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Comment by qnleigh | Hacker News Reader

When this all started, the Onion released a priceless 'press statement':

"Through it all, InfoWars has shown an unswerving commitment to manufacturing anger and radicalizing the most vulnerable members of society—values that resonate deeply with all of us at Global Tetrahedron.

No price would be too high for such a cornucopia of malleable assets and minds. And yet, in a stroke of good fortune, a formidable special interest group has outwitted the hapless owner of InfoWars (a forgettable man with an already-forgotten name) and forced him to sell it at a steep bargain: less than one trillion dollars..."

Full statement here https://theonion.com/heres-why-i-decided-to-buy-infowars/

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Brilliant plans for the future:

https://theonion.info/?p=1

> Such is the InfoWars I envision: An infinite virtual surface teeming with ads. Not just ads, but scams! Not just scams, but lies with no object, free radical misinformation, sentences and images so poorly thought out that they are unhealthy even to view for just a few seconds. The InfoWars of old was only the prototype for the hell I know we can build together: A digital platform where, every day, visitors sacrifice themselves at altars of delusion and misery, their minds fully disintegrating on contact.

Makes me think of the old Monty Python joke so funny it kills everyone skit.

Which makes me think of a thread years ago I saw on the modern equivalent: a meme so offensive (to literally everyone at once) nobody can see it without having an anger induced aneurism.

The skit would be a comical updated take on the Python skit. A hardened memelord shitposter troll is found dead in his basement, surrounded by rotted pizza boxes, empty energy drink cans, and penis enlargement pills. He had been working for years to create a meme that would simultaneously offend everyone. Something is on his screen. The person who finds it immediately flies into a rage so extreme they have an immediate brain aneurism and die. "We showed the meme to the most hardened Nazi edgelord trolls we could find on the worst Discords, Chans, and Telegram channels. Most did not survive. Some were saved by medical intervention but sustained severe brain damage..."

See also, the children’s book Fluffy McWhiskers Cuteness Explosion.

it makes me think of The Entertainment from Infinite Jest, where the new Infowars just kills everyone who observes it by rendering them unable to do anything else, even make an agent for it

> A digital platform where, every day, visitors sacrifice themselves at altars of delusion and misery, their minds fully disintegrating on contact.

Zuckerberg already did it.

No joke, I use Facebook every year or so to access the marketplace and at the time my feed was roughly half rage-bait, and the other half being what I can only describe as AI-generated almost-pornography. Both had thousands of what looked like genuinely real interactions per post, mostly from developing country users.

I'm loathe to defend Facebook but most people's experience is not yours. The algorithm pushes content you're most likely to engage with, in your case it has nothing to go on so probably pushes whatever causes the most reaction in general.

Not sure that is defending.

No matter what you follow if FB thinks you are a man it's going to feed you those foreign near-porn shorts.

I'm not sure if it is just what escapes across national boundaries or if social media in other countries is just way more horny, but every time I see a post where the text has been auto-translated from a different language it is thirst trap content. This is true across multiple social media platforms. It's especially prevalent on X for example, especially as they seem to be trying to showcase their Grok translations or something.

> No matter what you follow if FB thinks you are a man it's going to feed you those foreign near-porn shorts.

I don't know about FB as I quit it several years ago but I saw this happening on Instagram before I quit it too.

> No matter what you follow if FB thinks you are a man it's going to feed you those foreign near-porn shorts.

Definitely not, FB knows I'm a man and I don't have anything remotely pornographic in my feed with any regularity because I don't interact with it when it does.

I've gotten the main feed under control, but the Reels have a mind of their own. It doesn't help that the reels don't have the "not interested" or even a thumbs down. The best you can do is a "hide reel" which seems to impart very little weight on the algorithm.

Not my experience at all. I have never seen anything remotely like you describe on my feed.

It could just push his friends and family. Or nothing at all. But here we are.

This timeline sucks.

> I'm loathe to defend Facebook but most people's experience is not yours. The algorithm pushes content you're most likely to engage with, in your case it has nothing to go on so probably pushes whatever causes the most reaction in general.

It think that's a contradiction: if your latter statement is correct, his experience is a peek at "most people's experience."

No, I don't think so. If Facebook has a dataset to work from, as it does with most people, it'll tailor your experience according to that. If it doesn't it has to just use everything.

Then the algorithm is very broken for me. I post extremely benign and even somewhat boring things for my friends and family, scroll through the Marketplace scams occasionally, literally never watch Reels, and still--to this day--Facebook thinks I want to watch videos of teenage girls in loose-fitting bikinis jumping on trampolines.

My conclusion is not that the algorithm shows you things it THINKS you will engage with, but rather things they WANT you to engage with because it makes them money somehow.

