Inside Haiti’s Gang Neighborhoods (interrogated by military)

magnora7 · 2022-09-18T21:42:33+00:00

The fact it's as old as it is, and it's still relevant, speaks to how powerful it is. Almost all languages of a similar age lack the complexity to be able to still function in the modern age, and C++ is able to keep up, even though it's not at all pretty in terms of writing code. Most modern programming languages are just skins for C++, to make it easier to program in

magnora7 · 2022-09-12T19:51:13+00:00

All the millions of things that say "EIIR" like that chair now have to be changed to "CIIIR". It's going to be a whole industry, lmao

magnora7 · 2022-09-11T21:31:44+00:00

So funny how the missing trillions of dollars announced publicly the day prior had all the evidence and people set to testify about it destroyed in both building 7 and the exact part of the pentagon that was hit. I mean what are the odds!

magnora7 · 2022-09-11T19:45:57+00:00

Yeah that song is stupid, 100% agreed. Like that Beyonce song "Work work work work work work" like wtf kind of dystopia music is that.

magnora7 · 2022-09-11T17:51:42+00:00

Thanks, banned him

magnora7 · 2022-09-11T17:49:00+00:00

Truth. Vice is mostly just 'edgy woke' for leftists now, the journalistic integrity of their early years is gone

magnora7 · 2022-09-11T17:48:50+00:00

Cool, then we're on the same page about this stuff which is great.

magnora7 · 2022-09-11T17:48:26+00:00

Vote manipulation is still very much a permanently bannable offense.

magnora7 · 2022-09-11T05:14:21+00:00

When benefits received are far less than taxes paid, and also the amount of taxes being paid out is a significant chunk of total income. I think that's when people start to give up, or start working under the table

magnora7 · 2022-09-11T05:11:04+00:00

Being admin, and seeing the number of obvious bots I've had to ban just running stupid scripts and making endless user names, for years now... makes me wonder how many bots are smart enough that I can't even tell they are bots.

It is still wild to me that there are just bots floating around the internet trying to register usernames and copy-paste scripts on multiple forums, like the "Americans" bot, which I've seen post on GLP as well as saidit for years now. They are like viruses, but they take over entire forums instead of your desktop computer.

magnora7 · 2022-09-11T05:08:03+00:00

I wish I could believe either party could save us but everything in the political arena is so compromised

magnora7 · 2022-09-11T05:07:14+00:00

There is this phenomenon "quiet quitting" now.

But over 10 years ago Homer Simpson said, "Don't quit, just go in and do a half-assed job. That's the American way!"

magnora7 · 2022-09-11T05:05:11+00:00

Music is the same way now too. Uplifing music is a rarity.

magnora7 · 2022-09-11T01:55:30+00:00

1985-2009 was basically the peak of American TV. So many things now are so garbage, or just so blatantly pushing some agenda or product, or just using shock value instead of generating any sincere emotions.

magnora7 · 2022-09-11T01:22:36+00:00

In the context of the fact they posted it 4 times and that's all they've ever posted, I'd say it warrants removal as well as user ban as they're just clearly spamming nonsense to get people agitated and lower the quality of the board

magnora7 · 2022-09-11T01:19:20+00:00

my man

magnora7 · 2022-09-11T01:19:08+00:00

I'm back, everything is good

magnora7 · 2022-09-11T01:10:35+00:00

It's on my todo list

magnora7 · 2022-09-01T22:18:33+00:00

Visual art and video art are are just going to become cheaper and cheaper it seems. Soon they'll be able to plop in a script and scene descriptions, and AI will produce a 2 hour feature film that will win an oscar

magnora7 · 2022-09-01T22:15:31+00:00

They already have automated phone decision trees and automated billpay over the phone. They will probably just keep expanding that as AI is able to take on more tasks. Registering customer complaints will probably become automated at some companies.

