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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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Enough with the election. Let's talk about memes, sort of, in relation to message discipline, consensus building, and partisanship... for elections. Sort of.

I've been meaning to tap the motte-trust on this topic. Spurred by this comment by @Goodguy below. The following ramblings make me feel a great deal of shame. Forgive me, senseis.

I started to feel better about the current state of political discourse when I realized that probably a large fraction of the online political discourse is created by astroturf campaigns

I've been having similar thoughts as Mr. GoodGuy. Not just because it's campaign season, although this is part of it, but it's a general noooticing. I have always assumed astroturfing has had an impact on what people say online, but post-2020 it became more visible, or perhaps less bearable personally. 2016 set the stage, and probably perfected some systems, and now it does sometimes feel like Dead Internet Theory is real. But, instead of bots, these are performers.

Since most of you are credentialed internetters familiar with web surfing the following few paragraphs may not be necessary:

A recent case study that has spurred my curiosity is /r/npr/. I have been subscribed to the NPR subreddit for a long time. I don't engage there, but I would visit it a few times a year. Historically, it has been a relatively low comment activity link aggregate for NPR stories and podcasts. The most common type of post that received comments would be an NPR story and a few dozen comments. A specific program was good or bad and a few users would come talk about it. Between the years of 2018-2022 there was also a recurring "what has happened to NPR?" themed post.

Until around last Fall. I started checking it more frequently, because news was hot, I was weak, and the reddit-fication can be interesting in a guilty pleasure way. First October 7th, the the college protest stuff, then January 1st rolled around (it became an election year), Claudine gay was fired, more college protest stuff, then finally Uri Berliner's story came out in Spring.

Which is a rough, anecdotally polluted, timeline-- a relatively quiet link aggregate transformed into /r/politics blob with /r/politics type of consensus. My recollection of the sub as a light user could be wrong. Maybe it was part of the /r/politics blob already and I just missed the switch. It saw a ton of growth during the happening years, but a couple examples follow my concept of the subreddit:

  • July 26, 2022. A snap shot of the sub
  • March, 2023. Abortion story, 200 votes, ~40 comments. That's pretty normal, and that's after the major influx of users from 2020.

Despite its astronomical growth following 2020 I didn't notice a full on reddit political consensus until this year. And, if I were visiting between then and now, I'm fairly sure I would have noticed. I am no n00b nor naive traveler. I know what to expect from Popular Reddit Sub, but the comments in those places are still rather unbelievable.*

The sub now experiences an insane amount of increased activity in comments in the vein of /r/politics. Seriously, just go read the comment section. Almost like a flip was switched as it was decided this place was an important canvas to paint.


"Well, duh, @wemptronics, of course reddit is astroturfed," you say. But, my curiosity isn't limited to reddit-leftist types of blob. I see this many places in any popular English speaking onlineville. That's the basis for some general follow up questions and thoughts-- poorly formatted and ill-considered.

Is the social-media-net made up of a bunch of actors with too much spare time playing roles manipulated by a just a little bit of astroturf and narrative controls? How much weight do astroturf campaigns and organizations carry on social media? How much of what people say on large social media platforms is authentic types of group think and reinforcement?

Has anyone begun studying this stuff yet? Has the internet sociology and history been ideologically captured yet? It's too much for my small brain to systematize, nor do I want to spend time doing so for free.

Besides getting out of the screen, here are some ways I reason myself out of "wtf these people can't exist" Kookville:

  • Perhaps my conception of "real person" exists far out on the tails of reality, and people acting like ActBlue or MAGA surrogate shills online is a totally normal behavior for an average person to engage in.
  • Get with the times, old man, This Isn't UseNet Theory. My conception of "real person on the internet" may have at one point been real, but is either outdated, or was always an incomplete model. It is completely normal to spend time spouting outrageously partisan questionable propaganda among friends.
  • Kids have grown up with astroturf, and thus have become the astroturf theory. It's fun to wear political suits and bash the fash. Now it's all the kids have known. Even many of the kids have kids now.
  • The astroturf propaganda power law. Also Brave New World theory. 1% astroturf sends 99% "real" people accustomed to act and engage in certain behaviors that were once organically developed. If I were to guess I'd say the groundwork went up in 2012, was perfected for 2016, and now it's smooth sailing here on out. The "real" people find this experience rewarding.
  • Just Filling Time In A Weird New World theory. Sure, my Uncle posts dumb memes on Facebook, and he is manipulated by messaging downstream from some political apparatus somewhere. He'll tell you why all liberals suck in real life. But, he's a functional person who mostly just has fun owning libs with memes. U mad?

