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PaperclipPerfector  22d ago (text post)   24847 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 29, 2024

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It's All Astroturf

I came across this post today comparing two Reddit threads on LateStageCapitalism, posted 10 months apart, with essentially the exact same content, including top level comments and replies but with different user names.

Discussion on HackerNews.

The posters on HackerNews, ever blinkered, theorize that this is some sort of effort to farm karma in order to promote products. That theory is almost certainly not true. There is minimal commercial value to Reddit accounts.

The alternate explanation seems obvious. Hacktivists are manipulating Reddit to promote far-left ideas, creating fake accounts to post and vote. This does not take much imagination. In fact, Trump supporters were doing the very same thing in 2016 prior to being stomped by the site admins.

You'd have to be pretty simple to think that most of the political stuff you read on Reddit or Hacker News isn't deeply manipulated. It doesn't take many votes to sway things in one direction or another. All it takes is a few downvotes to keep dissenting voices from even appearing in front of real users. On the other hand, with a few upvotes, your own content will be featured front and center. It's comically easy to achieve.

It's been said that most of what you read on line is written by crazy people. I think it's worse. I think it's written by people who are trying to manipulate you.

I have a question, tangentially related but actionable nevertheless.

Every single information and/or discussion channel/forum is getting shittier and shittier. I posit that in addition to algorithms maximizing engagement or minimizing whatever, it's also the userbase. The average user is getting younger, less attentive and mostly importantly dumber. And this will only get worse as more of the third world with their sub 100 IQ's (Indians shitting up comments is a plentiful example) gain access to the internet.

Most of the internet is already unreadable to me. Not only is the discourse vaccous, it's actively harmful to my psychological and intellectual health.

Where do I even go in 10 years? Maybe Sam Kriss was right about the internet dying. It might serve me emails and host my software creations but it will not serve people like me anymore in the near future.

The only way this will be solved is timestamped id verification, then sites can make it so you need to be a non-Indian adult to be allowed to talk on social media. Unfortunately trusting some third party id verification API is a huge privacy risk, but it'd be worth it for some sites.

This can already be done "manually" by requiring timestamped ids sent to mods but if there was a way to do it with a third party system I'd be more willing

Much of what constituted the valuable discussions on the open internet of the past now takes place in Discord.

I've been pretty terminally online since the late 90s. Through most of the aughts and even early teens, I'd estimate it was 90% forums, 10% IRC for discussions. Discord has really changed everything now. I'd estimate that the previous ratios have flipped, and at present 90% of my internet discussions are via Discord, and 10% are forums like this one, Reddit, or SA.

I blame cell phones. I'd be a better motteposter if I was on my PC.

And as you say: add a distracted teen to the phone problem and quality is horrible compared to an adult looking at a computer screen.

In 2009 I suggested Saving forums from themselves with shared hierarchical white lists Linking to archived page: project name Outer Circle. It was discussed on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=920110 My health deteriorated. Nobody else tried implementing the ideas.

Where do I even go in 10 years?

That allows for planning ahead and maybe writing your own version of Outer Circle. The core idea is

Current approaches fail because they try to create a single forum, which requires agreement on what is good.

Shared hierarchical white-lists are a mechanism for allowing "multiple forums" to peacefully coexist with the same "comment base". You don't see shitty comments because you don't white-list them. The shitty commentators don't try to ban you because they never white-list long boring intellectuals and don't know that you exist. But there is overlap. The forums have the potential to reach critical mass, with enough commentators to sustain interest. And "freedom of speech" benefits from all content being opt-in. Every-one can ban any-one for any-reason, and that ban doesn't extend beyond their personal version of the forum.

It's like The City and the City except libertarian.

How do you resolve issues where someone you whitelisted replies to the comment of someone you haven't, and vice versa?

It’s addressed in the link. If I understand correctly: if you reply to a comment, then you “endorse” it by default, allowing people who whitelist you to see the comment. But you can also choose not to endorse a comment you reply to (in which case neither comment is seen, I think).

