Voting systems often amplify propaganda spam. Every day r/science has multiple posts upvoted to the top with titles exaggerating findings, and/or linking to shoddy studies.

Upvote/Downvote is very susceptible to headlines that exploit confirmation bias, and bot activity.

> This is making the perfect the enemy of the good.

To be fair, I'm not saying that we should all ditch Reddit and only congregate on obscure message boards with maximum user limits; I'm simply saying that a place like a default subreddit should never be considered counter-cultural.

> Also, voting systems take care of a lot of this, because naked propaganda spam gets downvoted by the users.

Strong disagree. Naked propaganda is downvoted, sure, but good propaganda is never naked. Add enough eyeballs and increasingly sophisticated and coordinated actors will find a way to get their message to the top.

>> From well-compensated marketing teams, to hordes of self-interested proselytizers (see: bitcoin), to propaganda teams looking to influence public opinion, mainstream dark forest sites simply shift the balance of power from the platform itself to the most motivated and well-funded members of the platform

> Also, voting systems take care of a lot of this, because naked propaganda spam gets downvoted by the users.

I disagree: crowdsourced moderation can only really take care of the most obvious crap, so it doesn't really take care of this problem.

Right, crowdsourced moderation works for badly done spam, poorly coded bots, etc. It does nothing for pseudo-science, "self-interested proselytizers" or PR teams. I think there's a mentality that if we just "crowdsource" something, somehow the work just goes away. It's a little like hand-waiving "the cloud" or "serverless" -- just because it's not your problem doesn't mean it disappears. It's still work that still needs to be done by somebody

On top of that, moderation of anything sufficiently popular isn't easy -- e.g., dealing with trolls or PR teams targeting a forum can get extremely complicated sussing out who is who and figuring out where to draw the line -- and like many things is inherently subjective, which means it's the last thing you'll want to hand-waive, but is instead integral to whatever is being built.

> I think there's a mentality that if we just "crowdsource" something, somehow the work just goes away. It's a little like hand-waiving "the cloud" or "serverless" -- just because it's not your problem doesn't mean it disappears.

Yeah, and this has been proven time and time again over at least the past 20 years. Crowdsourced moderation is also usually founded on the fallacy that people who are popular contributors will also be effective moderators, which isn't true.

Though certain crowdsourced features, like flagging, can definitely be moderation force-multipliers.

Social media sites with voting systems have a lot of bots. And they almost always are about expressing individual identity in the context of a unique combination of consumer choices, which is no longer countercultural, if it ever even was.

> because naked propaganda spam gets downvoted by the users

This is simply not true, although I suppose it depends on the definition of naked. Here's some random examples - although like anything, whether it qualifies as propaganda depends on one's beliefs:

- When the previous US president wanted to pull out of Syria, or at least scale down the activities there, a bunch of headlines to the effect of "[President's name] abandons the kurds, leaving them to die" were written, and went straight to the top of Reddit. (This is a classic war propaganda technique where there's always an excuse as to why you can't end a certain war, while failing to account for the negative effects of continuing wars, or the facts that many of these "problems" only exist because of previous foreign policy blunders and doubling down on those blunders simply doesn't help)

- Without going down the COVID rabbithole too much, there would routinely be articles that either (a) spread Chinese-state-originated propaganda videos of stuff like "man randomly collapses in the middle of the street", (b) articles that would credulously take China's metrics at face values, (c) scientific publications that immediately denied the possibility of non-naturalistic origins of the virus, (d) articles intended to shame those who don't believe in masking as an intervention, etc

- (This is a fun one since many won't agree) Many articles raced to the top which made just completely wrong statements about the portfolios of firms like Melvin Capital and basically depicted the WSB gamestop fiasco as a classic david vs goliath narrative, instead of the reality which was for a brief period of time it was a real short squeeze and then almost immediately became a classic bubble/pump and dump scenario that had no connection to fundamental asset valuation. (To be clear, in a short squeeze stock prices can easily be pushed past the "intrinsic value", but so long as there's still a squeeze it is not irrational to buy the asset. However, once it's no longer actually a short squeeze and is now just a normal bull-run / bubble, an article selling the david v goliath narrative is now propaganda)

- Here's a headline that's #2 on /r/politics, which I just visited to find the first headline that counts as propaganda in my book: "Conservatives Are Furious Biden Delivered a Non-Insane Presidential Speech" (regardless of what you feel about the speech or conservatives, it should be trivially obvious that they are not furious about a "non-insane" speech)

- Any of the dozens of articles about the "Capitol Hill Insurrection" which grossly exaggerated what occurred as an attempted coup instead of the reality which was a bunch of (largely deluded) self-styled patriots who changed and prayed and took stupid selfies inside the capitol building (note: me saying that it was grossly exaggerated is not the same as saying that there was no wrongdoing, etc)

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I do think it is true though that "articles which are clearly propaganda to the average user" i.e. one thats go against the status quo of a cite will be downvoted. But propaganda in the other direction won't because they will never think of it as propaganda

The GameStop thing was some trying to emulate the shitty behaviour of hedge funds and succeeding. The authorities had to intervene to stop these people. Even Robinhood had to disable trading for these people, otherwise who knows how long it could have gone on. The authorities are mum when the hedge funds do it.

'Changed, prayed, took stupid selfies' - let's not hide what they did. They had weapons. If an angry crowd with weapons come to my workplace and ransacked the place, making everyone flee for their lives, I would want them all to serve prison time. It's a no-brainer.

> (regardless of what you feel about the speech or conservatives, it should be trivially obvious that they are not furious about a "non-insane" speech)

I guess it could be implying that being furious about insane speeches is normal, and "non-insane" is what makes it news? Just for devil's advocate sake.