If this technology is taken to an extreme, a person could go their whole life without conversing with another actual human being. And if the technology is good enough, they might not even know it.

magnora7 · 2022-09-01T22:10:51+00:00

We're drowning in both. Not to mention all the Chinese propaganda.

magnora7 · 2022-09-01T22:03:48+00:00

Bypassing existing sitewide bans by creating additional accounts is not allowed.

magnora7 · 2022-08-29T08:53:28+00:00

Hilarious but disturbing. Reminds me of in Ocean's 11 when they switched all the security cameras in the casino to show pre-recorded feeds after they hijacked the camera lines. Video is becoming less and less trustworthy as technology improves.

magnora7 · 2022-08-28T21:13:55+00:00

How many more studies before this is allowed to be common knowledge on the MSM? Or will they never admit it and will just keep pretending even as the research becomes more and more robust?

magnora7 · 2022-08-26T09:03:08+00:00

"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered." - Thomas Jefferson

And he's right. The rates were low for a long time, but now they've jacked them up very quickly in the last half-year: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/repo-rate

Ostensibly they're doing it to counteract the massive inflation caused by all the covid stimulus (and loose money printing prior to that) where some 60% of the total money supply has been created in the last 2 years because of these 0% interest rates for the biggest banks.

But now they're yanking the chain by raising the rates. They're now shifting in to "deflation mode" to try and get inflation back down to only 2% per year, as is their stated goal. But doing this is basically going to crash the economy because they're now making lending money hard to get, mortgages hard to get, etc. So the housing and stock markets and crypto are all probably about to crash, because the easy money is going bye-bye very quickly as they raise central bank repo rates.

Not looking good. Thomas Jefferson fucking called it. This is a huge danger and we are facing it right now worse than ever. But most regular people have no idea, they just see gas and food getting more expensive and the news convinces them it has something to do with russia and war, instead of years of insane lending policies that have created the biggest bubble the world has ever seen. And now central banks (of almost every nation because they all did the same thing) have to choose between runaway inflation, or stopping the inflation that tightens the money supply and will collapses the economy that's basically a giant bubble. Lose-lose.

Buckle up.

magnora7 · 2022-08-26T08:55:18+00:00

People were offended by the actual George Carlin constantly. But that didn't mean tons of people didn't love him too. And he was right a lot of the time about things people are afraid to look squarely at, and I think that's a quality you share with him. I enjoy the things you have to say a lot

magnora7 · 2022-08-26T07:58:08+00:00

I like the original idea of having a "newcomer sub" that requires whitelisting to be able to post to the other subs on the site. This is a good idea for a new forum website.

The "OP bans users individually on each thread" idea isn't as good imo because it just causes censorship and infighting.

magnora7 · 2022-08-26T07:52:35+00:00

Yeah I think that was a good removal vulptex, it's a database of other people's passwords that were leaked. Articles about the database would be fine, but I see no reason to continue the propagation of stolen personal data. Thanks for removing and then deferring to me if I wanted to reinstate, good approach, much appreciated.

magnora7 · 2022-08-20T18:15:10+00:00

deleted the post and account anyway, probably a shill lol

magnora7 · 2022-08-20T18:14:29+00:00

I'm sure d3rr just built a new frontend if that's all that was necessary. I didn't work on this portion of it so I don't know the details, only d3rr does, but he deleted his saidit account so tagging him is especially pointless.

If you can figure out how to code the sending of an automated message upon banning that might be good, but I still think that maybe the extra of delay of shills and bots having to figure out they are banned might be worth it, especially if you were previously suggesting shadowbanning...

magnora7 · 2022-08-20T02:09:45+00:00

The worst offenders have infinite IPs, unique with every page request, that are not bound to any range or subnet. So IP bans are happening to them, even to entire ranges of IPs, but it accomplishes basically nothing, because they just make another completely different one.

magnora7 · 2022-08-20T01:24:49+00:00

Actually I don't think we inherited any of that functionality unfortunately. They stripped out all the admin controls from the open source. D3rr had to make a new ban system from scratch basically when we first started. Unless you're talking about some mod-level functionality I'm unaware of, I don't think we have it.

I would be down with an automated message to the person banned. But on the other hand maybe it's good sometimes if they don't know they're banned, similar to shadowbanning. Saidit currently doesn't explicitly say "you're banned", I believe it just returns errors when the banned user tries to post or comment something. Which I think is a reasonable system.

magnora7 · 2022-08-19T23:12:32+00:00

The fed just raised rates so money is harder to get for the big banks, which means all these companies that are surviving on cheap loans are not going to survive when the loans become expensive (due to much higher interest rates). This is what is happening across every industry. In many nations simultaneously too, a lot of central banks are now having to raise rates to counteract the massive inflation caused by all the two years of "emergency" covid stimulus printing.