Was this all just a roundabout way for me to scream, "Wake Up Sheeple" as I tip my fedora violently? Perhaps. Eternal September is not a new topic to this forum. But, geez, when I venture a little too far out into genpop, when I dive into a Twitter chain I shouldn't, when I click the "comments" section at WaPo, NYT, NYpost I am reminded just exactly what never was or will be.

I don't know if anyone else of you like to read /r/supremecourt, but if you do, does it feel at all like it's drifting leftwards? They do their best to be fair.

The Culture War adjacent threads always get spammed with people that probably saw the story in their feeds. But the moderation is great at swatting them down for fighting the culture war instead of commenting on the legal issues.

It has held thus far; maybe it will continue to hold; who can predict? But half the time when I go there, I still have that sinking feeling that they're one little break in modship away from cracking, resulting in there being approximately zero usable spaces left on the internet for rational legal discussion.

Never been there until now, but I will confidently predict yes, it is drifting leftwards. They all drift leftwards. "Cthulhu may swim slowly. But he only swims left."

That place looks like it's still in the realm of nice, active forum. How long it stays that way depends on how active and interested its mods are in maintaining that. My case study was not a drift. It was a cascade. A different kind of engagement, and a lot of it, just kind of moved in and took up shop.

That's not as likely for moderated forums with more specialized topic discussions, which I assume that place is. So it has that going for it. Unfortunately, it is inherently political, and there are few, if any, quality political discussion forums that value viewpoint diversity of any real size. It has that going against it. Mods and culture can fight the tides of Median Redditor, but the effort required to succeed for awhile longer is proportional to its size and growth.

I predict you have around the 40k subscriber mark until the quality drop starts to be really noticeable, then not long after that the consensus gets more intense, boring partisanship becomes uninteresting to the people that make the place (presumably) interesting, so many valuable content creators users depart, and then dregs take over. I think a really dedicated team of jannies, or very well defined ruleset, can extend the life beyond by 10's of thousands of subscribers. Let me know how it turns out and enjoy it while it lasts!

For reddit, I'm pretty confident it is something akin to an astroturf campaign. Just done by a few unpaid, obsessive to the point of would probably get diagnosed with something power users, rather than people being paid to do it. It's surprisingly easy to manipulate something to the top of reddit by ensuring it gets a few early upvotes because of how the algorithm works. The way in which reddit was taken over by the Katie Johnson/Jane Doe case, immediately after the debate, followed by a lot of users being confused at why it was news on Reddit and not elsewhere (the answer is because the case is from 2016 and was almost certainly nonsense), looked suspiciously like someone firing up a specific campaign though.

Perhaps my conception of "real person" exists far out on the tails of reality, and people acting like ActBlue or MAGA surrogate shills online is a totally normal behavior for an average person to engage in.

I think it's even worse than that. It'd be one thing is this was just social media getting to a mechanic that thinks a 'clever' Dem-politician pencil-holder is funny, or a moron with a podcast that can't read.

This is the official GovTrack mastodon account, a site that people here use, myself included. Axios just revised a three-year-old story today to remove 'border czar' from Harris' list of accomplishments. Elon Musk put tens of billions of dollars into twitter to shitpost, and does it badly. I've worked on open-source code with someone who was really proud of having physically attacked Brandon Eich, and that's far from the worst I've seen there; my boss and a coworker have a conspiracy theory about the FBI and the Trump assassination that would be fascinating if they weren't doing it in a business meeting; a forum that once was a mainstay for me blocked discussion of the Trump assassination attempt as a thread the day of (literally as the second post) and never discovered one made the day after. KelseyTUoC spent the better part of a decade as part of the EA community, earned Scott Alexander's respect, and then got to work at Vox... except it was a problem before then, too.

