It’s all about controlling the narrative.
Anyone who doesn’t comply with whatever the narrative is gets banned. Whatever the political ideology is, it devolves into ‘true believers’ vs everyone else, and the true believers are the ones who have no idea what their ideology really is other than shouting slogans and issuing purity tests on their fellow members.
my fav is people who harass you via messaging about some random comment you left months/years ago about how deeply hurt and offended they are.
I’m fascinated by the level of egotistical delusion it takes to be offended by random internet comments, let alone ones from old threads.
it’s not tech that is the problem. it’s predictive algorithms that push users to passive consumption of media.
The internet was interesting when it was random. algorithms remove randomness. corporations loathe randomness. in the 2000s everyone was going on about how tech/internet was going to allow us this international cultural renaissance by making everything everywhere accessible to everyone…
Remember when netflix and spotify algorithms actually helped you find interesting and new content? I do. But those algorithms didn’t promote the right content… so they were changed to promote the ‘right’ content that benefited their owners most, not the users. Now if i want to find random/new/interesting stuff… I have to manually search for it and know exactly what I’m trying to find… because that type of content is actively suppressed.
the algo driven internet has only been predominantly since the 2010s
it generally only rewards group think and rage bait. like every other algorithmically driven social media platform.
and trolls will report/ban anything that deviates from that as controversial or harmful.
It’s helpful in the nominal sense of allowing mods to dismiss people without having to do any work themselves. Which is precisely the problem AI is designed to solve… human beings have to do work and make judgemental calls. People generally do not like doing work if it can be avoided.
The same way that you can look at someone’s post history, skim it, and more or less understand what their deal is.
Most users on reddit don’t have this diverse set of interests or posts. Most of them post on the same subs and repeat the same types of posts… ad nauseam. Most people, online, aren’t much more sophisticated in their language use or POV or anything… than a bot.
Sure, 10 years ago you’d look at someone’s post history and it would be all over the place, and they’d be writing detailed and nuaced paragraphics in lots of detail… but that’s not what reddit is like anymore, or most of the internet really. God I remember when libertarians actually had decent theoretical argumentation to defend their viewpoints… and now it’s just memes and cliche phrases repeated over and over.
Pretty easy for any LLM to parse a person who just incessantly posts about the same stuff over and over. And if it came across someone doing long-form explanatory stuff… it would just ignore that data since that doesn’t fit the task LLM is designed to process.
The stats on these things exist.
But nobody likes to talk about them, because they don’t line up with the ‘men are all evil’ narrative.
Women are way more likely to get assaulted by someone already in their life than a random stranger. That stat makes people VERY uncomfortable. Much harder to imagine your uncle or your co-worker will assault you than some random guy on the street…
Yeah but that type of environment requites people who aren’t believers, but who are thinkers. Who don’t think belief is merely a set of dogma that must be protect and proselytized.