domain:youtube.com
f3zinker
Its A/B testing all the way down
16hr ago
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.
ChickenOverlord
22hr ago
and that sucks as a life.
Objection, arguing facts not in evidence. Plenty of women still live such a life an find it extremely rewarding and fulfilling.
Ben___Garrison
16hr ago
I followed a few of these types of accounts, the ones that would repost old stuff to farm karma. Some of them were on /r/4chan, some were on bigger subs like /r/pics or /r/funny. What I saw was that a lot of them get banned pretty quickly, but some of them turned around and sold their account to a third party. The most common client seemed to be porn actresses trying to sell their videos. It seemed like the ones farming accounts were typically from 3rd world countries like Indonesia and Bangladesh, although I bet there's pretty stiff competition from chatGPT now.
Reposting something popular is pretty common, and I don't think it's particularly harmful even if it's a little annoying to see the same thing (but how many of us even remember Reddit posts from years ago)? There's a big difference between that sort of thing, and political manipulation via buying upvotes, which is theoretically doable but I don't think anyone has shown real evidence that it's widespread. The layman's idea is politics is an arena drenched in money with moustache-twirling villains engineering everything behind the scenes, but in reality it has a lot less money than the power it wields would presumably incentivize, mostly due to coordination problems.
Seeing an entire Reddit thread with similar comments is very strange, and it's a shame that the new thread you mentioned got taken down as I would have very much liked to examine some of the accounts to see what they're up to.
AhhhTheFrench
We will sell no wine before its time
22hr ago
Well then it sucks to be the kind of person that would enjoy life as a breeding machine + house servant. Maybe some people love it, but that is pretty close to being dosed with alcohol as a fetus so you'll enjoy being a Delta in a Huxley book.
stav
21hr ago
He was wrong about literally everything. He was like a Marxist except instead of the working class vs the bourgeoisie it was Hobbes vs Rosseau. I saw him make insane comments like Strom Thurmond being a far left Marxist or saying HBD is the same thing as critical race theory.
MiddleAgedMan
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way.
15hr ago
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.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
20hr ago
He was right that the AuthLeft/AuthRight horseshoe is in fact a circle, that both are progeny of the Enlightenment/Progressive movement, and that their conflict with each other is fundamentally an example of the narcissism of small differences. To the extent that I understood his arguments, he also appeared to be correct about Hobbes vs Rosseau.
Ben___Garrison
15hr ago
The Border Emergency Authority is a "break in case of emergency" tool that's specific to the crisis happening now. It sunsets in 3 years, so it won't be relevant if AOC takes office in a decade unless it's renewed. If it's not used then it would be no different than the status quo, but the rest of the bill expanding funding for border security and plugging asylum loopholes would still be in place. It's in no way formalizing that 5k migrants a day is "fine", it's simply a trigger when opaque and extraordinary measures can be taken.
Trump did NOT need to pass this bill to stop immigrant caravans.
Trump was really no better than Obama when it comes to border crossings. A lot of it is driven by the relative strength of the economy, but also by non-US factors like the state of Latin American countries especially in the Northern Triangle. Your answer of "Trump didn't need this" is exactly the handwavey "Biden Bad" thing I was talking about in my earlier post. The assumption you seem to be coming to is that the tougher laws are all just a ruse, that Biden must be doing something sneaky, but this is effectively unfalsifiable.
It’s toothless. If the POTUS is of the wrong party then the border is open.
This law doesn't open the border. If you think it does, you're fundamentally misunderstanding what the bill does.
jeroboam
15hr ago
What I saw was that a lot of them get banned pretty quickly, but some of them turned around and sold their account to a third party.
But... why? Reddit users don't have followers like Instagram or Tiktok.
There's almost no value to a Reddit account, even if they have 1 million karma.
2rafa
23hr ago
Is the primary complaint of women in Korea really that the men don’t have enough money, then? That hasn’t been widely reported.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
23hr ago
That’s not a nullification. I’d say the correct remedy for opposing a law is challenging it in court, and Abbott’s doing that. But since this isn’t a law passed by Congress, it’s hard to fault him for instructing his administration on how to implement their administrative change.
