It’s remarkable how effective that strategy has been.

Reagan/Bush run up the deficit by 300%+ due to tax cuts and massive military spending, foreign wars

Clinton pays off the deficit, gets the economy booming, scales back military spending and foreign entanglements

GWB campaigns on a platform of tax cuts and increased military spending, along with denying climate change, barely wins

deficit skyrockets due to tax cuts, multi trillion dollar wars, lack of financial regulation collapses global economy

Obama has to save the economy again, extricate us from foreign entanglements again, while fighting against a republican establishment that refuses to pass any legislation

Trump administration completely fails to deal with COVID pandemic and tanks the economy yet again

Biden has to clean up that mess, and the resultant inflation is blamed on the Democrats

How many times are people going to fall for this shit?

Damn I gotta watch this ASAP

Between 2 and n “hexbears” (understood to mean “humans afflicted with hexbear mind virus using other servers”) are behaving in some coordinated way. You were pretty clearly implying that it’s some conspiracy rather than simply other users disagreeing with you.

Lol what are you on about? People who use hexbear (i.e. hexbears) share similar traits, interests, and behaviors. They use hexbear because they fit in on hexbear, and in order to fit in on hexbear you need to pass an extensive series of ideological purity tests, which result in the homogeneity and cult-like behavior that occurs.

Hexbear is quite explicit about this, they don’t want anyone with any sort of divergent political views on their server. They clearly revel in “dunking on libs” by chain downvoting and harassing people when they say things that the hexbear hive mind disagrees with. And yet always claim innocence when their obvious brigading is called out, as you are currently doing.

It is a real problem for everyone who’s not a hexbear, because it means that we can’t have sane, civil conversations about certain political issues on Lemmy, because CCP apologists and edgelord larping teenage “leftists” constantly butt in and derail the discussion with their potent combination of ignorance and self righteousness.

I never asserted that “anyone downvoting must be a hexbear alt”. There you go again, misrepresenting my point just to feel like you’re winning.

I’m quite sure that non-hexbears are downvoting OP also. But that wasn’t what you said, was it? You could have said that originally, but instead you decided to mock OP and act like he’s crazy and there’s no way he is getting downvoted by hexbear users, which is disingenous and lame.

You know what you’re doing, I don’t need to explain your own bad faith tactics to you.

Lemmy, famous for not allowing alt accounts 😅

This is why people don’t like hexbear, because they consistently try to gaslight and use disingenous arguments such as this. How are you disputing the fact that OP is getting downvoted by hexbears right now? That’s insane.

You don’t need those commas in that sentence. It makes you sound like Christopher Walken 😅

That sub is trash also. I think the whole conspiracy theorist subculture has been taken over by the alt right and is highly politicized at this point.

Really? Damn that’s crazy.

Rage against him when he does evil things, by all means. But when you start raging against him 24/7 for no particular reason, it serves no purpose. In fact, it lessens your ability to actually call him out when he does bad stuff, because you sound like the boy who cried wolf.

And more importantly, it also affects the quality of discussion on Lemmy. One major advantage we have over reddit is that people tend to actually read the articles and make insightful comments that add to the discussion. “Hurr Durr Muskrat bad” is the opposite of that, it’s a reddit style pandering comment that ultimately has no substance or meaning. When these circlejerky comments become more common than good comments, the value of this site as a forum for legitimate discussion falls off a cliff.

It’s baffling how people on Lemmy hate Musk so much and yet can’t stop mentioning him in every random, unrelated thread.

The starlink was privately bought as per the article, it wasn’t officially procured using federal funds. So the comment I responded to doesn’t really make any sense in the context of this post.

But it gets 50 upvotes because Musk is very bad man. I guess that answers my own question about why people can’t stop mentioning him on Lemmy: it’s free upvotes to shit on him. That’s fine I guess, but it can be annoying when it clogs up the discussion in unrelated threads.

What dude are you referring to? I’m confused how your comment relates to the article.

A few things.

• Admins can and do ban accounts that downvote rampantly

• Obvious bot brigading is obvious. It became harder to tell on reddit when they started fuzzing the vote numbers, but could frequently still be figured out. It’s easier on Lemmy, someone just has to report some unusual voting pattern to the admin and they can check if the voting accounts look like bots.

• I was once told that the algorithm is less weighted towards upvoted comments and more weighted towards recent comments on Lemmy, when compared with reddit. I am not sure if this is true, but I have noticed that recent comments tend to rise above the top upvoted comments in threads when viewing by Hot.

• Without any way for bad content to be filtered out, you just end up with an endless stream of undifferentiated noise. The voting system actually protects the platform from the encroachment of bots and the ignorant mob, because it helps filter them out from the users who have something of value that they want to contribute.

I’m not insulting anybody. I’m simply stating the fact that it’s smart to wear a helmet, because if you hit your head on the ground, you could die. That’s all.

Walking down the stairs is less dangerous than biking and you know it.

You make some good points.

I still wear one, but I don’t judge people who choose not to.

I don’t wear one and I judge myself for not doing so 🤷

Complicated issue.

Could be even lower if they wore helmets though. I don’t even wear a helmet myself, but it’s objectively smart to do so.

My friend got something caught in his front wheel and went over the handlebars at 20mph. Could have been turned into a vegetable if he wasn’t wearing a helmet.

Not really. Lemmy is filled with skeptics, rebels, and independent thinkers, and there are only like 50,000 monthly active users.

You know what’s a much better target for propaganda? Reddit or any corporate social media site. The users are simpleminded and easily manipulated and you don’t even have to worry about moderators, you can just pay to run ads.

Lemm.ee is actually bigger in terms of userbase now. And SJW is about the same size. But .ml still hosts a lot more communities so I guess that also counts for something

Why not provide it to everyone else?

Anytime I see a trash post that’s where it comes from 9/10.

It’s 40% of the whole Lemmy userbase and activity. They’ve got their fair share of trolls but come on, the worst? Have you forgotten about redditors?

It’s hard to be the biggest, and I think their admins are doing a pretty good job.

I saw a fellow mod outright nazi-ing about ( not “saying things I disagree with” but actual nazi fanboy-ing)

A claim like this typically requires evidence.