These aren't astroturf, or rando nutjobs who have nothing to their name but politics, or AI, or rats following the Pied Piper, or nineteen-year-olds fresh-faced to the internet, or whatever. This is what they are under the mask.

Beneath that, Trace and Its_Not_Real have been having a twitter debate over The Machine and its output, and I think it's bad enough that Trace's defense is literally pointing to "Hanania/Karlin", but the more critical problem is that even were it true (which I'm far from sold on), The Machine has lost any capability to credibly present the truth, and very few people care.

I wrote, three and a half years ago, about how I didn't see a path back to trust in academia. But why would they care? In many ways, things have gotten worse for the academics, but academi_a_ has been doing fine. Even individual schools and journals with massive scandals have quite happily shaken them off and gone right back to it. Sometimes bad actors manage to get fired, but sometimes they get a TV show. In some cases, and I'll point to Wansink again, the policy proposals and even individual papers don't suffer much even after everyone discovers they were always made up from whole cloth.

Why would anyone expect that to stay to one poorly-demarcated field?

I'm truly surprised about Dan Ariely getting a TV show.

But why would they care? In many ways, things have gotten worse for the academics, but academi_a_ has been doing fine. Even individual schools and journals with massive scandals have quite happily shaken them off and gone right back to it.

I've been tapping the sign so vigorously lately that its starting to hurt my finger.

Literally I just want accountability from those who are nominally in charge of various important functions.

I think this was Trump's best moment at the debate, criticizing Biden for having fired not one person during his term.

Wild that a short while after the head of the Secret Service would be fired. Not for being the head of the organization that screwed the pooch and let Trump be shot, but for being a bad politician in the aftermath.

I have to assume its a LITTLE BIT because she let Trump get shot.

Politicians, ironically, ACTUALLY have some skin in the game when it comes to their protection details. They don't want potential bad actors to think they have a chance at successfully offing a politician because the USSS is incompetent. They definitely don't want such actors to be successful at offing politicians, they'd actually possibly suffer consequences in that case.

Accountability is coup-complete. The entire system as it exists is designed to launder and diffuse responsibility. You'd have to change how things work in a fundamental sense that requires a circulation of elites. The current ones can't be accountable because they rule through unaccountability.

I think what tends to happen is that lack of accountability makes it almost impossible for the system to correct course even as the need for such course-correction becomes absolutely obvious. There's no mechanism for filtering out incompetents, there's no feedback for the leaders to judge which decisions are actually improving matters, so we get the iron star catastrophe.

Covid kinda showed many of the seams. It really seems like the elites are running very low on effective tactics for reigning in discontent. I don't see how they'll effectively resolve the Israel-Palestine divide without alienating some large portion of the population. It seems unlikely that they'll achieve true 'victory' in Ukraine. They can't even solve the problem of drug overdose deaths in the heart of the capital, let alone the outer reaches of the empire.

You can only run away from consequences for so long. I'd wager most of them are gambling that they'll be dead before the chickens actually come home to roost.

It really seems like the elites are running very low on effective tactics for reigning in discontent.

Why wouldn't "brute force" be effective tactic enough?

By the time you're resorting to pure brute force you've probably lost so much legitimacy that you're asking for revolution or coup.

Of course this doesn't mean it'll actually happen.

you're asking for revolution

From where? I know I keep harping on the German Peasants' War, but I think it's a good analogy for the relative positions of ordinary citizens and professional militaries. Modern governments like that of the USA are effectively "rebellion-proof." It wouldn't matter if tens of millions of gun-owning Americans decided to rise up in revolution, because it would only take ten thousand or so regime-loyal troops to crush them utterly.

As for coups, the upper ranks have all been too politically captured to want to carry out a coup, and the lower ranks don't have the capacity to organize one.