This will thin the herd of businesses, but it will also make food costs and etc stop inflating so fast (hopefully). Inflation is way out of control just like in the 1980s (because that's what happens when you print like 60% of it in just two years) so now they're raising interest rates to make money harder to get to counteract inflation. Every company and person surviving solely on cheap debt, or who has an adjustable rate mortgage, is going to be in trouble in the coming months and years as this all gets sorted out.

magnora7 · 2022-08-19T21:47:58+00:00

I think some people also don't want to believe it's true, because that would mean they've been reading shill opinions without realizing it and taking them as actual opinions. Fully realizing this is kind of a worldview shift if you've spent years reading forums. The denial is strong. It's like people who watch WWE wrestling don't want to hear how it's fake, even though deep down they probably know it is.

The entertainment value of forums is diminished if one fully realizes half the comments are equivalent to reading a paid commercial billboard, and that forums are no longer the organic thoughtful places they once were. Letting go of the ideal of the internet as a window of worldwide communication and instead seeing it as a massive propaganda network, is a large very un-fun thing to realize, and some people are trying to hit the snooze button on that realization because they're still getting some enjoyment out of it yet.

I think this natural psychological mechanism is working neatly alongside all the gaslighting shills and people who are paid to defend the interests of the powerful. It's like 50/50

magnora7 · 2022-08-19T21:42:57+00:00

It is an interesting idea, but who approves people to go from the introductions sub to the rest of the site? If this approval process gets hijacked by shills then the site is over. That's the weak point of it. And also it would slow growth even more. But even with those downsides considered, it might be worth trying on a new website

magnora7 · 2022-08-19T21:28:53+00:00

Shadowbans only slow down their process slightly, because of reddit they know all they have to do is logout or look with a private browser mode to see if they're banned or not. It's 10s of hours of programming for me, to result in a few minutes of annoyance for them. Not worth it, unfortunately. Furthermore I have a moral issue with shadowbanning in general, I think it's a form of gaslighting for the real people who get caught up in it.

The only other thing I can think of is removing voting rules altogether, then the most determined party wins.

Yeah that's kind of where I'm at with it too. The thing is, they're always the most determined party, because they're being paid to do so. They will always have the most time and energy to devote to manipulating the forum. This somehow has to be taken in to account when designing a new forum. There needs to be a way to disempower the busybodies and empower the people who post infrequently. Which is the opposite of how it works now. But at the core, if they can create infinite anonymous user accounts, then we have no real defense. So I think something like limiting the number of IP addresses per user might be the way to go.

Or another user suggested that maybe new users could be restricted to a certain sub, and then get community approval before they can post to the rest of the site. But the downside with this, is that the moment this approval system gets hijacked by some shills, they'll approve a thousand more shill accounts, then the whole system is shot again.

Another idea is to make people pay $5 to register an account, with no refunds if they get banned. This would make shilling extremely expensive. But it would also certainly deter real users, and it would be awful for anonymous truth telling because it ties back to a cash account, which is kind of against the whole point of this site.

It's a real pickle.

magnora7 · 2022-08-19T21:09:54+00:00

You need a trusted-team AND an inspired community plus ongoing open communications using an open management system. This is not new, but you won't even consider it.

You mean like the admin team of 10 people and all the subreddit moderators and the voting system that we've been doing for a long time now? Your anger isn't helping, and your ideas aren't novel because we've already implemented them.

magnora7 · 2022-08-19T08:59:14+00:00

Agreed.

magnora7 · 2022-08-19T02:14:42+00:00

I do see you telling people about saidit and it's awesome to have your help. Saidit has definitely grown because of your continued work, and the work of many others who share links and tell others about saidit.

magnora7 · 2022-08-19T00:44:05+00:00

Thanks, I appreciate you all that help saidit be the best it can be

magnora7 · 2022-08-19T00:37:42+00:00

well It's just a matter of trying to create communities so that everyone can contribute to detecting and punishing shills.

That's called reddit votes, and it's already proven that system is far too easy to hijack.

