I assume in any sort of thread on a topic like this there is going to be inorganic activity. These companies are all fighting rather hard to try to gain marketshare, potentially worth $trillions, with a product fully capable of producing endless reasonably compelling content to populate an account, a website, or any other basic proof of identity one might ever want.
It's probably never been the case that plurality of views meant anything since online is a bubble to begin with, filtered by endless biases wherever we happen to be reading, making it an even more fringe bubble, but the advent of AI has pushed it all over the edge to the point that perceived pluralities are just completely and utterly meaningless. Somewhat depressing for a one who enjoys online chat as a pasttime, but it's the reality of the world now.
Yeah yeah yeah, everyone's a bot expect you with all the right opinions...
hehe :)
What's a good way to think about this? Because it does cross my mind about the billions of dollars at play - at the same time, I'm not a pessimist. I think my middle ground is kind of just the usual, taking things with a grain of salt. I mean, I chose to reply to this comment in good faith it's human to human, commenter to unpaid/unaffiliated commenter.
I hope I keep that faith. I hope our billions of neighbors on the web enable me to keep that faith over the coming years. Definitely uncertain about the future of the web but want to love it like I've loved it 1990s-today. (Guess I should volunteer w/the EFF while job hunting, try for for-purpose jobs...)
I don’t know why you dismiss it. There is plenty of astroturfing here, bots and otherwise.
I believe the rule around here is to not assume everyone who disagrees with you or has opinions you don’t understand is a shill. Perhaps there’s a bit of that in the post you replied to, but to me seems mostly about mourning the loss of quality conversations online.
Gotta say, I agree. Not that things were ever great, but it’s really in the crapper now.