Plurality failing the Independence of clones criterion so badly might suggest the easiest step forward. Switch to approval voting, where sparking a competition between "President Mediocre" vs "President AlsoMediocreButWillFireTheIdiots" no longer risks splitting the vote and getting "President Bad" elected instead (all candidate evaluations in the mind of a partisan voter, not necessarily objective), and we might then see a lot more voter control over the worst bureaucrats.

Though ... I can't actually say that that's not "coup-complete" still. It's hard for me to picture the existing parties agreeing to a voting system that will take away their insiders' power, and it's easy for me to picture a world where voters have been granted a way to remove idiot bureaucrats but never exercise that control because the marginal voters are also idiots.

Much as my Liberal heart loves electoral design, changes to the election system not only basically impossible, they are also not enough. Trump is about as much of an outsider as you're ever going to get and even if we replaced him with a smooth operator who actually wants to clear-them-out he couldn't do a damn thing because generals would tell him to fuck off, Hawaiian judges would stall his every move and the actual power structure would continue to tick the boxes it wants to tick while throwing just enough Russia related nonsense at him to keep him occupied. I say this completely independently of a partisan agenda, a President Sanders would have had the exact same issues.

The only way out of this is for power to diffuse away from administrations and into new hands. The only new set of hands available being private businessmen (as opposed to public corporations) and left wing postmodern revolutionaries.

The former seem to actually be telegraphing an attack at the moment (we shall see if it manifests into anything if Trump wins), and the latter have apparently made their move over Palestine and been soundly beat (though not into submission yet) by Israeli interests.

The tools are available for those who want to fight the battle though, especially with Chevron gone. But I've seen nothing ever happen for too long to expect an actual realignment in my lifetime without collapse.

Kids have grown up with astroturf, and thus have become the astroturf theory. It's fun to wear political suits and bash the fash. Now it's all the kids have known. Even many of the kids have kids now.

I'm more familiar with the online left spaces but many people really have imbibed a certain mindset. They sound like CNN anchors or press secretaries that are deeply anxious about the discourse and how giving voice to certain narratives or allowing the opposition to set the frame will lead to defeat. Kind of understandable if you have an audience of millions and a bit silly and sad if you're on reddit.

But these are the sorts of people that'd self-astroturf.

I’ve noticed the same. It’s memes all the way down. I think a lot of it is down to a couple of things: decline in literacy and numeracy (because our schools no longer care if students can read or do math at grade level), shrinking attention spans, and the always online nature of the post 1990s generations.

I suspect the always present nature of the internet has flattened culture by quite a lot because of the nature of culture and idea generation. Ideas are always thought up in isolation, by either a single individual or a small group of people. The small group has an idea — a technology, a new take on art, a new concept, a solution to a social problem, etc. — and then develops this new idea in mostly private until it reaches a point where it can be shown to the world. But because the internet is always on and in everyone’s pockets, the idea is never completed before it’s shouted to the world. In politics, these are hot takes and memes. It’s pretty easy to see once you start paying attention to it, but almost none of the political discourse is about politics it’s about appearances. Kamala is stiff on stage. Trump sounds angry a lot. Or sometimes it’s about the horse race aspect— how a certain person is doing in the polls, whether or not a certain turn of phrase helps or hurts at the polls. These things are easy to talk about with little information. They don’t even really require thought. Just start posting image macros and hot takes. And because the internet moves fast, it’s probably better not to waste time developing a viewpoint because by the time you’re done, the moment will be over.

Second, attention spans are pretty much at goldfish level. Nobody wants to read the articles, and if they do, those articles need to be short and quick reads. A five page article or half hour podcast seems to be about the limit for most people, and it helps if the article is funny and the podcast host has a jokey style. A book or long form article on a single topic especially, if done in a serious way, will be dead on arrival. Nobody wants a tome on political topics, make it short and snappy. And it’s actually impossible to have a real discussion about politics because any take longer that “boo other team” is too long. And because a real understanding of an issue in politics requires a lot of time to learn, most people can’t or won’t do that. So all that’s left is trying to win voters by having spicy memes and clever phrasing in their one-liners.

