I notice a large number of ragebait-y political communities being spun up by new users with thousands of posts & ai profile header photos. I notice comment sections are more acrimonious, and foreign disinfo talking points are circulating a lot more prolifically than before the US election started ramping up.
Anyone else notice this? Any idea on how to combat it on this platform? Are there any communities built around creating block lists of obvious troll/ai/disinfo accounts & communities?
Just because you disagree with it does not make it spam.
If anything your post history looks like a spammer/troll.
Shit like this is why I wish instance blocking dealt with users, too
I subscribe to communities and only read what I’m interested in. So I didn’t notice anything. But I know lots of people use Lemmy differently and read the “All” feed. That might be an entirely different perspective.
Yep, I’m the same as you. Didn’t notice a damn thing, and was curious how I’d missed anything. When I saw it was happening through new communities I knew it was the All-feed people seeing this.
I get that the All-feed is useful and fun, but seeing random shit is kinda the “price of entry” no?
Unfortunately, it’s not bullet proof solution. I still see multitude comments in technology communities about “it’s capitalism (greed)”. It’s an uphill battle to block it all. You can’t block whole instances like lemmy.world or lemmy.ml :-)
You can block them
I think that’s a you problem. If you’re too thin-skinned for the truth, I don’t think there is a good way to engage with people on the internet. Especially technology is a field that’s massively intertwined with money. In our current world, the largest and dominatig companies are about technology and selling ads. That’s just the way it is. So when talking about facts and real-world issues with internet technology, this influence is bound to come up… I mean feel free to have your own opinion. Maybe it’s also a cultural difference in our perspective on the world. I’m also a person who doesn’t shy away from calling them out.
Arguing with people complaining that everything is capitalism fault is pointless. Especially with people having definition “not their perfect ideal communism” equals capitalism. It’s just waste of my time. I’m done with politics and I know many communities where politics mean an immediate ban
Yeah, fair enough. It’s a bit weird for me to discuss politics, too. Especially since I’m not from the US and lots of people here are. But our perspectives are so different. I’ve been called a communist. And I’m far from it. A lot of people are ignorant or trolling, too. That has nothing to do with where they come from. And yeah. Lemmy in general is overly political. I completely agree. And I’d rather discuss some computer projects, personal projects and hobbies or whatever. Most of politics is just a shitshow. Especially when I look across the ocean. And that’s none of my business, strictly speaking. We have our issues, too. I’m not okay with excluding capitalism from the arguments, as I think it’s one of the biggest issue with for example why parts of the internet suck. But I think I get it if you say you’re tired of it and resignate.
If you interpreted my last comment that I called you communist ( which I didn’t intend ), I’m sorry that wasnt my intention. However, in my home country we say that best way to finish a meeting or party is to start politics. That’s why I’m allergic to politics because I know that most people even don’t try to argue, they only repeat “their opinions” same one form or another and call themselves names and labels. People have too far opinions to reconcile and I’m fine with this
Yeah. I wasn’t implying that. You didn’t call me anything. I’m just a bit sad that it is the way it is. I think in a democracy it is our job (we as the people / citizens) to shape the world around us. Ideally it’d work that way and that’s what democracy is about (at least in part). It’s super unhealthy for a society that people can’t talk to each other or reconcile. But that’s where things are steering towards?!
Being stubborn and having strong opinions, calling each other names and confining people to labels doesn’t get us anywhere. And it doesn’t get anything solved. I’d not participate in that, either. The sad thing is that this silences the good people. Maybe like you(?) And in the end I’m not okay with that. Idk. Take care… Have a nice day… I think on a personal level your reasoning is perfectly valid.
I think the problem is that politics is involved in literally everyone’s lives in every aspect. On the other hand, every other hobby is kind of it’s own niche. I wish people would post more in their own niche hobbies, though. Too many people are content to be lurkers (me included, I need to go back to posting in the league of legends, gaming, and other communities again).
It’d help me if you (meaning everyone here) just pressed the upvote button every now and then. I’m regularly typing long answers here, contribute perspectives or give good advice. And seeing that valued by people is on the decline, lately. I occasionally scroll through my old comments and I regularly ask myself if it’s worth the effort if no-one engages or even shows any appreciation by voting.
Feel free to also write text if you have some time to spare. But I think upvoting comments is an important issue to me, too. And it’d already get us somewhere. And can be done by any lurker.
And I really agree with the “post more in their own niche hobbies”. That’d really add to this place. Immensely. I always complain that I’m here for that. And instead, most people just dump the news from some newspapers.
Lately it feels like the bots have found Lemmy
If you only look at your subscribed communities you’ll see much less of it.
Just blocked politics & news and my quality of life instantly jumped 200%. I highly recommend it. If something significant happens, you’ll read about it in another community.
Me too. I had been getting really agitated, and others too, but it became so obvious that it was foreign influence trolls. Blocked politics, but it’s especially concerning because most people aren’t going to block politics.
Filter out the names of the candidates and a couple of crazy billionaires and you can even keep the news subs.
Lots of blocking to do. Trust me, you won’t miss it. Part of the fun here.
The most powerful country in the world is a large disinformation piñata. You whack it with a few memes and poor decisions come out.
