How to prevent this from becoming a racist cesspool like voat

submitted by davidorr from self.SaidIt

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[–]Extract 25 insightful - 2 fun25 insightful - 1 fun26 insightful - 2 fun -  (3 children)

Hmm, another account with no comment history going "we need to hide those no-no opinions away".
I wonder what this could be..

I'll just leave this here:

What if I told you, that the last refugee wave was large enough for some propaganda organizations to put this site on their radar?

What if I told you the concern trolls posting those threads/comments are the first wave of shills, whose goal is to slowly corrupt this site the same way most platforms (like many subreddits, in their time) get corrupted? Notice how most of those concern trolls highlight problems that could actually be solved by their own participation - but, that would actually help the site, while their goal is clearly to (slowly) undermine it.

They will also cite the new influx of users as a good thing, and threaten it ends if $demandList isn't met, while in reality much of this activity is artificially created by those shills (not most votes, just the early spike that makes it visible enough for other people to upvote it for the sake of discussion).

This isn't going to stop, by the way - this is only going to get worse the more popular this site gets bigger.

[–]magnora7 19 insightful - 4 fun19 insightful - 3 fun20 insightful - 4 fun -  (2 children)

I am going to copy-paste that for emphasis, because it needs saying again. The users of saidit need to understand that this is happening. The information attacks are real, and this is a problem all social media, and the users, are going to have to come to understand and deal with so we can overcome it. What you've said is very very accurate, and I am saying this as the head admin of this website as I've watched it change and grow every day over almost 3 years.

What if I told you, that the last refugee wave was large enough for some propaganda organizations to put this site on their radar?

What if I told you the concern trolls posting those threads/comments are the first wave of shills, whose goal is to slowly corrupt this site the same way most platforms (like many subreddits, in their time) get corrupted? Notice how most of those concern trolls highlight problems that could actually be solved by their own participation - but, that would actually help the site, while their goal is clearly to (slowly) undermine it.

They will also cite the new influx of users as a good thing, and threaten it ends if $demandList isn't met, while in reality much of this activity is artificially created by those shills (not most votes, just the early spike that makes it visible enough for other people to upvote it for the sake of discussion).

This isn't going to stop, by the way - this is only going to get worse the more popular this site gets bigger.

[–]Extract 6 insightful - 1 fun6 insightful - 0 fun7 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

On a related note (and don't answer this here, by the way), I really hope you guys have at least some of the heavy-duty user-behavior analyzers that current Reddit has - the kind that takes as input the login/view/upvote pattern of monitored accounts, and outputs the likelihood of it matching specific models (which are tuned to find shills, trolls, etc).

You should really focus on this (either development or improvement) if you hope this site survives, as at some point (once saidit is large enough) manually banning shills is going to become impractical, while letting them brigade unchallenged is even worse.

[–]magnora7 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Yes I understand, thank you. We have tools like this that are constantly being improved and I realize they will become more necessary as the population of saidit increases.