I'll remove the particulars to avoid anything partisan, but:
I failed to truly appreciate how cooked reddit was with bots until I accidentally clicked Popular and stumbled upon a national subreddit post with a 'chad meme', starring a particular political leader, whose unpopularity is hard to adequately convey to foreigners.
It was not just that this post had been so severely upvoted, but the comment section itself had a mantra more or less, with very little actual conversation, just echoing the same sentiment; and all those comments in turn upvoted to the point of drowning out the lone comments at the bottom (not downvoted, just not upvoted) expressing "???". I don't know if I'd ever even written the word 'astroturfing' before expressing my bafflement at a friend, so I don't think I'm very tinfoil hat about these things.
It was just utterly bizarre to see someone who can barely get a single win in public discourse being heralded -- monotonously -- like he was the second coming.
>I failed to truly appreciate how cooked reddit was with bots until I accidentally clicked
For me it was a wholesome response. It seemed genuinely kind/human.
Click on user profile...it's a bot just pumping out posts like that. Looked organic when seen in isolation, but when you see a wall of them you see that it's got to be an LLM (with a good prompt).
That was disheartening...I had kinda accepted that the sht-stirring rage posts might be bots but the kind comments too? Ouch
I try to avoid the place where I can. The only places I check with any regularity are niche, like r/roguelikes, or r/ironscape; I think they escape the worst of it as a result. I'm sure the bot stats on twitter would be even scarier though, and there's no real escape from the noise there.
Google's "don't be evil" motto already felt ironic over a decade ago, long before they even replaced it with "do the right thing [for shareholder value?]".
You have to understand it to work like in many RPG games - you get to murder and pillage from time to time as long as you donate some of your ill gotten gains to move your alignment back to "neutral".
Arc is still great on macOS (not so much the Windows build, essentially an abandoned beta) even if it's not getting active development anymore.
I'm defaulting to Firefox ever since I moved my desktop to CachyOS, but I need to either reacquaint myself with its add-on situation after a long arc of using "chrome alternatives", or migrate to something else niche. Vivaldi was what I was sold on before Arc caught my attention through its wonderful UX/UI.
I heard Arc was abandoned and not getting any more work because they were moving to their new AI browser. So, Zen has replaced it for me, and it is based on Firefox which is nice to avoid the chromium
The basis of so much of Microsoft's complacency (and why the MB Neo was such a nuke to the entry-level laptop market).
It's pretty terrible how much this kind of dynamic rules over tech. I'm not a 'capitalist', but god damn if competition isn't the most important thing to prevent total enshittification.
I definitely feel less a product on macOS than anything Google-orientated. I don't know where Windows fits into that exactly, given "paying for Windows" is not really how it's even seen, given major updates were 'free' (with extra ads).
(I miss Arc, such a shame it only gets security/chromium updates now ...)
And I think Codex's desktop client has a built-in browser now? At least I've seen someone using something like that. Nevermind Atlas is a thing now too. https://openai.com/index/introducing-chatgpt-atlas/
I failed to truly appreciate how cooked reddit was with bots until I accidentally clicked Popular and stumbled upon a national subreddit post with a 'chad meme', starring a particular political leader, whose unpopularity is hard to adequately convey to foreigners.
It was not just that this post had been so severely upvoted, but the comment section itself had a mantra more or less, with very little actual conversation, just echoing the same sentiment; and all those comments in turn upvoted to the point of drowning out the lone comments at the bottom (not downvoted, just not upvoted) expressing "???". I don't know if I'd ever even written the word 'astroturfing' before expressing my bafflement at a friend, so I don't think I'm very tinfoil hat about these things.
It was just utterly bizarre to see someone who can barely get a single win in public discourse being heralded -- monotonously -- like he was the second coming.
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