Third is the schools. We’ve had problems for decades in teaching science and math. Schools are glorified daycares with disruptive behavior being the norm rather than the exception. Teachers are often blamed for not being able to handle disruptive students, while the administrators basically refuse to punish students who disrupt classes. Kids know this so why should they bother sitting around learning boring math when they can talk in class, or play games on their phones? The end result is a population that can barely function in life. You simply cannot understand anything in science and technology without a firm grasp of mathematics. And most people don’t. You can’t understand anything else if you can’t read at high levels. And most people function at a sixth grade level in reading. At such low levels of education, understanding even the simplest political issues (not personalities, issues) becomes almost impossible. If you want to understand a topic like the war in Ukraine, reading headlines about the war isn’t going to give you much insight. The region has a long history that includes the pre-Soviet era, the USSR, the breakup of the Warsaw Pact, expansion of NATO (despite promises not to), the color revolution, etc. it’s not something you can understand by performative renaming of Chicken Kiev to Chicken Kyiv, or by referring to Russians as orcs. If you want to understand abortion then you not only need to know biology, but the statistics of who is having abortions, when and why. This requires statistics and basic scientific knowledge.

Love paragraph one on the development and proliferation of ideas. There's probably a deep vein on memetics and ideas in the internet age to be mined from Culture War threads. Sure wish there was a search feature on The Vault and it actually had all the AAQC's.

Paragraph two/three reminds me to post a recent chat I had with a highschool teacher. He had mentioned he was headed to graduation, so I asked him a question.

Me: "How are the highschoolers? Kids I'm around are younger. Seem mostly fine but there's lots of doomer stuff from places like the reddit teacher place, [teacher friend X] quitting the profession, etc"

Well, they're not good.

I try hard to not be the "kids these days" kinda person, but the kids in school right now are the subject of a sociological experiment that most of us would probably agree is not going to go well for them. These are the first kids in history who have grown up with screens in front of them and the message that the screen is good and they're not okay.

Most adults will probably acknowledge that their phone is a problem. I don't know that I've ever met an adult who believes that they have a good control of their phone or that it isn't a problem somewhere in their life, and it's much worse for the kids. It's anestisizing them to feelings and experiences, and they're dumber because of it.

I mean that in a couple of ways:

  1. All those movies you're supposed to see in your life? The ones that every one has seen? They haven't. They played on their phone through it, or they went to go watch this other thing and never saw it. There are huge cultural things that they're missing, and I'm not talking about, "What do you mean you haven't seen All the Presidents Men. I'm talking about things like The Lion King or Beauty and the Beast or such. They have no cultural knowledge to speak of. [Editor's note: this just sounded like old man-ism to me. But could indicate more concerns about decreasing shared culture, values, and increasing siloed experiences as a people. ]

  2. They're not only uninformed they're misinformed. They get a lot of information about life from tik-tok/social media, and they aren't old enough to discern between "this is a quack pushing a bad idea" and "this is a doctor." I've had kids who have been transported to the hospital because they drank so much water (because some influencer told them to, as "healthy") that it screwed up their electrolyte balance. They actively believe in conspiracy theories, because the fake moon-landing stuff has a bunch of accounts pushing it, but the history accounts don't exist/aren't watched.

  3. Their reading/critical thinking skills are really lacking. Shakespeare has never been easy, but "My only love sprung from my only hate!" should be something that they can parse, and they can't. The lack of time reading is leaving many of them the inability to think very deeply, and they don't know enough to have anything to think about.

  4. They're fragile beyond belief. Their feelings are the most important thing in the world, and anything that hurts their feelings is automatically wrong.

With all that being said, they're nice enough. They're not bad. They're selfish, they're self-absorbed, and they don't have great skills, but they're nice. Their parents are probably the reason to quit: The inability to hold students accountable for their poor decisions, and that it's somehow the teacher's fault, is more of a soul-sucker than anything the kids can do.