The fact I already took on 10 content admins shows I'm not trying to do it alone.

magnora7 · 2022-08-19T00:30:25+00:00

I might make another website with rules like that, but to tighten the saidit rules to that degree at this point would appear reactive and would go against the original mission we've continued for 5 years

magnora7 · 2022-08-19T00:28:24+00:00

Not ignoring so much as can't do anything about it beyond what has already been done... I can remove accounts all day but they can just keep making new ones and after 5 years it's at a stalemate as they appear to have infinite time and interest in doing this. I am open to new ideas about how to deal with this if anyone has any

magnora7 · 2022-08-19T00:14:28+00:00

Thanks. I think we are doing alright overall too but there's always room for improvement. Having 10 content admins like saidit does is helpful. The real danger to having too many content admins is that one of the shills infiltrates an admin position. I think we've avoided this so far, but it's tough.

magnora7 · 2022-08-18T22:44:44+00:00

I agree this is a problem, and why a forum that has no votes but still uses the reddit format may be a new thing to try on the next forum.

The fake upvoting problem is an issue, and the real deal is these people have infinite IP addresses and can spoof their browser credentials. I've made scripts that detect activity like logging in and out to too many accounts too quickly, but even these rules can only block a certain IP. And if they have a completely different IP address every single time they make a page request, then there is literally no way to block them.

We at least have it fixed so when a user is banned from saidit, their votes go away as well, which helps remove the effects of vote manipulation. But the reality is, they just keep creating accounts with unique credentials each time, and so I have no way to differentiate those accounts from the accounts of regular users other than the behavior of the account... I have done some work developing algorithms good at detecting accounts that vote too quickly all together on a the same post or comment, and then autobanning all those accounts. But the result is they just make 10 more new accounts every time. This has been going on for years and I'm honestly not sure how to better engage it than we already are. I am open to suggestions, but also the amount of programming work necessary to get marginal improvements on this issue is rather steep.

We also built the block buttons, so posts by known troublemakers can be blocked by the users. We've really given the issue a fair shot many times over, but the real problem is that the vote system will exist to gamed in the first place. Another idea I had is to make a forum that limits the number of IP addresses a user can have, using the fact that the browser credentials and IP are randomized every time as a giveaway to shill activity. The problem is many VPNs mimic this behavior as well so it's again tough to differentiate between shills and normal users. Which is of course what they are trying to do, to pretend to be normal users while hijacking the information stream.

I think the real answer is a no-vote forum, where the threads are sorted by who left the last comment, old school style. But even this can be hijacked with enough volume. I really hate to say it but the text-based forum is in trouble because I have been thinking seriously for 5 years about this issue and I don't have a better solution than what we currently have. So many forums have failed because of it. Any better solution requires a team of people working 24/7 to monitor each post and comment individually as it arises, which is a ridiculous amount of work that requires a ridiculous amount of money. We have 10 volunteer content admins which helps but it only goes so far.

Anyway, if people have ideas, I'm listening.

magnora7 · 2022-08-14T20:19:38+00:00

It's a LARP, like 90% of the sub.

Reddit is basically massive psyops on unknowing teenagers at this point

magnora7 · 2022-08-14T01:51:38+00:00

They were literally stockpiling ammo though, weren't they?

Why do so many regulatory agencies have their own standing militaries? Seems like a recipe for domestic conflict

magnora7 · 2022-08-14T00:48:29+00:00

Your kind words are much appreciated. I'm glad you've come to saidit, welcome! Please make yourself at home!

magnora7 · 2022-08-08T20:11:16+00:00

Polls show around 40% of American Jews disagree with the ideology of Zionism, which in modern day has basically become the ideology of Israeli nationalistic expansionism.

This is the dirty secret, Zionism was popularized by the Rothschilds in the 1860s in order to acquire the land of Israel from the British Government after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the Balfour Declaration is a 1-page historical document that makes this clear. Many Jewish people see this Zionism movement as pushed by the Rothschild et all as functionally hijacking actual Judaism by pretending to spearhead it for power-seeking reasons.

magnora7 · 2022-08-07T22:26:06+00:00

I have to remove this for advocating violence, please post it again with a headline that doesn't.

"hold her accountable" or "put her in jail" or "remove her from her position" would all be fine

magnora7 · 2022-08-07T22:14:38+00:00

Yes, exactly. Users who consistently drag the quality of discussion downward (especially if they seem to be doing it intentionally) should be banned, as per the site rules. And then creating alternate accounts to bypass bans is also not allowed.

