This isn’t about immediately filtered content, like the disgusting DuffMan George Floyd meme, or Holocaust denial. That’s pretty well kept in check by mod tools. I’m also not talking about cogent or even pointed political discussion.

I’m not even talking about necessarily in this community directly, however in a lot of other spaces I’ve noticed a lot of accounts using divisive language and terms like “The ineffectual left” “single issue voters” “ignorant right wing morons”. Lots of straw man arguments, lots of willful ignorance.

I’m not a centrist, I’m very very very far left however I know well enough not to patently dismiss the talking points of others, outside of course calls to genocide. I know what dog whistles sound like, and I’m hearing a lot of them lately.

Most egregiously I’m seeing very long form post replies that read very much like what is generated from LLMs.

So I guess my question is, how’re we all fairing with what might be the largest Turing test ever?

  • @rustyfish
    17•6 months ago

    I remember there, when the Russian Internet connection went down, and for like a day all those kinds of posts nearly evaporated.

    Oh shit, I remember this one. For a short time Reddit became a loooooooooot friendlier. Not friendly but friendlier. You could have a nice conversation with someone opposing your views and it came to an actual trade of insights. I valued that a lot. No fucking derailment with stupid ass nonsense and childish jibes. (At least for the most part. Reddit is after all Reddit)

    • AFK BRB ChocolateEnglish
      11•6 months ago

      Yeah, for sure. And before that time I used to wonder how much truth there was in the idea of the Russian troll farms - it seemed a bit like a conspiracy theory, even though it was pretty well documented in the Mueller report. But that day was such a dramatic demonstration. The whole site suddenly shifted so much to the left, and the toxicity dropped so much lower.

    • @Lost_My_Mind
      1•6 months ago

      Ah yes, Mr RustyFish. I see you support Fishell Rustic Sanders for ruler of earth, purely based on his pro-fish stances.

      We may agree in a fish court, or even a basketball court, but at the end of the day, you win some, I win some, and we both smell like fish for having tried your suggestion of chopping up dead fish that washed ashore already dead…and running their guts and bodies all over our hair and bodies.

      Now I fear we’re two naked strangers slathering each other in fish corpses.