You can’t fault hostile intelligence for giving it a go, and there are a lot of hostile intelligence services.
Yeah, the US has been doing this to other countries for decades. The internet just made it more accessible and easier for the rest of the world to participate en masse.
other countries
Somehow I really doubt we exclude ourselves
deleted by creator
You whack it with a few memes and poor decisions come out.
… ouch. ~sigh
Yeah, pretty much.
It’s also by design.
The flaws are designed to be exploited by the rich and powerful.
You can’t fault hostile intelligence
Yeah, I can! 😂
We manipulate other countries similarly, so you can fault them but there’s an element of hypocrisy in doing so.
Ideally, we’d all stop…
It’s only hypocritical if you approve of it’s use that way, which I do not. It would be naive or even stupid to expect those countries not to retaliate, but I don’t like it when anyone interferes in a diplomatic process.
No. You, flicker, are clearly in charge of all the decisions of the US Government when it comes to foreign interference.
Damn! I’ve been found out!
It’s been nothing but politics and memes (often about politics) since the first day I joined. I can only imagine how bad it is without my content filters considering how bad it is even with them.
Yes. There’s also been a spike of political commentors that seem normal until you engage with them, then they fire back with emotionally-charged nonsense full of contradictions.
Rather than block lists, just subscribe to the lemmy communities that interest you and don’t subscribe to political/news communities. Then view lemmy through the “subscribed” feed rather than the “all” feed - no political posts - problem solved.
I trawl through All to find new communities though, and a short blocklist makes that much easier.
Doesn’t help. Everything from the meme/joke/fun communities you’d expect people to use to tune out The Horrors™ to discussion about the ActivityPub standards (what little exists that doesn’t conflate it with Just Lemmy or Just Mastodon) devolve to US politics in like two comments. For me at least this entire section of fedi is a politics-radioactive one I try spending as little time as possible (that includes posting non-politics!)
I find myself having significantly more fun on the microblogging side of the fedi, ruining jokes to ground in like 4 minutes with my oomfs and making followup meta jokes about how jokes only last 4 minutes. People actually use content warnings to hide away The Horrors™ when they want to talk about it, which means filters actually work. (Things like alt text for images also helps with word filters!)
Huh, it’s almost as if politics matters because it affects people’s lives, and so people feel motivated to talk about it. Who knew?? 🤯🤷
Just because you wish to talk about your own country does not mean I want to listen to the politics of a country I am not a citizen/resident of nor have ever set foot in. That’s what content warnings and other functionality allow me to do. Unfortunately, Lemmy.
(Also notice how I specifically single out “US politics” and not “politics” in general. That is a different thing where “politics” is sometimes used to mean “anything I don’t like not from a white cis het from the upper middle class person”. That is not the case here. I am simply tired of hearing about Trump and Biden and Harris and whoever the new VP is or whoever the Republican Main Character of the day is or the Democrat Main Character of the day is)
I agree and if you want it to stop make sure this November you vote for Kodos for president. Do not vote Kang as he is a terd.
It’s more of a permanent flooding situation, but, well, election year. I just block shit that gets to be a nuisance - some instances are entirely devoted to shrill screeching, some have legitimately decent communities that just aren’t worth the astroturfing/doomposting/negativity/politics/malicious management/people being twats or 100 other reasons. None of it’s missed, except it shows how much of a ghost town this is when you remove the ragebait.
I lost my (several pages long) blocklist in the kbin.run disappearance, Lemmy actually having instance blocking does a lot to make it easier to build back up. I do wish blocking an instance also blocked its users, which doesn’t seem like the case.
Since Lemmy is an open source platform it is incredibly easy to build automated bots to spam it. I suggest looking for quality user Profiles to follow, and see what communities they posted on to find high quality communities.
It’s been bad for a bit with the tankies here taking every opportunity to make some variant of “genocide Joe” comments but refusing to discuss any of the choices we had and the result of those choices.
They got super-quiet when Biden dropped out. Vanished.
Now we’re getting what appears to be a new wave.
It always takes them a bit of time to pivot talking points. I imagine that whenever a pivot is needed, there’s a bunch of drunk higher up russians having meetings to come up with new ideas, then all those ideas get thrown out there to test them, they measure clicks and responses to figure out what works and once they find something that sticks well enough, the frontline trolls will receive the new talking points and playbooks.
We’ve all see some vile attacks against Walz and especially Harris recently. But unfortunately for Trump and his foreign supporters, drunk macho fascists coming up with ideas to attack the character of a non Caucasian woman, does not produce ideas that resonate well with the democratic left. So they were unable to find something new that had enough zing and they went back to their golden classics of pushing a 3rd party and the “both sides” argument, for now anyhow.
They had to workshop new prompts
Yep, and i understand that im on a western instance so western politics is to be expected but it was getting too much that
Allpage is overwhelmed with politics to the point that i don’t see posts that interest me anymore. So i just blocked political communities and also communities related to twitter. Now I interact more with the fediverse cause i actually get a chance to see things that i can relate to instead american politics.Be real careful calling out or reporting a bot/troll. Some weak ass mods around that will ban you for either even though they say to report the mod…