Where do I even go in 10 years?

We're on a site five steps removed from a LiveJournal called squid314, and I certainly wouldn't have predicted this back in April 2014. Scott had been doing SSC for about 14 months, the events that would result in GamerGate were still playing out, and I don't think /r/slatestarcodex was even around then (June 2015?).

I'd posit something like "the openness of the system can only be in proportion to the quality of the general population". As the population gets worse, more gatekeeping is required. Unified logins, generic codebases, and modern web design are on average bad signs; single-site authentication, custom codebases, and archaic design are on average good signs. A lot of commercial web design is to make it easy and attractive for anyone to participate, and in a way, I think we want the opposite. We want people who value the content enough to step outside the path of least resistance.

But there's also the problem of keeping population growth above replacement.

Gatekeeping and openness aren't exactly the same, you can be "open" and also high-quality if you're swift, brutal, and arbitrary with moderation, which is the best place to be imo.

But there's also the problem of keeping population growth above replacement.

If hypnosis works on some people, why not force people making virtual boyfriend apps into conditioning women using those apps into having a 'breeding kink' ?

I could see CPC okaying this.

My suspicion has always been that the CCP elite is less committed to increasing the birthrate than is often suggested.

They don't really need to if the rest of the world sinks even more.

I'm not sure though. They've been trying to curb excessive working hours. I doubt they're doing that so their subjects can have more leisure time.

I... was making a joke about the problem of getting new members to this forum, if we're deliberately not making it easy to join.

But OK, if we can get the makers of virtual boyfriend (or girlfriend) app to insert hypnotic suggestions to follow the "Courtesy" rules in the sidebar, that'd be a major win for humanity. Heck, even "don't be egregiously obnoxious" would go a long way toward making the Internet usable again.

The subreddit was created in early 2014.

I've been wondering if the dark web might ever become useful for that, just as something that raises the barrier to entry and keeps idiots away.

Alternatively we could paywall sites, even just like $1 to keep away spammers and low effort bullshit.

Anything that introduces friction for both high and low IQ is right out as friction will increase user base entropy. You ideally want a one time cost. Blind, a kind of 4chan for software engineers, works for tech, as you need a corporate email to get in. Lobste.rs deals with this problem by being invite only.

Blind, a kind of 4chan for software engineers

Oooooooh, I'm sold. Looks like /g/ and /pol/ had a baby. God has seen fit to let me live another day, and I'm about to make it everyone else's problem.

but where do us high-IQ aimless NEETs go to post? can I sue Blind for discrimination?

People argue in favour of Urbit a lot with this exact reasoning.

Hmm, I've never tried Urbit. Have you? Is it worthwhile, in your opinion?

I have not. It's just that a lot of people in my circles talk about it. For example, I follow Justin Murphy (who imo hosted one of the best Moldbug irl appearances) was very into it. Interestingly, most of his followers would fall into the Continental Philosophy constellation, so there's some viewpoint diversity already.

The open internet is clearly dying. Most discussion now happens now on walled gardens such as Discord and Facebook.

LLMs will make this much worse. For example, ChatGPT-5 has been presumably been trained on internet data such as as StackOverflow. But no one will post any more questions to StackOverflow since GPT-5 will just give them the answer directly. StackOverflow will die. Rinse and repeat for any site where people once posted questions.

StackOverflow has been going downhill for a long time. Goodhart's Law, "when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

It's now full of thirsty newbie coders who are desperate to get answers in the hope that their StackOverflow profile will and them a job. Unfortunately being eager to help isn't useful it you're looking for specific domain knowledge.

Yeh. ChatGPT is more useful these days.

I spend nearly all of my message board time on either the Motte, Data Secrets Lox, a few other small-volume boards, and a finance board more oriented toward long-term investing. Pretty much everything else is direct blogs/substacks and an occasional quickly-regretted venture onto Twitter.

The key is smaller groups that are either gatekept or uninteresting to the general public. Everything else is garbage.

