Yes, I can log into a community with very few users and no interesting, educational or entertaining content and find no spam. Cool. There's no spam there because the community you're describing isn't large enough to be valuable.

If a community got large and active enough to actually be engaging in a meaningful way, it would then have enough value for advertising to start swarming it. Which would lead to one of three outcomes:

The unpaid moderator spends hours a day removing it.

The unpaid moderator relies on automated, algorithmic filtering WHICH HAS NEVER WORKED ON ANY PLATFORM.

The unpaid moderator turns himself into a paid moderator and monetizes his own user-base.


Those are the only possible outcomes. And I'm sorry but "you have to try it to understand it" is how you farm metrics, not how you do honest advocacy. If you can't actually describe some functionality or community on this thing that actually provides a benefit to me as a user, not the administrators, then I'd consider it as a user. But you're completely failing to do that.

And just to be clear, if there is a single person in complete control over a community, it is not decentralized. Every single aspect of this development and marketing push is deceptive and weird.

Replacing a private equity-backed multinational that's in charge of the plaltform with an anonymous social media account isn't an upgrade. You're not actually solving the problem, you're just changing it's name. The code to design a social media network is everywhere. We don't need more code. The problem isn't in the technical details. The problem with social media is in monetization and sustainability. I bet you hate reddit moderation but that's exactly what you're describing. A series of self-appointed moderators generating spaces for THEMSELVES. That's not the point of social media.

There's just no there there. This a framework that doesn't include solutions to any real problem. Except the problem of liability for the people controlling these platforms. He isn't designing a tools for users to create communities, he's designing a framework for self-appointed moderators to control communities.

You're describing algorithmic filtering as a form of moderation and every single platform that's switched from human moderation to algorithmic moderation has become a hellscape of spam and fraud.

I don't understand why an honest person would try to pitch a solution that's already demonstrated itself as ineffective on a massive scale. Facebook fired most of their moderators and replaced them with algorithmic filtering and now most of the ads they serve are for fraud schemes or drugs.

You're making an argument that might have made sense 10 years ago, but now that we've seen these "tools" in action, we know they don't work.

You're describing a space that functions just like a reddit-style, where users run collections of echochambers and monetized fiefdoms. So your solution doesn't really solve the problem but it would more or less destroy the product and completely eradicate the parts of social media that people actually like.

Platforms needs resources and resources cost money. If the users aren't providing that money, then someone else is and that means the platform is someone else's resource. There's no way around this. The fundamental flaw in social media is sustainability and monetization and the only solution is subscription-based social media. "Decentralization" is a grift designed to reduce the liability of the folks controlling the platform. Why the hell would a user want that? That's all literally all this guy is offering.

Just a heads up, decentralized platforms don't solve the problems that users have. Social media platforms without moderation are hellscapes of spam, fraud and hatespeech. Every single one of them. There has never been a large, productive, legal and profitable platform that's been unmoderated and that's what this guy is creating.

He's actually got the entire problem completely wrong., We don't need social media to be more "free" we need to it to be less free. We need it to be paid. The users have to be communally paying for moderation and server space. Otherwise, whoever is providing those resources will eventually seek a return on their investments. If it's centralized it means ads, if it's decentralized then it just means every community turning into a monetized fiefdoms or hate-filled echo chambers.

Platforms need management and management needs to be transparent and knowable. Decentralization is a scam designed to reduce liability and obscure platform management but it absolutely still has to happen for any platform to exist. This guy is avoiding any effort to solve that problem with his product that no one needs.

Reddit does not control your life. What you're saying is 100% counterfactual and downright hysterical. Reddit is a message board filled with trolls. Most of the posts are spam. Most of the comments are spam. Most power users are grifters.

Reddit is digital market for guns and drugs that's filled with children. It's a bad thing. If Reddit controls your life, then you're in distress and need to reach out to someone for support.

"I tried generating a fake account and Reddit didn't let me."

Good. As someone who uses Reddit for communication, not marketing, I don't want to be interacting with fake accounts.

Sock puppets are not a human right and a user's post history is the only thing that other users can do to gauge your credibility. The idea of everyone constantly making sock puppet accounts is great for Reddit, great for scammers and great for propaganda but every single space on the internet that's embraced fake accounts or rewards users for running has become a hellscape.

