would say when most comments I saw online said some version of “don’t even argue with them, it’s like wrestling with pigs” is when I started to notice our spaces being given away.

I’ll be the first to admit I’m terminally online. With that comes alot of vibes, so I get this is vibes. But my experience is that leftists don’t like confrontation. I saw many spaces start out resisting when MAGA and racists began to show up, but they quickly lost interest and left. My instinct when I see a space getting turned is to stubbornly prevent it as much as possible. Other people have more common sense. But it’s almost always inevitable.

Look, I noticed this prior to 2016. I know at least one step in how they accomplished this. They built a network. They made some accounts like parent nodes connected to child nodes, and each one would build networks and sub networks in different areas. Then once those accounts had a good amount of real human followers, they connected the human followers together. Now they had a logistical supply line to disseminate information rapidly. The parent node drops a story and within hours its posted everywhere. Then your Dan Bonginos and Charlie Kirks and Shapiros boost it.

It isn’t organic. It didn’t just build itself, it was forced, and the left didn’t do anything similiar.

There were multiple steps where I saw the right building something, and to this day they’re still doing it. Why the fuck is there a Bobs Burgers group on Facebook who only posts about trans people in bathrooms. There’s one for every cartoon.

What i said is hyperbole sure, but like this api issue, I feel like things are oddly silent and I’m worried while the right are building things, we’re destroying them thinking we’re building them.

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So you left but the world is still on these fascist billionaire tools. Their kids are on their learning. They will be adults one day. So running away to lemmy is great for a minute. Are you ready for the next generation raised on nothing but MAGA and heritage foundation digital spaces?

You can say fuck em all you want but I think we’re making a huge mistake right now and it’s terrifying to me how people don’t see it and or actively encourage it

What do you mean by work around?

Because these spaces now generate so much racism and anti science and anti leftist trash that it leaks into every part of culture and society. I watch kids on their phones all day. They don’t go to lemmy. They go to Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, Reddit. Everybody here is saying left leaning users all left so what is left? What content are the kids today seeing and learning and building their world views from? I get you don’t personally like it. But are you ready for these kids to be voting and running for government and being your coworkers and employer in the next 10 years?

Sure but more of us do here don’t we? I would have thought more people here would share ways to collect it. If we still had access I bet we would have learned alot about how the propaganda is spreading. Who, what and where it was originating from. It’s just strange to me there isn’t a ton of interest in it. Like barely any.

I took people saying they’d punch a nazi to mean they would be willing to fight nazis. Instead I kind of feel like people saw nazis take over their places and went ok we’re going to go over here now.

Whereas I see fighting back as finding out how many comments are needed to tip a post in favor of the left wing, and kicking the nazis off the platform or stopping thier momentum. You know fir mah lazer shit. Leftist coordinate back in the day. Today it’s just not happening.

I just feel like the moment arrived and we were asleep.

First is the counterculture comment. I’ve thought alot about this and I think lemmy has done the opposite. You mentioned regaining control, censorship and payments which are all structure issues. But look at this place. What was actually created here? I’d argue it may even be worse then reddit.

The golden days of reddit and the internet existed for one reason, because they were everything you described. People had control. We had tools that let regular people create and post whatever they wanted, and also control the spaces we participated in. It was essentially a more socialized platform. But eventually reddit and the others wanted to make money, so they drifted toward removing those controls. YouTube removed the downvote button, then brought it back, but now it doesn’t do anything. It gives users the sense they’re doing something but its theater. Reddit and the others did the same. In the end everything was there to serve corporate interests.

Mods were given massive powers because it’s easy to appoint a producer or marketing team as a faceless mod who controls the space. That took away the communities freedom to grow organically. It also opened them up to political interests, like r/canada where a user became a mod, turned out to be a nazi and proceeded to only allow racists. That is exactly what lemmy recreated. It didn’t rebuild what reddit was in it’s best years. It rebuilt the features that allowed corporate control, censorship and the selling off of communities, and nobody questions this. Things are only good now because lemmy isn’t big enough yet. It’s a poison pill waiting to turn because we never addressed the original problems. We just found a new place.

So here’s what I think needs to change. Lemmy should reject mod control measures in favor of community based powers. Mods shouldn’t control communities. Control should be with the people in them, and mods should be there only to handle the most serious issues. Whatever power mods do keep should be transparent so everyone can see whats being removed and why.

Second, you didn’t know what I meant by collecting, analyzing and disrupting. I just mean learning.