Now, there’s a little problem. The USED already implements other Title IX athletics rules. Seeing as those aren’t being challenged, I assume Congress explicitly delegated the power at some point. Either that, or it was assumed through the ever-popular federal funding mechanism.
So what makes this different? If it were an Executive Order, I’d understand the case for a Constitutional violation. But this is a “Notice of Proposed Rulemaking.” See here. It sure sounds like business as usual. If so, the federal government has its obvious recourse: cut federal funding. No Constitutional wrangling necessary.
That’d probably be a big win for Texas Republicans. The rule is being spun as “destroying women’s sports” already. Actually reducing any federal funds? Free leverage for Abbott. As much as I resent the guy, he’s set up a decent gambit. Hard to blame him, when Biden’s agencies are being such partisan hardliners—
Taking those considerations into account, the Department expects that, under its proposed regulation, elementary school students would generally be able to participate on school sports teams consistent with their gender identity and that it would be particularly difficult for a school to justify excluding students immediately following elementary school from participating consistent with their gender identity. For older students, especially at the high school and college level, the Department expects that sex-related criteria that limit participation of some transgender students may be permitted, in some cases, when they enable the school to achieve an important educational objective, such as fairness in competition, and meet the proposed regulation's other requirements.
Oh.
Well, no one was going to look at the actual rule, anyway. And if they did, they’d surely see that it’s a trap; no restriction could ever survive the captured, liberal media blitz. And if it did, the deep state would bury it. And if they didn’t, those partisan judges would have to legislate from the bench to stop it. And if they didn’t, well, Biden would obviously send the 101st Airborne to escort a minimally-sympathetic trans woman into your daughter’s locker room. Or worse, do it himself. And you don’t want Sleepy Joe near your daughter, do you?
Far better to make political hay now, before all that unpleasantness can get started.
practical_romantic
1hr ago
How does one get into linguistics as a hobby? I would appreciate some creators or accounts on ig or twitter, people making YouTube videos and podcasts about linguistics.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
12hr ago
Reposting something popular is pretty common, and I don't think it's particularly harmful even if it's a little annoying to see the same thing (but how many of us even remember Reddit posts from years ago)?
I think that there's a big difference between reposting good content and reposting someone else's post wholesale while pretending it is an original contribution for ulterior motives (political or pecuniary). Technically you're right when you say that it isn't particularly harmful, in the same sense that when you come home to find a thief picking the lock on your front door it isn't actually harmful because you were going to open the door anyway. Those accounts cause only minor problems when they're being created, but think about what happens when one of those accounts actually gets sold or otherwise activated - nobody is going to buy or create a fake account because they want to do something good for the original community. Whether they're trying to shape opinions/discourse or simply sell a product, they still cause damage to the social fabric and cohesion of whatever community they start sprouting up in.
sliders1234
13hr ago
Why can’t we just have a clean bill that closes the border?
You say the golden triangle. The south is richer than they have ever been. There is always going to be some excuse. America will always be richer than every where else so there will always be economic demand.
I find it interesting you did not try saying these are real asylum seekers.
I prefer Trump over the bill because I know the bill does nothing when the wrong party is in power. Biden could have stopped this but chose not to.
stav
17hr ago
Almost everything we think and do in the modern world has at least some of its roots in the Enlightenment. The United States itself is a product of the Enlightenment (founded by Enlightenment thinkers etc.) and he was a super patriotic Red Tribe American. Taking his arguments seriously we could also accuse him of all kinds of things that he would disagree with and doesn't believe in because of tenuous links.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
23hr ago
I believe that was zPv’s point. Making a stink about Obama’s latest change was accepting the legitimacy of the past four decades of Title IX.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
10hr ago
Similarly, leftists were in favor of free speech and questioning authority when it was beneficial to them, but now that their institutional capture is more entrenched, they don't need those things anymore.
But something about this explanation rubs me the wrong way. It paints a purely structural view of the formation of ideologies, and ignores the role of the individual completely; you will hold the views that you must based on your relational position to other political actors while taking into account your rational self interest, and that's that.