I agree with Muskrat that joke accounts should be left alone, but when they spam disgusting things repeatedly, that's just having the purpose of dragging the quality downward. Especially if it's clearly one account repeatedly ban evading over and over. Thanks for the help guys.

magnora7 · 2022-08-07T22:10:21+00:00

It's not a "fix the issue" thing, you have to build an entirely new house and people don't have money for that. It's cheaper to buy electricity and AC than to fix the issues, which is a big part of why they're not fixed in the first place

magnora7 · 2022-08-07T20:58:44+00:00

Yeah but the houses were built for that back then. Now they're not built that way so without ac they get super hot.

Black shingles don't make sense, for example. I measured my roof surface at 167F the other day. White adobe makes so much more sense in this heat, but instead people rely on AC to overcome design flaws that trap heat

magnora7 · 2022-08-07T19:12:29+00:00

That's a fair point. But I think the desire to be consumed by the electronic entertainment comes from a "work hard, play hard" kind of attitude. Where sitting around doing nothing is seen as not okay, and is "wasted" time. This fear of wasted time comes from a work-obsessed culture, taught to be good slaves for those who wish to extract the value of their labor. If that mentality didn't exist, I'm not sure the electronic entertainment obsession would exist as fully as it does today

magnora7 · 2022-08-07T18:54:32+00:00

Basically because slaves aren't allowed time to realize they're slaves, better to keep them working without rest so they don't realize the futility of their position in the rat race.

magnora7 · 2022-08-07T18:52:14+00:00

There is a fair amount of bot and shill activity to dilute the quality of text forums on the internet. This is also causing the reasonable people to abandon those forums, which further increases the concentration of noise. They are intentionally gaming the signal-to-noise ratio of the internet to destroy its usefulness as a communication medium.

This happened with books too when the printing press was invented. Too much truth was getting out to too many people, so authorities started making lots of crap books with false information to make people distrust the information gained from books, and to safeguard their secrets by spreading lots of conflicting information.

Today's internet has become an automated and paid version of that. And as a person who remembers the promise of the internet in the 90s it makes me very sad.

magnora7 · 2022-08-07T18:49:18+00:00

I think it is mostly stress, peoples' way of life is being taken off of autopilot and people are being forced to think and make tough choices, which they've been trained their whole life not to do. So many people are becoming emotionally volatile as a result.

magnora7 · 2022-08-07T18:46:00+00:00

Cool building. I wonder if they have beef with the masons

magnora7 · 2022-08-07T18:43:42+00:00

The lack of time to zone out and daydream is likely correlated the lack of self-reflection most people seem to exhibit on a daily basis.

Hard to be self-aware when you never have time to stop and think about yourself and your place in the world.

magnora7 · 2022-08-07T18:41:53+00:00

In Texas I'm pretty sure they'd just cut off the utilities for all these people. Which would be life-threatening in the summer heat.

If they have good weather, and the courts see what is happening and work with the people, there may be another outcome.

But this is just another result of inflation caused by central bank interest rates being so extremely low for so long. Europe and the US and so many other countries are experiencing inflation from their "covid stimulus" money printing.

magnora7 · 2022-08-07T18:39:08+00:00

Literally buying your own biometric data off of you for pennies

magnora7 · 2022-08-07T18:37:11+00:00

Lol more like both sides have full checkmarks. They're both definitely obsessed with national security, not sure if you lived through the 9/11 era but that was all that was talked about for decades. They both think our military can stomp anyone. They're both cheating elections (look at gerrymandering, and how lobbying and 'advisors' have infiltrated our democracy).

This "the republicans will save you" rhetoric is basically a "bad cop, good cop" gambit to save the system at this point, but the parties keep switching who is the good cop and who is the bad cop about every 15 years. Whoever has power ends up being the bad cop, because the system is so thoroughly compromised by special interests.

magnora7 · 2022-08-06T07:01:19+00:00

Yeah this kind of censorship is unfortunately everywhere on reddit these days. Saidit exists for a reason.

magnora7 · 2022-08-05T19:59:42+00:00

It's what saidit runs on as well, I had to learn mysql to be able to operate this site

magnora7 · 2022-08-01T20:00:29+00:00

Yes enza PMd me a couple days ago saying goodbye with a nice note. Enza is doing fine, just moving on to new things I guess. Hope everything goes well!

