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ro_bit | 3 months ago

Reminds me of when Reddit posted their year end roundup https://web.archive.org/web/20140409152507/http://www.reddit... and revealed their “most addicted city” to be the home of Eglin Air Force Base, host of a lot of military cyber operations. They edited the article shortly afterward to remove this inconvenient statistic

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Lammy|3 months ago

> host of a lot of military cyber operations

Relevant: “Containment Control for a Social Network with State-Dependent Connectivity” (2014), Air Force Research Laboratory, Eglin AFB: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1402.5644.pdf

dialup_sounds|3 months ago

The boring but more likely explanation is that "most addicted" is just a weird statistic that produced weird results.

Eglin has something like 50,000 people but it's actual population as a census designated area is more like 5000.

Oak Brook, IL was also "most addicted" but people didn't run with the idea that McDonalds HQ was running psyops.

tracerbulletx|3 months ago

I mean they should. Because corporate influence networks exist just as much as state run ones do.

ffsm8|3 months ago

Urm. They almost certainly are though?

It was generally being called astroturfing when it got more apparent on Reddit in the early 2010s, and definitely didn't get less after.

pabs3|3 months ago

> military cyber operations

You would think such people would be competent enough to proxy their operations through at least a layers of compromised devices, or Tor, or VPNs, or at least something other than their own IP addresses.

mdhb|3 months ago

OP has just completely pulled this analysis out of their ass. They aren’t all constantly running g cyber operations on Reddit, that bears zero resemblance to what cyber operations look like in real life including the point that you raised.

adastra22|3 months ago

Tor was literally invented for this use case.

torginus|3 months ago

Daily reminder (for myself especially) to engage as little with social media (reading/commenting) as possible. It's a huge waste of time anyways not like I don't have better things to do.

survirtual|3 months ago

Addiction is hard.

This is a special addiction because most of us are community starved. Formative years were spent realizing we could form digital communities, then right when they were starting to become healthy and pay us back, they got hijacked by parasites.

These parasites have always dreamed of directly controlling our communities, and it got handed to them on a silver platter.

Corporate, monetized community centers with direct access to our mindshare, full ability to censor and manipulate, and direct access to our community-centric neurons. It is a dream come true for these slavers which evoke a host of expletives in my mind.

Human beings are addicted to community social interaction. It is normally a healthy addiction. It is not any longer in service of us.

The short term solution: reduce reliance on and consumption of corporate captured social media

The long term solution: rebuild local communities, invest time in p2p technology that outperforms centralized tech

When I say "p2p" I do not mean what is currently available. Matrix, federated services, etc are not it. I am talking about going beyond even Apple in usability, and beyond BitTorrent in decentralization. I am talking about a meta-substrate so compelling to developers and so effortless to users that it makes the old ways appear archaic in their use. That is the long term vision.

demarq|3 months ago

Not a good start.

Also don’t reply to this.