Yep and the slow gutting of the education system isn’t making it any better.

You have an entire generation coming of voting age who are rabid Trump supporters. They don’t care about policies or democracy or public institutions. They don’t care about healthcare, social securities, or the stability of the economy.

They don’t care about any of the things that have been built up through generations. They lack critical thinking ability.

The recipe works. If you make dumb kids they will vote for dumb people. It works so well that part of the future plan for a trump presidency is to get rid of the department of education. Solidifying the Republican party indefinitely.

Without critical thinking and with mass media it’s so easy to say every problem that people deal with is because the “other side” made it so. Even if the other side has been doing everything possible to achieve the opposite.

Yes, and with reddit having a baseline corporate & bot astroturfing rate of ~25% that’s not exactly a good bar to measure by.

I… That’s not how this works. Or at least that’s not the context I’m referring to.

I can make an account (or 1000, Lemmy doesn’t exactly have controls to stop me) and run it as a bot, and NOT mark it as a bot. And use it to automatically manipulate the tone of conversations and threads without anyone knowing. And the premise of your argument is now void.

Labeling of bots is done via goodwill.

We’re not worried about goodwill users in this context. We’re talking about astroturfing bots posing as actual users. That said, labeled bots are still a problem if their content out grows organic user content, since that just isolates us, and erodes our community in favor of w/e interesting content bots scaped up today.

Which is a massive problem on almost every social media platform already. And will come to Lemmy soon enough.

Unfortunately the bot problem is coming to Lemmy.

Bots posting content is already a thing here, and then taking up front page space is already a thing.

Lemmy is speed running “How to lose your sense of community”.

You can’t really tell.

It’s also a very very VERY small platform compared to other social media platforms like Reddit. (I had another comment where I calculated this but it’s ridiculously small)

It is unlikely that it would see anywhere near the same level of dedicated bot activity due to the low return on invested effort.

This is a problem that will become greater once the value of astroturfing and shifting opinion on Lemmy is high enough.

You’re missing the big impact here which is that bots can shift public opinion in mass which affects you directly.

Gone are the days where individuals have their own opinions instead today opinions are just osmosised through social media.

And if social media is essentially just a message bought by whoever can pay for the biggest bot farm, then anyone who thinks for themselves and wants to push back immediately becomes the enemy of everyone else.

This is not a future that you want.

Mhm, I love dismissive “Look, it already works, and there’s nothing to improve” comments.

Lemmy lacks significant capabilities to effectively handle the bots from 10+ years ago. Nevermind bots today.

The controls which are implemented are implemented based off of “classic” bot concerns from nearly a decade ago. And even then, they’re shallow, and only “kind of” effective. They wouldn’t be considered effective for a social media platform in 2014, they definitely are not anywhere near capability today.

Lemmy has no capability to handle non-advanced bots from yesteryear.

It’s most definitely not capable of handing bots today and is absolutely unprepared for handling bots tomorrow.

The fediverse is honestly just pending the necessary popularity in order to be turned into bot slop with no controls.

Yep, and even worse. Lemmy has absolutely NO controls for quality and minimal moderation tools or capabilities. It’s in a much worse position than Reddit.

If it’s not already happening (And I think it is), it will.

“I refuse to accept progress if it’s not perfect progress”

Is what you’re effectively stating here.

Cmon, really? I have this argument with my toddler when he asks for something like a rip off a loaf of bread. He wants the whole loaf, he can’t have the whole load, so he gets a choice: The piece you can have, or nothing.

So. Would you rather have this progress, or nothing? That’s your choice, and right now it sounds a whole lot like you would rather have no progress?

I like how many of the new top level comments on here are going the way of Reddit already.

One-liners trying to be funny or make puns instead of actually engaging in conversation, indistinguishable from bots. :(

• https://lemmy.world/comment/12504760
• https://lemmy.world/comment/12504656
• https://lemmy.world/comment/12504761
• https://lemmy.world/comment/12504503

Please do not make this another 2016, and assume Kamila will win.

The Russian bots are out in full force to pacify voters that “they have this in the bag”. This is an indication that the only way we lose is by not voting. And the sentiment is changing, I see calls to vote less and less now, and comments assuming Kamila has already won more and more.

It’s not over till it’s over.

Incels at least is a natural consequence of the difference between society’s expectations, the needs of an individual, and generally the lack of support and or direct toxicity towards men who need help and emotional support men require as humans.

That one is a societal problem around isolating people away from affection.

The rest I have no freaking clue how one becomes a Nazi in 2024.

Welcome to corporate conglomerates and enshitification.

Anti-consumer antitrust stances enables this to happen.

They literally say in the title “use prison for food and shelter as opposed to dying homeless in a gutter”.

This states, in not unclear terms, that the context here is being disabled and so poor that food and shelter are inaccessible.

Outside of this, have you considered moving to a country with a viable welfare state that takes care of people with disabilities?

Ah yes, with all that money, paperwork, and jobs this person probably doesn’t have…

Other countries don’t want America’s destitute.

Other than meds?

Actually getting enough sleep.

They could, but as it currently stands media hosting on the fediverse… Sucks.

It’s obscenely expensive for everyone involved, and scales poorly. It’s just not ready to operate at scale at this point.

I’m sure it will get better, but large storage costs are better off being handled by a distributed file-system where a minimal level of duplication is baked in, but the storage load is reasonably spread out instead of fully duplicated on each peer.

There are technologies for this, but they all have their own issues. And tomorrow there will be n+1 distributed filesystems, fragmenting it further.

why is this here

Because it’s relevant?

Don’t let a bad thing go to waste, it’s a great opportunity to shore up, improve, and accept migrating users with friendliness and openness.

A great time to share the ideology behind decentralized social media.

That doesn’t answer the question.

Domains can expire, be sold, have their hosting (nameservers) changed…etc it’s very conceivable given the current climate that it could be a malicious site used for data exfiltration from prospective voters. The security posture, if any, of the owner are also unknown, meaning it may be unknowingly compromised.

Especially when you have people willing to drop tens of millions of dollars on voter suppression.

Plain and simple, don’t enter your personal information into a 3rd party site. Use your official government provided ones for this purpose.