Me: "[I basically say, well, teenagers have always been jerks.] Definitely a concern there with just how easily and cheaply social media can manipulate educated adults, let alone kids that are accustomed to sucking up 80 second clips as an informative source."

Yeah. They're not radically different, but the bad is just worse. They're more coarse. Like... selfish jerk? Yes, but twenty years ago, you could shame them for it. Now? They don't see anything wrong with being selfish. "Hey, if I don't look out for me, who else will?"

And yeah—we don't have the social mores to deal with the technology that we had. In 800AD, you would have beer for breakfast—it had calories, it wouldn't make you sick, and it was so weak that it wouldn't be a problem.

By 1300AD, a bunch of monks had invented distillation, and suddenly there was hard liquor. It took hundreds of years to figure out the rules for dealing with it. "No drinking before 5 o'clock", "this is for adults only", "one and done" and all the other rules we have in society.

We're not there yet with the tech—and a lot of people are just so firmly in the "more is better" place they don't see the need for it. AI is going to ruin their ability to think and write, I'm sure.

With all that being said, they're nice enough. They're not bad. They're selfish, they're self-absorbed, and they don't have great skills, but they're nice. Their parents are probably the reason to quit: The inability to hold students accountable for their poor decisions, and that it's somehow the teacher's fault, is more of a soul-sucker than anything the kids can do.

Only tangentially related, but this paragraph made it occur to me the sad irony of the situation with respect to how much teachers are believed to be able to influence kids. This attitude of blaming the teachers for students' poor performance caused by students' poor decisions obviously stems from the belief that teachers have the responsibility to influence students to make better decisions, and implicit in that is the belief that teachers have the ability to significantly influence students into making better decisions. It seems to me that the people who both buy into and push forward this belief also tend to be the ones who are most supportive of teachers, the biggest proponents of rearranging society such that more money and resources flow to teachers. This makes some sense, since if teacher quality matters a great deal for student performance, then incentivizing the best and brightest to go into teaching by giving them more money is likely to pay dividends in the form of better students. And yet it's the prominence of this very same belief that's responsible for this phenomenon of teachers being blamed for their students' poor performance and eventually deciding to leave this "soul-sucking" profession.

Where is the MAGA online space and their memes? Facebook or more private Telegram/Facetime/Whatsapp group chats?

Maybe also twitter and discord?

Facebook, but also just a lot of talking to people we already know through eg group texts or telegram.

2016 /pol/ was the purest form of online political memetics in action, and I have no doubt by 2020 it was heavily astoturfed if it somehow wasn't in 2016. Today I have to imagine much of their messaging comes through truth.social. I tried to visit the other day, but it requires registration.

Since Elon took over you can find plenty of Trump and MAGA loyalists on Twitter fighting the good fight, though. In fact, you can find them under any CW related Elon Musk post these days if you want to dive into those networks.

There's also /r/libsofreddit, which I'm frankly surprised still exists.

There's always a question of whether a space was actively astroturfed, just became popular with certain types of folks, or was just taken over and shifted to driving out certain types of folks and being more attractive to other types of folks. I'm thinking /r/law, which prior to 2016 was a pretty good, legal-expertise-focused sub that usually didn't take the ridiculous political bait and could be pretty reasonable about what the law actually was, why, etc. It was visibly taken over by Orange Man Bad moderators who openly made it a rule that any comment that could be perceived as "helping Trump" in any way was verboten, regardless of the legal merits. The incredibly rapid descent to becoming /r/politics followed like clockwork.

The same with /r/whitepeopletwitter which was once light-hearted and funny, but mutated suddenly to 100% tubthumping for lib-left causes.

I'm off Reddit now, but when I was on, /r/law was pretty non-political up until Trump's indictments started happening. After that, it became wall-to-wall Trump-bashing and any legal analysis was biased towards seeing him lose. Completely non-objective.

It's really no different to what happened to many IRL institutions post-Trump. In fact, we should expect it to happen more because it takes vastly less effort to take over online spaces.

All it takes is someone with too much time who's imbibed the Left's idea of fighting where you are and that controlling the discourse will determine reality and, instead of running around trying to decolonize birdwatching or joining and shifting the ACLU, they just become a mod or a reply guy that harangues mods into submission.

