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Y'all See the Astroturfing, Right?

• PaulHoule 1y ago
  Remember Triplebyte? Or the early posts about MCP?
• gwbas1c 1y ago
  Pretty much any comment that runs contrary to the current hype narrative gets downvoted: 10 years ago, if you pointed out that cryptocurrency is a scam, you get downvoted. Today, if you point out that AI isn't going to live up to the hype, you get downvoted. That being said, I think you need to have concrete examples of opinion shaping for this thread to get any constructive discussion.
  • justcuriousss 1y ago
    Thank you, and I agree. I did not want to cite examples, thinking they would overwhelm the thread with the specific problem in question. I don’t mean groupthink or the opposing groupthink that comes in response, though. I believe I can tell the difference, and I believe this is new and systemic. If you don’t perceive the same thing, I may simply be wrong or projecting. It’s why I asked.
    • gwbas1c 1y ago
      If it's going on, it's probably not in the threads that I read. Hacker News has no ads: It has to support someone's agenda, otherwise it would be a charity.
    • nacho-daddy 1y ago
      I see sock puppets everywhere. Some obviously state actors. This is how soft power is exercised in the 21st century to shape narrative. Your tax dollars being spent (assuming you live in a country that practices propaganda against it's own citizens like the USA. see Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012/2013)
• salawat 1y ago
  For the uninitiated. https://cryptome.org/2012/07/gent-forum-spies.htm https://cryptome.org/2012/07/gent-forum-spies.htm Take it how you will.
  • _wire_ 1y ago
    These points observe how forum members adapt to and manage controversy irrespective of any connection to organized influencing. Basic psychology. So connecting these observations to "spies" is absurd begging of the question. Maybe this little catalogue seemed insightful in the 80s era of USENET news, but today it's simplistic and anarchistic. MSM and FAANG have gone so far beyond these points in strategy and tactical manipulation of opinion that trying to reckon MSM / FAANG concerns and approaches with a litany about interpersonal behaviors of ordinary, singular net users is like confusing an interaction with a next door neighbor is the same contact with aliens in another solar system.
    • salawat 1y ago
      Difference is in scale, not in kind. BBS's, Chan honeypots, chat control, dark network infiltration, MSM/FAANG & governmental manipulation are all just different ways of trying to coerce and orient different maturities and scales of technical networks. The implementation details and scale may differ, but the actors, activities, and mechanics are all the same. Without a single machine or computer in the picture, these same tactics are the fundamentals of manufacturing consent amongst a gaggle of free agents. If you only have a bunch of humans trying to organize themselves in a network, these same forces will emerge. If you can't see that, that's more a failure on your part, but I still beseech you to really bloody pay attention. It's not about tech. It's about guiding attention and shaping narrative. The tech has just made the activity and execution easier to do, more difficult to investigate, faster to get results, and is absolutely something I will until the end of my days, initiate young men and women to. Even just members of this forum, through my observation of how they operate over the last decade are prone to the same forces. It isn't alien. Quite the contrary. Most bloody human thing on the planet. People organizing against other people. Tale as old as time. We have the manual. It is in use. It isn't perfect. It can be worked around. But you have to know about it to do it. The first step is learning. The second step, is resistance. There cannot be the second without the first.