this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2024
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I absolutely think that's the idea, yes.
The world is a complicated place. Part of the optimization our brain does, to even be able to make sense of it at all without being overwhelmed, is to absorb things that you see other people saying to each other, and incorporate them into how you see the world. So I'm always interested when I see a variety of people all saying the same thing, even though that thing is demonstrably not true if you think for yourself for a few seconds.
In this case I think it's just some kind of internal cope that they're doing for themselves, and the repetition leading to other people potentially absorbing it is purely accidental, but it's still a dangerous pattern.
I tend to love reading your comments - they are insightful and deep:-).
When people behave identically as a "bot" would - passing along what it has heard, without thinking twice or even so much as once about it - they can act as part of that same, dark anti-pattern. Except the danger is so much more real then b/c they "genuinely" hold their belief?
I thought that a lot of it was due to enshittification reasons to maximize profit incentive, e.g. making it hard to "search" on Reddit, yet exceedingly easy to "post", while at the same time making it harder to read the community rules prior to doing so, all to maximize "engagement". But it seems more related to human nature, which will never change.
Hey, thank you! Yeah. The nature of the network can induce people to behave nice or behave mean, and to put a lot or a little effort into the stuff they are posting. I think a lot of the anonymity and ease-of-getting-on of the modern Lemmy-type internet means that you get kind of the lowest common denominator of human nature. It's unfortunately true of commercial networks as it is of free ones.
And either way, it takes effort tp fight against those natural inclinations.