A similar change has happened to a quite different, but also alike subreddit, /r/simpsonsshitposting. It's not a remotely serious sub, as the name implies, but it is very close in size to /r/npr and has only very recently undergone a transformation into endless US democrat posting. Previously a subreddit where users would poorly smash together different Simpsons scenes, with the occasional current events or political post, in the past month 22 of the top 25 posts are explicitly political. 2 are current events. Just 1 is an actual Simpsons shitpost in the traditional style.

One thing we can rule out with Simpsonsshitposting is bots; unlike NPR, you can't just post links to stories and while there are repost bots the aren't creating new political shitposts. Some of the top recent posts are very much the "arduous journey to read this left wing meme" wall of text (see https://reddit.com/gallery/1dyj5zb, https://reddit.com/gallery/1e3jkeb), which don't really lend themselves to astroturfing either. Why bother typing all that out when you can just post Stampy walking through the Republican convention? Two posters have multiple top posts in the past month, and both look relatively normal. Spectreagent7000 and first level ranger have regular posts in both SS and other subreddits, plenty unrelated to politics.

This suggests to me that either your 2nd or 3rd theories are correct, although there is one another factor you didn't consider: reddit karma. Every large subreddit becomes garbage because of the way reddit is designed, and because people just want easy upvotes. Creating a real simpsonsshitpost is not a huge challenge but it takes a modicum of wit and a great memory for the show. In return you're heavily limiting your audience to others who really know the Simpsons. The US political shitposts above do require more effort, but they don't take any brainpower. You just slap some standard talking points on Frinkiac and reap your reward, which, it is clear, is a much larger audience, with more upvotes and comments. Now that Simpsonsshitposting and NPR are large enough to get onto /r/all through subscriber numbers, the political karma farmers move in.

So, there's Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People and then there's my question of what if it's not really an "online" problem- maybe in the old USSR insane believers were writing for Pravda in offices and insane nonbelievers were writing samizdat on smuggled typewriters in various dachas and basements.

So how should we react if political enthusiasm in years past was pretty much "astroturf" as well? 1776 was kinda a masonic plot, was a bad mood in Boston about stupid bullshit taxes by foreign assholes and their quartered thuggish troops carefully managed lest it turn against a local landlord or obnoxious priest or any other problem or cool over time?

Of course it's not just an "online" problem.

Traditional newsrooms lost 40,000 jobs in 12 years, the majority of their employees, mitigated slightly by 11,000 new online news jobs over the same period. The problem has not abated yet; we are now at around two straight decades of decline.

Online there's a "1% rule" to worry about? Ha! Offline we should be lucky to get such a huge, broad cross-section. 50K newsroom employees is 0.03% of the US workforce.

What kind of person, while watching even the first half of this collapse, was coming to the conclusion that "wow, there's the career for me!" Is this type of person someone to whom you want to outsource your epistemic hygiene? In theory we might find a few genius altruists with multi-million-dollar trust funds who decided to give up on any other financial stability for the cause of restoring honor to the Fourth Estate (but can anybody name one?); in practice we're starting with a crop of people who make bad life choices and then we're winnowing that crop down further based on whether they were pragmatic enough to rank "maximizing eyeballs" above things like "honor". The only redeeming feature of this mess is that the economics also want to winnow away anyone who doesn't rank "maximizing eyeballs" above things like "crazy political zealotry", but human psychology is such that zealotry is attention-grabbing so I'm not sure this second form of winnowing is quite as effective.

Having tried to edit, I have no idea why that link isn't formatting correctly.

You reversed it. First the text goes inside the square brackets, then the link goes inside the round brackets.

That's what it looks like I've done to me...

/images/17218867574684837.webp

Looks wrong in your image too.

[Text] (link.com) is the right format

Thanks! I've done it correctly on reddit dozens of times, thought that was what I had done here, and was impotently raging about it. I'll keep this moment to be patient when doing tech support for my elderly relatives.