I came here around the time the rif app shut down, and the general vibe I get from this place is much more negative than when I joined. Is Lemmy growing more toxic or is it just my imagination?

  • pelespirit@sh.itjust.works
    221·
    9 days ago

    There are trolls. Not as many as other places, but we have them.

    Once we isolate key people, we look for people we know are in their upstream – people that they read posts from, but who themselves are less influential. (This uses the same social media graph built before.) We then either start flame wars with bots to derail the conversations that are influencing influential people (think nonsense reddit posts about conspiracies that sound like Markov chains of nonsense other people have said), or else send off specific tasks for sockpuppets (changing this wording of an idea here; cause an ideological split there; etc).

    The goal is to keep opinions we don’t want fragmented and from coalescing in to a single voice for long enough that the memes we do want can, at which points they’ve gotten a head start on going viral and tend to capture a larger-than-otherwise share of media attention.

    (All of the stuff above is basically the “standard” for online PR (usually farmed out to an LLC with a generic name working for the marketing firm contracted by the big firm; deniability is a word frequently said), once you’re above a certain size.)

    https://archive.is/PoUMo

    from Bannon:

    “The opposition party is the media,” Steve Bannon, who helped run Trump’s 2016 campaign, told PBS Frontline five years ago. “And the media can only — because they’re dumb and they’re lazy — they can only focus on one thing at a time.”

    So the solution, per Bannon? Overwhelm them.

    “All we have to do is flood the zone,” he said. “Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done, bang, bang, bang. These guys will never — will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity.”

    https://www.npr.org/2025/02/07/nx-s1-5289315/trump-week-in-review

    The best defense is to call them out on it and then walk away. They’ll downvote the shit out of you, but who tf cares about upvotes and downvotes. If someone is getting downvoted heavily, read what they said carefully before piling on.

    • shalafi@lemmy.worldEnglish
      74·
      9 days ago

      I seriously doubt lemmy is under that sort of concerted, planned attack. There are only so many bot handlers and the like and they aren’t wasting time here.

      • Jiggle_Physics@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        4·
        9 days ago

        There is a phenomenon going on right now where tiny sites are getting knocked offline due to sudden traffic, basically DDOSing them. It has been found that the automation of these bot farms sends out scrapers to find new places where you can post on the site. Like anything, anything hat allows you to post anything on the site. So it will find some tiny store’s webfront, see it has a place for customer reviews, and then tell the bot farm it has found new land. The place then gets swarmed with bot traffic.

        So literally everywhere you can post anything is getting bot traffic right now.

        • shalafi@lemmy.worldEnglish
          83·
          9 days ago

          You honestly think the fascists and oligarchs are aiming for lemmy? We’re not a blip, not even a sparrow, on the social media radar.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_platforms_with_at_least_100_million_active_users

          Say I’m paying you to go out there and influence people. I’d fire you if you came back and said you hit lemmy with your time and my money.

          How many people do you know IRL that have even heard of lemmy?!

          • mushroommunk@lemmy.today
            7·
            9 days ago

            Sometimes it’s not just the numbers but who those numbers are. Depending on what you’re trying to achieve, influencing all the techy Linux nerds that seem to make up Lemmy might be more helpful than just blowing into the wind for as many as possible on Twitter or whatever.

            I’ve got no data either way on this, just some basic social engineering training for work.

            • brbposting@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
              2·
              9 days ago

              Agreed on influencing say influencers (e.g. decision makers in corporate IT for example who presumably would be somewhere on here)

            • shalafi@lemmy.worldEnglish
              43·
              9 days ago

              Can’t see anyone bothering with lemmy’s pathetic user count, not for a few years at least. Like I said, were I paying you for social engineering, I’d be more than disappointed if you went after us.

              Maybe your training taught you something I don’t know? If you’re talking about social engineering in the context of IT, I get that bit, taught classes on it myself.

              • mushroommunk@lemmy.today
                2·
                9 days ago

                It’s not always about the user count though. It’s about your end goals. There’s two types of social engineering. Mass and targeted. You’re focusing on the mass social engineering.

                Say you want specific information on how Crowdstrike works. You could launch a massive social engineering campaign on Twitter but if you don’t catch any of the engineers who work at Crowdstrike then what’s the point? You just spent all that money for nothing. It would be better to find where those engineers socialize online and try to inject yourself there, doesn’t matter the size of that community and it could very well be on Lemmy in one of the programmer communities.

                Now if you want to convince the entire world of something then yeah, focus on the big user counts, don’t worry about the small fry communities. It’s all about your end goal.

      • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        41·
        9 days ago

        I used to think like that until on the e-mail address I had for my lemmy.world account (an account which I left following that) I started getting e-mails in my native language from an organisation based in Tel-Aviv inviting me to attent a “learn about Israel” online course.

        This was when I was already very vocal about the actions of Israel in Gaza.

        That e-mail wasn’t public and as far as I know only server Admins have access to that stuff.

        When the largest Lemmy instance is infiltrated at the Admin level by state actors (and that’s also very clearly the case for Moderation in the main forums there, as reflected by their moderation actions with even one Moderator of the news forum being very openly Zionist in his posts elsewhere), the idea that there are bots and sockpuppets around in Lemmy trying to shift opinions for the benefit of nations and even large political forces, isn’t exactly outrageous.

        I mean, if I remember it correctly the budget of Israel’s Hasbara ops is somewhere around $1 billion a year, so plenty of money to have a few people at least part time trying to influence a place with maybe a few hundred thousand people, like Lemmy.