I actually feel strangely better about this now, given the developments of 2023. I think the scale of it was what concerned me before, because formerly we all

I actually feel strangely better about this now, given the developments of 2023. I think the scale of it was what concerned me before, because formerly we all had a small handful of MLM-adjacent people in our acquaintances, but then social media and later the various manias and bubbles seemed to crank that up to 11 and suddenly it seemed like they were everywhere. I know it's not true, and those people/accounts just seem more prevalent because it's by their nature they need to be highly visible, but that wasn't quite enough. Now though? Now I can dismiss large numbers as potentially being bots. It's not particularly healthy to commit too hard to this as a coping mechanism, as of course some small number of people with what seem at first like shallow, self-interested opinions are going to be onto something genuinely interesting and I might be missing that. But 100 crypto influencers now becomes a handful, leveraging technology, and that becomes easier to swallow. It works for other things too. The cluster of comments on every show hacker news post for open source (but somehow commercially restricted) software claiming it's not open if it's not MIT? Automated cloud provider community sentiment management accounts. The linkedin blogspam PR houses communicating exclusively with other linkedin blogspam PR houses? All automatic now, no suffering humans in that loop. It's a nicer picture overall. Can more easily justify skipping over well-structured bad ideas as if they were spam comments on blogs back in the early 2010s.