unions

they’re casually manipulating public discourse

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It's particularly bad on Reddit whose entire business model seems to be selling out the "front page of the internet" to the highest bidder. That's how you get an IPO after all. You can observe competing political and commercial factions duke it out on the daily. The day after, I can hear my colleagues, especially the older ones, revive and pass around whole chunks of Reddit threads.
And I'll always remember that insane shilling with mushrooming bots, virally hyping at first the amazing "bargains" you can get on Amazon, then the "one-day delivery" which nobody needs, and then, when quality undeniably faltered, the "amazing return policies." As if I want to spend my free time purchasing sub-par products and returning them after a few days.
The only glimmer of hope is we can still talk about this on other forums like this one. Even the ever-living-in-denial Hacker News finally caught on, as I saw over the past one or two weeks:

dingnuts:

Reddit comments are mostly bots shilling ideology or products nowadays though.

halyconWays:

The major subreddits are almost entirely bots as well. Try posting anything authentic and you'll be banned, regardless of how old your account is or how human you appear to be. It's entirely controlled, fake discussion tending to be authentic due to the legacy of the site. The concept of moderators being volunteers from the community died off a long time ago, and there are zero safeguards to ensure they aren't captured entities from some organization or NGO; in fact, the architecture of the site itself doesn't even view this threat as a threat. Remember, once considered a conspiracy theory, Ghlisane Maxwell was a powermod.