MathGrunt

I was there for the early days of Voat, which was an earlier version of a Reddit clone. Those first few months were nice, but it quickly devolved into a hate-filled N*zi safe haven.

Fediverse has an early version of a bot problem, which is ubiquitous in all social media these days (thanks to state actors and also corpos that want you to think/feel a certain way). idk how the fediverse is handling the bot problem, but for now it seems to be less noticeable here than other places.

If the platform is truly “free speech” without any moderation, then it will quickly devolve into worse than 4chan.

Voat is gone now, which is a good thing, but if you have an programming background you can use an LLM to study the way it self-destructed by looking at the archive.org snippets. See how it quickly became theDonald but worse.

That is what will happen to this un-moderated decentralized social media protocol.

Pencils. The ones where you need a pencil sharpener to sharpen them every so often. Mechanical pencils just aren’t the same.

You are absolutely correct. The unfortunate fact is that propaganda works. Even if you know it is propaganda, it still works.

A bit like a placebo in that regard.

I would really like an open-source alternative to Facebook. The connection idea with friends via a social network platform I like, the bots and ads and force fed (propaganda) news I really don’t like.

Plus, an open source Facebook would really hurt Zuck and that’s also a win.

Thank you for trying to get ahead of the spam influx. Trying to beat the spambots is a thankless task, but thank you anyhouw.

Thank you for the article OP.

While this doesn’t surprise me, I can’t help but wonder how many other parallel situations there are where an industry of many separate entities distort, hide and otherwise lie to the public to maintain the publicly harmful gravy train.