If you look at history you will notice patterns that raise suspicion.

Making many posts on popular communities of low-effort memes and/or baiting questions and very few actual comments or engagement with the community is a pretty telling sign. The most common bots are karma-farmers, it’s just worth a lot more on Reddit but even Lemmy is a site that gives weight to people with particular kinds of history.

They also do it for social engagement experiments and AI training, for posting memes and pictures that have advertiser watermarks, and probably a thousand other motivations I can’t think of.

Low word-count posts won’t raise suspicion by itself, but if you check the actual context and see that they’re making almost random low-effort replies without actually making human conversation, it can be a good sign of roboshenanigans. “Wow that’s amazing, I can’t wait to share this with my wife” or “Where did you find this? I’ve been looking for something like this!” are both pretty innocuous replies, unless you see them posted in reply to a dumb spongebob meme for example.

None of this means there aren’t bots that are indistinguishable now. The turing test is dead and buried, we’re entering a strange new world.

Maybe I should be more forgiving.

Sure, you can be more forgiving. But slap them around anyway!

I heard about that from my darkweb days. It’s amazing how much of a fingerprint everyone leaves. I decided that if I have to fire up TOR and encryption to talk to redditors who are often bots anyway, it’s probably a dead platform

I will say that guns rarely deescalate a situation.

In life, you’re right. And I am speaking as a former self-defense teacher. I really believe the average person should not be carrying guns. Home defense, sure, but they’re NOT an answer to 99% of potential daily problems with others and just make everyone crazier.

That said, political defense is a different ball-game. You need force behind your politics when your enemy is also putting force behind their politics. This applies to everything from international relations between allies and enemies to domestic movements. This is why Trump has so much political capital, not only does he have a raving cult behind him, they’re literally armed lunatics. It may seem unstable and it is, but it IS power. It’s why he managed to carve such a deep swath through the GOP, that kind of assured power is intoxicating to people.

I guarantee you if the left were more willing to take up responsible gun ownership broadly, we would have both more cards in the political game, AND we would have greater influence over the gun laws our country desperately needs. (Gun lobbies listen to gun buyers, not the people trying to put them out of business.)

And the best thing you can do to prevent that is to keep a fucking gat pointed at your door when they come, and that way we turn a potential takeover of our nation into a house-to-house meat grinder, effectively preventing that kind of action.

You are not going to win an offensive game, no matter how many people you recruit to throw their lives away in the face of machine guns and ordinance. It’s delusional roleplay thinking from watching too many movies or youtubers who make careers on LARPing.

Love your username!

I’ve felt like an odd one out here for a while. Took a bit to realize I’m probably thrice as old as any average user here.

I feel like maybe I should be nicer to the literal children who try to debate with me their asinine, juvenile takes, but also… I think getting slapped around a little in your safe-space is healthy at times.

Lol

Well thought out rebuttal, I didn’t have time to read it all but I will try to address each point later.

Mussolini didn’t end up hanging upside down in an Italian town square because of protests.

While you’re right that the people who killed Mussolini were armed dissidents, it’s worth remembering that he was allowed to be taken after being deposed after a vote of no confidence from the fascist government of Italy after they got their shit kicked in a few times militarily, and it was the King who removed and presumably arrested him before the citizens did their thing.

And also, the Allies were plowing a path of destruction towards Italy.

Moral of the story: no great story is as simple as we need it to be. There is still politics, there are still decisions by the ruling class that allow the next steps to happen and that ruling class can have their will bent. We still need to be involved in the political system, armed mobs cause as much harm as good even in the best of circumstances, so we want to avoid that if possible, but we need to also have that force behind us or the politics won’t work.

The fact that we have millions of people willing to barricade themselves while ready to defend their homes with weapons, is what will keep this tyrannical administration from knocking down random doors and dragging people out for looking at porn or leftist youtubers.

Nobody, NOBODY in the US wants to be the one breaking down the door of another US citizen, because everyone knows how many people are ready to open fire.

It’s not ideal, but it’s what we have.

If you think it would be better to “rise up” and form an armed revolution… you’re insane and dumb. They have fucking missiles and tanks.

Rising up against the government is a LARPy roleplay fantasy by people who don’t have community or culture.

However, making your insane, fascist government think twice before knocking down random doors in random neighborhoods lest they face a hail of gunfire, that is almost a necessity right now.

This country has too much wealth and resources that a lot of people would love to control, Trump is just the first to succeed at getting into the vault, but there have been many, many others who would have taken the US by force from within given the means.

Yes, better social policies and better international relations would have done a better job mitigating that, but we didn’t get that, so here we are. Huddled behind our weapons and hoping they scare the monsters enough that they leave us alone.

If it were swords, we wouldn’t want to the only people without swords in a place bristling with swords.

Weapons are force-multipliers and we have too many people willing to use force, including our own fucking government, which was the idea to begin with; don’t have a government that can do whatever because they have all the force.

In fact, you can even demand a kingdom without swords while carrying a sword. They do not cancel each other out.

Yah I went through all that, you have to really clean your browser before and after resetting your IP, and if you use anything connected to your old account you will be immediately shadowbanned, as well as if you use a VPN to sign up, or even to log in.

I eventually gave up, it’s too much work to interact with bots and brainless people.

people might not even notice right away that they were shadowbanned.

It’s feeling very strongly like their ideal platform has millions of shadowbanned users, or more correctly, millions of users in their own instanced versions of reddit, populated entirely by AI creating the impression of community, influencing and shaping the attitudes, behavior, political beliefs and shopping habits of entire nations.

The massive influx of bots pretending to be humans doesn’t really bode well for the future of social media.

Also, you’re blocked, continue to be a dancing clown for whatever audience you feel needs to know how awesome you are.

My brother in christ, or whatever the fuck you are, I have been banned on most platforms and have new running accounts just for this and debating mindless, heartless morons into the fucking ground.

I’m sorry, point me towards the Conservative fucking lemmy communities that are receptive to outsiders and debate LOL or are you not aware there are other social media platforms out there?

It’s a weird effect that when someone feels called out by a broad, sweeping statement that they have to jump in and invent stories in their head based on absolutely no evidence to preserve some kind of triggered pride. It’s very transparent and comes across as childish.

This is incoherent.

I am blocking you.

There. Some periods. Enjoy.

This may be a shock to you, but there are other sites out there where actual bad people go and see things, I have to warn you though, they will argue with you, and I know the folks here are pretty sensitive about such things.

The fact that you both assume I don’t AND got pissed that some faceless stranger’s general advice made you feel like you’re personally not doing enough, is actually succulent.