You're trying to create a test case for some weird "principle" based argument but you literally don't have grounds for an appeal based on that principle. The GDPR allows platforms to ban users and delete accounts for having multiple accounts. And they're allowed to delete data after a user is banned. Here's the fact pattern you seem to be describing:

You were doing something that is bannable under the GDPR and Reddit TOS (create a sock puppet)

They banned you.

The data was deleted after the ban.

Then you got your account reinstated.

Where's the GDPR violation? Your grounds for appeal doesn't exist and you know it, which means everything you were doing was just trolling. You get how that's not relevant here? Reddit is supposed to ban trolls.

I don't understand why this is considered news. A dude got his Reddit account for self-promotion. And why the hell are adults pretending that an old Reddit account with some karma has any kind of real world value?

This is forum drama. WTF is going on here? How many bots are being used to make this blog appear active? Because there's no way any human being sees a conversation about a reddit ban and and thinks "this clearly has an overwhelming public interest".

So they aren't generating the metrics they need and are just going to pay YouTube to manufacture them. This deal means that the Peacocks subscriber #'s are going to shoot up by millions with the stroke of a pen and requiring absolutely no consumer demand. This feels like an admission by Comcast that Peacock is a failure.

I know it's a single data point but the moment when Twitter started hiding the likes on a post, they were admitting that their metrics were fake and couldn't withstand scrutiny. Of course, the back-end for the platform is still showing that nearly every like/retweet/reply on Twitter is coming from an onlyfans bot.

Social media platforms are not plausible. All the metrics are fake and they're processing payments, running massive e-commerce platforms and massive ad-fraud campaigns. And the platforms know it. Facebook deletes BILLIONS of fake accounts every year.

From 2014-2018 the media actually covered media literacy and more and more researchers were pointing out how fake information is spread through super-spreaders and swarms of boosters all being operated in concert. And then that conversation just stopped. The platforms hid their own metrics and researchers' finders were no longer reported in the mainstream media as the click farms started moving from the east Asia to the US.

Social media cannot be regulated. It is a massive fraud scheme. You can't "clean up" a platforms that only profitable business models require fraud and deception.

Solution: "Factory Reset" and then never connect it to the internet again. I did this after the last UI update put a 3rd or 4th row of ads on the home-screen and it's made my life a whole lot easier.

Microsoft has managed to extend your cyber-attack surface into the 4th dimension. Cybersecurity threats are an inside job. Windows is malware and Microsoft is a threat to national security.

There aren't believers. There are people who sell big foot nonsense and people who think it's nonsense. No one believes in it. It's not like UFOs or ghosts, tons of people of all shapes and sizes believe in those pseudoscientific phenomena. But even in paranormal/cryptid circles, bigfoot is considered a joke. A small group of grifters with ties to the entertainment industry have spend 50 years monetizing an obvious hoax. Outside of that small group of people who have a financial incentive, every single person who has ever seen or commented on the video has said it looked fake and kinda dumb.

This documentary isn't exposing anything or changing the narrative at all. Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin are grifters. That's been the most widely believed narrative the whole damn time.

The narrative is entirely unchanged by the new footage and even that footage wasn't exclusive to the doc. It had been shared before. But also, and here's the important part, you can't expose a "truth" that everyone already knows. The "rehearsal" footage doesn't change the who, what, where, when or why. So what's it exposing?

This article isn't news and you know it. You're trying to defer to a reputation instead of actually justifying it by pointing out some hard hitting journalism in the article. And just for context, The Wall Street Journal is controlled by the world's sleaziest newsman, Rupert Murdoch. Corporations are fictional. They are run by people. And people are real. And Rupert Murdoch is a real piece of shit. Promoting his propaganda rags and tabloids is indefensible. Trying to clutch your pearls at someone criticism a Murdoch controlled publication just shows that you don't understand the supply for the information you're consuming. Also, I think you probably work in marketing but call yourself a writer.

Native advertising is indefensible. The internet is an environment and marketing is pollution.

This is an ad for a documentary made entirely out of publicly available information. We've known who the creators were, how they created, why they created and how it was spread for well over a decade. This another example of the dead-internet/internet-in-reruns shit.

I don't understand how this website works. There have to be mods, right? "Moderators" are constantly "upvoting" or "downvoting" my comments and yet the feed is almost entirely made up of blog spam from marketing grifters.