magnora7 · 2022-07-18T18:14:39+00:00

Yeah I got one of those too after calling out a shill thread. I wonder if reddit keeps all those reports in a database

magnora7 · 2022-07-17T00:00:13+00:00

Get some land in the country, do things that are actually fun, that actually bring you joy and peace

magnora7 · 2022-07-10T23:35:00+00:00

Good point, the western shill farms probably have to pay $10/hr or so per employee, but I imagine the Chinese shill farms pay about $1/hr or something

magnora7 · 2022-07-09T22:16:14+00:00

They're also having power outages, I've read that all Sri Lankans don't have electricity at least 2-4 hours a day every day because they're having to do load shedding because they cannot produce enough electricity to meet demand.

magnora7 · 2022-07-09T22:14:02+00:00

I've never seen footage of a western company or agency doing it, no. I assume the security is tighter in the US about this sort of thing, whereas apparently in china they're able to sneak out some footage.

Or maybe it's a matter of propaganda, maybe Chinese internet users have seen footage of western shill companies but we haven't.

magnora7 · 2022-07-09T22:11:24+00:00

Yes I assume basically every major government, military, intelligence, and major corporation has a shill group at this point.

magnora7 · 2022-07-09T22:10:53+00:00

Nice video. The OP has made "ground effect" flight vehicles before, but this is the first "ram effect" where the lift is generated by a pool of high pressure air under the entire craft, which requires a big flat body so a pool air can get trapped. I think the video you posted, while cool, is just a ground effect vehicle, which is related but not exactly the same.

magnora7 · 2022-07-08T23:53:01+00:00

And this one: https://gfycat.com/simplisticneglectedarrowworm

magnora7 · 2022-07-01T05:51:06+00:00

Sorry, crypto and patreon are all we can do for the moment. Thanks for thinking of us though

magnora7 · 2022-06-25T19:35:50+00:00

Yeah, we get DDOS'd literally every day for 5 years now, it's kind of insane. But we've automated the defense so thankfully it's manageable

magnora7 · 2022-06-22T22:46:04+00:00

My guess is their thumbnail system has changed, and our thumbnail fetch system needs updating to be compatible with it. This is something d3rr used to work on. If someone is interested in helping improve the thumbnail fetch code, let me know and I can point you to resources.

magnora7 · 2022-06-22T22:31:24+00:00

Thank you!

magnora7 · 2022-06-21T08:11:39+00:00

As much as I love this movie (and Mike Judge) and it is accurate about today and wish to share it with everyone, for the sake of saidit I have to remove it or else we will almost certainly get a DMCA claim which will result in the server company forcing our server to go down until it's removed. Sorry. I wish DMCA wasn't a thing

magnora7 · 2022-06-01T03:18:39+00:00

Not really... that's quite a mischaracterization of MLK imo

magnora7 · 2022-05-31T01:24:01+00:00

The fact it's so hard to come up with a single name is part of the problem... the media doesn't really focus on people actually doing good in the world.

Often, anyone who takes a moral stand within the current culture of corruption is only able to do so once, then they are ostracized or worse. Our corporate and media systems filter those people out, because morals and having a backbone is goes against the drive to maximize profit and keep order for the existing order.

Newscasters get fired for speaking the truth, amazon workers get fired for unionizing so they can have pee breaks, intelligence agencies tried to get MLK Jr to kill himself and he was later assassinated... and nowadays someone like MLK Jr wouldn't even get air time. Where is today's MLK Jr? Where is today's JFK?

Instead if we listen to the media, we're meant to look up to people like football players, or fictional superheros, or greedy billionaires. Where are the real heros? And do most people care? Most people seem content to live in a fictional world, while their real world gets worse and worse. They avoid discomfort and thus the uncomfortable problems never get addressed.

magnora7 · 2022-05-28T02:14:12+00:00

Seek wisdom, cultivate peace

magnora7 · 2022-05-25T19:42:43+00:00

I've been switching between DDG and google (for when DDG can't handle it, which is anytime there's more than 3 keywords) but DDG is disappointing these days

magnora7 · 2022-05-19T18:54:09+00:00

I bet that's the last time we'll hear him speak publicly for a while. I bet Dick Cheney was not happy about that one

magnora7 · 2022-05-17T18:49:26+00:00

Thanks for the info, I didn't realize he was so controversial. Much appreciated

magnora7 · 2022-05-16T01:45:44+00:00

Glad you see what I'm saying. 5 years ago the cat was out of the bag, just look at my most popular post on reddit ever: https://old.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/5vn4k3/forbescom_reddit_is_being_manipulated_by_big/

But it's taking time for everyone to see how widespread it is, and how many companies and governments are all doing it. It's so cheap compared to traditional advertising, they'd be financially irresponsible not to!

