a network of sites and forums. It would be small, with some kind of gatekeeping system like a one-time fee you pay just like the glory days of Somethingawful, and maybe some kind of video-chat with administrators to get cleared to participate if you’re a human and an adult who can form coherent sentences. If it works well and people participate and form even a somewhat active community, I could envision such a network becoming an incredibly trendy, underground movement that would feel a lot like the olden days of usenet and IRC and AOL messenger/chat rooms, but with today’s access to technology and communication tools.
I can’t imagine such a thing would last too long. Maybe a few years before someone finds a way to compromise it. Humans are just too good at finding ways to tear things down rather than keep building.