| ▲ | ars an hour ago | |
What you are describing is not hivemind, but rather paid participants. Companies pay for these "grassroots" recommendations, and Iran pays for those Jews posts. It used to be more subtle with real people paid to post, but AI has made the quantity of it skyrocket, to the point where you can start to notice it, if you pay attention. For example you'll see some comment about Jews, and very rapidly a bunch of upvotes. And you'll see a very similar comment elsewhere, with the same upvote pattern. I've cut back quite a bit my participation in these types of sites once I realized just how many of the "people" I'm talking to are actually bots. This talks about a company doing it: https://www.tomshardware.com/laptops/bots-targeting-the-r-ga... This talks about Iran doing it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rz8whKktkQg | ||
| ▲ | malfist 40 minutes ago | parent [-] | |
I don't know. I don't think it takes too many paid participants to sway a large group of non-paid participants who perpetuate the paid position. Especially for product reviews, at the end of the day, the best product is the one you bought since most of them work well enough. I buy a new tire for my bike and buy the one reddit recommended and the next ride, buoyed by excitement for the new tire, go out and ride 1-2 mph faster than before, now all of a sudden I'm a convert. It's the best tire ever and I recommend it to all my friends. Nevermind I don't have anything to compare it too. This is super common in astrophotography community. You ask people what's the best camera or best mount and because they're so expensive most people only have had one, or maybe two and so everyone comes along to recommend their particular item because clearly it's better than the rest, when in fact, it's all about equal but nobody has compared. Part of that makes sense too, right? I buy a mount for my telescope from Software Bisque that's $14k and I decide to add another pier to my backyard observatory, $14k is a lot to gamble on and I know I'm happy with the mount I currently have, I'm just going to buy it again. I never tried iOptron's $7k alternative because if I hated it, I've wasted $7k | ||