codexarcanum

I used to work for one of the nation's largest survey marketplaces. Y'all have no idea how deep this hole goes.

Surveys\polls are largely requested by political polling groups, research teams, and ad agencies. They put those up on an auction block just like ads, and then we would route traffic into it from various places. Mostly the survey takers come from mobile games (take this 3 question survey for 20 Blorp Points kind of stuff) or survey taker apps that give you points for gift cards and such.

So even before bots, most polls are taken by "professional" survey takers who use banks of phones to maximize their point earnings. We spent a lot of energy on "proving" to the survey provider side that real humans were answering, and not using scripts or bots to just rapid finish them (answer B to everything kind of stuff). Using sophisticated bots to randomly answer was super common.

They were super ready for AI. We talked about it everyday, game planned how it would work, designed systems around it. "Synthetic survey" was the buzz word. Why ask humans for answers if the statistics machine can convincingly predict the answer for you? We proposed ideas like generating the prediction fast and early, then using actual polls to adjust the result towards reality over time. We had tools to track people and connect their spending to poll questions so we could ask follow up questions on purchases, to provide "lift" metrics to agencies on if their ads were working. We were working on the "verification can" tech, only it would have been "Answer this 10 question survey to continue watching your movie."

I was so glad to leave that place. They got bought and consolidated into the world's largest survey company a year later and they fired everyone else that had been left. All they wanted was the tech and the customers.

Hell yeah brother! Some of the old EU novels and games were pretty fun too!

My claim was that piefed development and instantiation could be influenced by state actors. If it wasn't clear from my other response, I believe such a thing is possible because the state (specifically the United States of America via it's clandestine spy agencies) has been documented as having done so before. Other countries, like China, Russia, and Isreal (and the USA) have all also been credibly accused of shaping public discourse with paid actors, bots, and various other accusations that get tossed around regularly. Creating chaos, destroying the ability to perceive any piece of information as being true or real, these are the goals of numerous agencies and actors.

Rimu can just be an ideological patsy, they don't have to be "in on it" if their behavior aligns with authoritarian goals naturally. That's the basis of modern decentralized fascism: stochastic terror, disinformation, layers of control mediated by regulation and economics to isolate the decision makers from the soldiers.

I don't need to imagine a "cabal" when an open conspiracy of pedophile billionaires demonstrably rules the planet. The subtle shifting you made in my argument from those implied authoritarians to the language of "cabal" seeks to associate my argument with a fascist dog whistle for the secret Jewish conspiracy to rule the world. It's the same as if you'd claimed I was implying that Rimu is a "globalist." Those words mean more than just their definitions taken from the first paragraph of Wikipedia.

The petty tyranny of forum moderation indeed...

My dude. Coolness is always subjective, every person is the arbiter of their own definition of coolness. If you don't like mine, it would be very cool of you to stick to your own and not worry about what I think.

Are you worried I'm not respecting Star Wars fans enough or something?

You keep moving those goalposts and I'll keep kicking through them lil buddy.

Etymology The term cabal is derived from Kabbalah (a word that has numerous spelling variations), the Jewish mystical interpretation of the Hebrew scripture (קַבָּלָה). In Hebrew, it means "received doctrine" or "tradition", while in European culture (Christian Cabala, Hermetic Qabalah) it became associated with occult doctrine or a secret.

I didnt suggest a "cabal", please don't put Nazi language in my mouth.

I was also called spooky, kook, paranoid, and other X-Files derived insults way back before Ed Snowden proved the US government (and others) actually were spying on everyone and actually had infiltrated or partnered with every major tech company and several standards committees to ensure that emerging communication tech would be susceptible to centralization, subversion, and espionage.

I'll consider it a badge of honor to be called an extremist when the alternative is naively wandering into a propaganda mill.

There have been multiple attempts recently to discredit our admins and justify unilateral defederation. That's weird. When we've talked about defederating in the past, a governance thread is opened, the case is presented, and we vote on it.

https://vger.to/lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/67198913

~~This isn't always true, we recently defederated from feddit.org through pure admin fiat, but an announcement thread was opened to explain why, and I never had the impression that the decision couldn't be questioned or debated if someone felt strongly about it.~~

Edit: my mistake, please see db0's correction.

And I'm not saying every instance must follow our rules or procedures, but db0 and the admins continue to impress me with how they run this ship and put into stark contrast how dictatorial and secretive the governance of most instances\forums is. I'm happy to not carry that responsibility, so I can act like a provocative extremist and try to shake people into thinking more critically.

I'm also not necessarily trying to claim that Piefed and it's instances are ops, I'm asking how would it look different if they were? Being guileless is not a protection against exploitation, quite the opposite in fact.

I never said people can't enjoy what they like. I said they can't like it and be cool. Coolness is a specific quality and often a high bar. I like doing crosswords but crosswords are a coolness-neutral activity, neither cool nor uncool, just a fun thing to do.

Caring really hard about main stream media, making it your personality? Uncool. Liking what you like regardless of some jackass on the Internet's opinion: very cool.

It was part of the original Sunday lineup of Nicktoons! Along with Doug and Rugrats. Ahhh Real Monsters and Rocko's Modern Life joined them a few years later. They syndicated and moved R&S around quite a bit, probably trying to make their money back on it or find a timeslot it fit into well. It moving to late nights and other channels with the much later Adult Animation Show did confuse the issue for many people, but I assure you it used to come on weekend mornings and was a trip to live through. You'd finish watching the wholesome adventures of a band of babies, and then in under 10 minutes a man made of toast is shoving cats between his buttcheeks.

It really is astounding that John Kricfalusi isn't in jail and stayed working for so long.

That "shadow lock" thing sounds like a terrible feature. I'm so annoyed too because I posted a real tear of a rant at that one dude suggesting everyone read Proudhon. Buddy, I have got opinions on that kind of thing.

Real talk here though, wtf is going on? Every day there's some new assault on our instance and every time the thread is dogpiled with crypto-fascists and Zionists.

I've been on the net a very long time. I know what a Nazi infiltration looks like. It looks like the temperature on the board suddenly spiking, with huge arguments constantly breaking out that, somehow, magically, always start to turn towards topics that were "just asking questions" in ways to start etching and eroding the community standards. It starts by claiming everyone doing good moderation is a Zionist or a nazi, so they get kicked out and replaced by actual fascists.

I'm not worried about dbzer0 falling. I'm afraid that piefed already has. It did appear rather quickly, offering a slew of features to get folks off Lemmy. Would it be so strange if a state actor was promoting (and developing) it in order to gradually EEE their way into control here?