Just trying to imagine any other business run this way. Imagine asking a doctor for a recommendation and they give you heroin since everyone seems to really dig it.

It's really amazing how different people's experiences with Facebook are. I have been on Facebook since it started (I was at one of the original schools, I was in that famous first million users).

My feed is entirely photos of friends' kids, invitations to local events (things I actually attend), folk-dancing groups I'm involved with, and the like. I have literally never, not once, not ever, seen any rage-bait or political content (other than that directly written by friends - not reposted) in my feed.

Huh, I wonder if there's a flag on the first million users (or some proxy for "Zuck's cohort") from the worst of the slop shoveling. It would sure save him some pointed remarks.

My wife's feed is very similar and she only got an account a few years ago.

Same, i don't see any problem with my facebook feed, it's all just friends and family postings and local events and some local news posts and things like that.

No political content or anything I would consider rage bait.

It's probably like Youtube. Look up one WWII video there and suddenly you're getting spammed with "How to be a neo-Nazi" videos.

It's like setting out to write "The King in Yellow"

"...brought to you by Squarespace."

I hadn't heard of this my entire life, but now three times in the past week I've seen it randomly pop up. Did I miss something, or is it just the frequency illusion at work?

edit - interesting, Google trends shows it spiking over the past few months: https://trends.google.com/explore?q=%2Fm%2F0m_7t&date=all&ge...

(also a huge spike in 2014, I wonder what that was about?)

The first season of True Detective on HBO would be responsible for the 2014 spike.

https://babylonbee.com/news/alex-jones-worried-people-will-s...

Babylon Bee forces you to accept cookies to use their site. Worth avoiding.

I shut that site down as soon as I saw that. Gross.

As with all silly internet block BS, simply reload the site and hit escape before the cookie banner loads.

> reload the site and hit escape

What exactly does that do? Which web browser?

I’m on mobile right now, so can’t test.

I'm on Firefox and it did nothing for me. The popup came up so fast between me refreshing and hitting escape.

Alternatively, you can disable JavaScript on the website. That lets me view it.

I would suppose it interrupts the page load after streaming the HTML and before loading and/or executing the cookie banner‘s javascript, meaning the content is there but the cookie banner will never open.

On Chrome on desktop it stops the (slow) javascript running which is what actually loads the blocker. You need a fast finger.

Or just inspect element + press delete. In some cases you also need to then delete an extra gray overlay and re-enable scroll on the base html tag, but takes 30s

Seems like a lot of work to browse a site that makes a good joke once every month or so.

> Babylon Bee forces you to accept cookies to use their site. Worth avoiding.

Use uBlock and block javascript by default with NoScript. I saw nothing about cookies and just got the article.

The Onion is satire, so ... But Alex Jones is currently busy with Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly and others to bitterly criticize Trump for the Iran war.

Trump retaliated by calling all of them "low IQ".

Given that Carlson's media company has an investment from the ubiquitous 1789 Capital (Thiel and Trump Jr.), we don't know if this is theater to keep the isolationist MAGA in the fold.

It could also be that they sacrifice Trump in order to accelerate Thiel's and Vance's technocracy.

Anyway, these influencers are still useful for their masters.

They’re just reading polls and reacting accordingly. There’s no principle involved.

Literally no principal involved.

Tucker will take any position for money see his entire career!

Plus the guy was advocating the administration should attack Iran for attempting to assassinate trump.

I dunno, he's pretty consistent as a white nationalist.

Having to take unscheduled vacations from Fox News over some of his more racist comments.

> I dunno, he's pretty consistent as a white nationalist.

> ... Fox News ...

Sure but can you link some white nationalist clips when he was the host of Crossfire [1] for 5 years?

Like he's just not principled. If he were to re-join Fox News and Fox were to pivot to being a competitor to BET [2] his comments would change immediately.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossfire_(American_TV_program...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BET

And they aren’t being objective and rational about the polls, they are funding and cherry-picking poll data that tells them to do what they want to do.

There’s no principle, no strategy, no goal. We’re living in the political version of Cube, and just like the movie: it’s a headless blunder operating under the illusion of a master plan.

The only polls they care about is their sales numbers and their sponsor dollars.

It really doesn't matter how popular or unpopular a candidate is, what matters is if their listeners are still willing to overpay on snake oil. Or if their oil barrons are still giving them a few million dollars for whatever message they want to sell.

AJ is probably the worst in this space. One of the things leaked in his emails is if you give him $20k he'll gladly bring you on the show and talk about whatever it is you want to talk about and sell. You could probably get him to shill for a book about the benefits of communism.

No polls so much as views + likes. What gets a reaction? What makes good TV? This seems to be all that matters.

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