The nuanced version of this is less concerned with individuals changing their minds and more concerned with generational succession and coalitional realignment.
In essence: SJers were never liberals (they're clearly six-foundation rather than three-foundation), but while they were weak their immediate goals coincided with liberals' and they needed liberals' help to achieve them, so the coalitional rhetoric catered to liberals. Now that SJers are more numerous and powerful, and have already picked the low-hanging fruit, they have run out of common goals with liberals, and don't need the liberals to maintain a shot at power, so they kicked the liberals out of the coalition so that they could pursue their more illiberal goals. Meanwhile, the Moral Majority is no longer a majority and now needs the liberals, and also their most immediate goal of reversing SJ excesses is shared with liberals, so they've started including liberal things in their rhetoric.
TowardsPanna
11hr ago
a finance board more oriented toward long-term investing
Where can this board be found? :)
Ben___Garrison
12hr ago
nobody is going to buy or create a fake account because they want to do something good for the original community.
I don't think this is necessarily true. Reddit has a lot of silly or dumb rules... that's part of why this site decided to separate in the first place! I'm fine with Onlyfans sloots slinging their wares on the proper subreddits if that's what they want to do, and I really haven't seen much of an issue with pornspam on unrelated subs. All purchased accounts that I saw advertised on NSFW subs.
I'll believe political manipulation via bought accounts is a problem when I see actual evidence, but so far it's mostly been lacking. At least, I don't think it's much of an issue in comparison to the stuff the Reddit admins themselves are already doing via biased moderation policies.
Why can’t we just have a clean bill that closes the border?
I presume you mean "close the border to illegal immigrants". I agree that would be the best, but it's like saying "why don't we make murder illegal". It already is illegal, it's just a question of enforcement. This bill would have beefed up enforcement.
You say the golden triangle. The south is richer than they have ever been. There is always going to be some excuse. America will always be richer than every where else so there will always be economic demand.
I presume you did an autocorrect error and meant to type "Northern Triangle", not golden triangle.
The causes I listed aren't excuses, they're explanations that lie on a continuum. It's like judging the performance of a CEO based solely on the stock price, when you really need to understand the whole underlying environment to make a proper judgement. If the company grew by 10% but the rest of the sector grew by 50%, the CEO probably screwed up. Similarly, extraneous factors affect enforcement at the border.
I prefer Trump over the bill because I know the bill does nothing when the wrong party is in power.
You keep saying this but that doesn't make it true. At the very least this bill would have given more money for enforcement and closed an obvious loophole that illegals were abusing to enter the country. If Biden actually used the bill to its full effect (which he said he would) then it would have done even more.
BahRamYou
13hr ago
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.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
16hr ago
Almost everything we think and do in the modern world has at least some of its roots in the Enlightenment.
A lot of what we think and do has some of its roots in the Enlightenment. There are notable exceptions, a lot of those exceptions cluster in thought-space, and they form the foundation of Red Tribe.
The United States itself is a product of the Enlightenment (founded by Enlightenment thinkers etc.) and he was a super patriotic Red Tribe American.
America (together with Britian and their progeny) appears to me to be a clear outlier in the range of Enlightenment societies, throughout the entire history of the Enlightenment from its founding till now. It is nonetheless true that America has much of its roots in the Enlightenment, though, and I would argue that is why America is doomed. We didn't get enough of the Enlightenment to wreck us on the spot, but we got more than enough for the social equivalent of cancer, which we are now dying of.
Taking his arguments seriously we could also accuse him of all kinds of things that he would disagree with and doesn't believe in because of tenuous links.
In the first place, he is not here to defend himself, so it seems rather unsporting. But I am here, I am better at maintaining decorum than he was, and I'm willing to defend most of his arguments or make similar ones of my own. If you think taking my arguments seriously leads to absurd results, feel free to elaborate.
drmanhattan16
16hr ago
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.
Your rebuttal makes no sense. The argument is that these accounts are pretending to be people to sway people's decisions on the products they buy. The commercial value of an account doesn't factor into it.
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.
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