What is Data Secrets Lox? Can you describe a bit more about that?

It's the "official" builtin board style forum of (like the 3rd cousin?) of themotte. I think the relationship is roughly like:

lesswrong 
   └─> slatestarcodex ──> astralcodexten <─> datasecretslox
              └──> r/slatestarcodex ──> r/themotte ──> themotte

Obviously the full history is a bit more complicated and there is a bunch of cross mixing between the branches.

DSL was created by users of the open threads on SSC when the blog went down IIRC. So very closely related to TheMotte's origin

Yes, exactly. I would describe it as more esoteric in that there are many more threads with diverse topics. Also the general vibe is a bit more relaxed and personal beefs are tolerated somewhat more.

The finance board is just bogleheads.org which is pretty public at this point. I mostly stick to a few niche topics (like TIPS investing) that have dedicated posters, but there is a lot of good information there for people who are new to investing.

Why TIPS? Do you ladder treasuries for deep cash? SGOV/BIL holder here.

BOXX > SGOV for tax reasons, in my opinion.

More comments

The TIPS are for my version of a liability matching portfolio. The main idea is to ensure that we have an inflation-adjusted income floor in retirement that matches current spending, so that in theory our lifestyle will not need to change for financial reasons.

In our particular case I am penciling in my retirement at 63 and wife's when I am 68 (she is younger). We'll both start drawing SS when I am 70. So I need amount A for years 63-67, amount B for years 68-69, and amount C for years 70+ (currently planned through 82). These amounts are obviously estimates but reasonably good ones, and they exclude items like college which are accounted for separately. Once these floors are established, then the majority of the rest of the portfolio will be in global stock index funds with some in Treasurys.

I have about 2/3 of this locked in already. Currently there is a gap in TIPS availability from 2035-2039 which coincides with part of my plan. The 2035s will be available next year as 10y and I will just buy them as they become available. Then for some of the other years I will fill in as money becomes available.

This strategy is not for everyone but my wife is particularly risk averse and we do not need to take any additional risks to ensure a solid retirement. My goal is to preserve our current lifestyle - I'm not trying to hit the jackpot. The overall allocation is about 33% stock, 39% TIPS, 28% T-bills at this point.

a finance board more oriented toward long-term investing

Where can this board be found? :)

I am also curious and PM'd the user. I am 90% sure he's talking about Bogleheads because we live in a boring world, but hopeful for something better.

Try Gyroscopic Investing. https://www.gyroscopicinvesting.com/forum/index.php

Yes that's correct, and also that we live in a boring world. Fortunately investing should be boring so that works out well. There are some occasional trainwreck posts that are entertaining, but the mods there are extremely quick on the trigger so they tend to peter out quickly.

I first started there over 20 years ago when it was much more niche and the strategies espoused were not as well known. The philosophy has probably saved/made me a few hundred thousand dollars over time versus picking my own stocks, so I have some residual good feelings.

Wouldn't mind a paywalled or otherwise well curated forum where people share their insights and research.

I was going to evaluate your intelligence and see if this post made sense, but you made your account private because you're either a coward or a dullard. Stand by what you post. I'll fight anyone anywhere.

  • -18

Wat

Though he could have put that better, I definitely agree that being able to see posting history is nicer. Occasionally I'll really like someone's post and look to see what else they've said, or what their top comments are, or what other things they might care about, so it's not just used in order to attack someone.

you're either a coward or a dullard

This is not allowed. Banned for three days.

Every single information and/or discussion channel/forum is getting shittier and shittier. I posit that in addition to algorithms maximizing engagement or minimizing whatever, it's also the userbase.

The true old timers will tell you that they wish September '93 would end.

Not that I disagree, but the observation is hardly new, and yet we're nominally still here. I sometimes wonder if it's bias in the observation, but maybe there are objective measurements somewhere.

World avg IQ is 92.

Average Internet user IQ in 92 was likely 115-125.

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