The list of general motivations may be short, but in specific there are many ways to accomplish this goal of destabilizing a site. Like if an admin publicly says in a moment of frustration "x really annoys me but it's not against the rules so I guess I'll have to ignore it" then the attackers will double down on making sure x hits the front page every day. If an admin says to the community "They're DDOSing us bad and it's making us go offline" then they know to double down on the DDOS attacks. And so on, and so on. That's what I mean by "ideas and new motivations". If they know what's working, or where our weak points are, then it just emboldens them. So admins have to be quiet about it to protect the website and the users of the website, but as a side effect it keeps those same users in the dark about what's actually happening.

Overall saidit has done pretty well at dealing with this, compared to sites like ruqqus, voat, and poal. We've still had our fair share of turmoil too, but unlike them we're still standing strong.

magnora7 · 2022-05-15T21:51:19+00:00

Yeah pretty much. We are swimming in BS propaganda, media is really a joke these days

magnora7 · 2022-05-15T21:49:47+00:00

Yes I agree most people don't realize how common this problem is. And that very lack of public awareness is itself a problem.

4chan is another forum that comes to mind as knowing that there's a high presence of fake posts and glowie posts and so on. I think most people using forums know it goes on to some degree, but they feel they don't have definitive proof of how widespread it is. I guess most internet users would think it's 5% non-organic posts and comments, when in reality it might be 50%.

Most forums' admins and mods are in active denial about this to their users and often themselves, because they want the forum to appear organic so they can attract new users. They want to believe it's all real, because that makes the work worth it. So most new forums like ruqqus, voat, poal, etc all get swamped by bad actors since they have no system to root them out, and then later have to develop a defense mechanism against it (usually too late) which itself creates backlash from the community. Public backlash that the attackers amplify as much as possible. Both the attacks themselves and the public backlash from the bans are a source of instability for the forum itself and the userbase. Ruqqus, voat, and poal all failed because of this exact same development arc. The attackers fracture and infiltrate the community and admin group so badly that the admins give up and everyone quits out of exhaustion and frustration. So taking all this in to account, it's obvious why a typical admin of a typical forum would be motivated to delete all attacks as well as any discussion of attackers. So that's what 95% of forums do. And the forums that don't, often just instead let it take over the whole forum.

Also admins don't want to show any public weakness to attackers, or else attackers might get ideas and new motivations. So basically most admins delete all mentions of it ever, and also never tell anyone details of what's going on for security reasons (and to keep the website looking nice for new users) so the users remain in the dark about what's really happening.

Part of why the saidit community has awareness of it, is because on saidit we allow information about it to exist publicly which creates awareness. Most forums (hackernews, reddit, twitter, GLP, etc) erase all information regarding attackers to remove it from the forum and ban anyone mentioning the attackers or any drama related to it. They 100% remove both the attacks themselves as well as the "the attackers were banned" posts in reaction to it. They basically kill all discussion about it, and would certainly never allow such a thing on the front page, and this is how they maintain the appearance of harmony... and for some forums that have a narrow focus like hackernews, it works. Because this drama is "off topic". On saidit we allow people to air their grievances, as long as they obey the rules, which actually brings light to this sort of activity. This creates awareness. And also most people here on saidit have been banned from reddit at some point, so they're well aware how "curated" of an environment it is because they've run against it firsthand.

Lastly, from a psychological perspective I think most people don't realize how advanced bots are until they see a sub like www.reddit.com/r/GPT3 and see how good the bots have become. Or when they run in to an actual shill group that is undeniably obvious, which is honestly pretty rare if you don't have access to the moderator or admin side of things. Which is another reason a bit of public airing of laundry from time to time is good (as long as it doesn't take over the forum).

Anyway, after some thought, that's my take on the issue. What do you think about it?

magnora7[A]

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