My question back to you is this. Take anti vaccination groups, communities that defend rapists, or some of the most vile stuff online. Do you think those are just regular people showing up organically, or do you think there’s networks and information supply lines feeding each other?

I struggle to tell if other people see this the way I do. When you say you’re confused about why we would collect information, analyze it and disrupt things, it makes me think we’re living in two different worlds. It’s like trying to bring up vaccinations on Facebook. I feel like i want to learn a lot of things in life and right now to me this take over of our digital spaces is the most important. So I’m just always taken back when I’m asked “why would you want to”

I don’t think there’s much of a counter culture here. Where is it? I see reddit just with smaller communities.

Are there communities of people discussing how to scrape Facebook or Twitter in order to collect analyze and disrupt?

Ah bummer. I find things wrong here and there. My favorite is when you don’t do anything and ask if it’s sure. Sometimes without any new input it’ll say “you’re right I’m totally wrong the answer is…”

I just see it as a tool. I don’t have much luck searching through endless forums or documents for hours just to find the section i need is worthwhile. I can at get to a direct answer and if it’s wrong I troubleshoot like I do anyways.

What’s an example of a technical issue?

I use it more to rubber duck and also scaffold or search Google and it self to link me to things that I then can read. Other times if I’m reading something and I don’t understand I’ll again feed it into it and then talk it through with it. It’s so much faster than trying to do it with search engines now

Absolutely same experience.

This is a bit of a tangent, but I find I’m at odds with a lot of things lately. I’m just miserable lol. One example is I love to learn new things. As an example I learn coding. Early on there’s great resources. Very clear videos of new content creators who have answers. Over the years everybody wants to code. Now the content creators explode. The content slowly over time becomes less useful. Now when I search I have millions of videos on the same thing because they’re all chasing the one video that week whose metrics were the highest. Soon searching for educational videos is super difficult. It’s a broken system.

AI is like that early day now so it’s still fun to use and gets right to the heart of the problem I’m trying to solve and it’s interactive. That’s how I learn. I have a conversation. I’m sorry it’s killing the world. But I’m honestly done being a leftist hero I thought I’d be when I was younger. I’m so tired and I just want to learn stuff and I’m tired of every new thing that comes out being some evil according to the latest lefty gripe.

Look at bitcoin. It fucking sucked. Still sucks. But if any of us invested in it years ago we’d be retired. But we were all here telling each other to stay away. What did that get any of us? Pride? Digital acceptance that we all complied with the latest hater trend? We’re still poor and crypto still exists. It was just an eye opener to me that people online are holding each other back. Id rather use the tools I have to better my position. If it works then it works and I’m not going to let the faceless amorphous body of haters hold me back.

Use ai

It’s warranted.

You dodged that one. Which missing the point is something I noticed you do a lot with just this interaction. Why engage me

Hey why are you still here. By your logic you can just go start your own content thread. But instead you’re here with me 😆

Why even engage. Weird huh

Come on, all 500 of us.

Oh sorry, this post is over 4 hrs old.

Nevermind.

Holy shit, man. You’re dead weight. Don’t engage if you’re too lazy to bother. Just fuck off

My issue is more against the left as a whole. You can start your own country but does that fix the one you left. The issue is systemic. Seeing people who claim to be leftist rally around the most capitalist structures is why we’re failing. It’s why we end up in protests that were set up to fail. It’s why there is no growth. It is why the culture globally has massively shifted towards pseudo science, racism, hatred.

We all can sit here and say fuck MAGA. Fuck republicans. Fuck hegseth. We’re not wrong. But we have to start looking at our own shit. How did the left lose the public opinion the way it has in the last decade. All of us fucked up. By not addressing that we’re going to repeat history over and over again.

I am blaming the structure of these websites as a core issue. The way moderation is handled. The way they act like abusive cops. The way it mimics the very society we claim is an issue. It is a massive mistake to just recreate what was used to make us lose power in the first place.

You guys do ban everybody. This place is worse than reddit.

Like you guys realize reddit was made popular by leftist who gravitate to it because the community controlled everything.

Mod abuse came much later when they went to sell ads and go public. Mods were needed to secretly control all the spaces and then put everything into sellable boxes.

Lemmy recreated these terrible parts of reddit and none of the original fun parts. You want a real leftist space get rid of the fucking bullshit mods. Expose them for what they are. Leave it to the community to control and get rid of these stupid snuff boxes where everything is sorted into boxes with no energy.