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It took years for me to really disconnect.
- They introduced, with much fanfare, a mysterious new way of counting votes, and back-propagated it. Suddenly, all upvotes of past and present posts and comments got boosted by a factor of 8-9 or so. Felt hollow, manufactured, disingenuous.
- The founders admitted that in the early days, they made up lots of sock puppet accounts which talked to each other. That eerie, self-congratulatory sentiment never really left the site.
- Proven to tamper with comments.
- That derailed AMA with Julian Assange. It felt 99.9% inorganic.
And so much more.
My Discord registration was denied several times without explanation, so as soon as I discovered Lemmy, I came over and never looked back.
That 1935 piece surely seems prophetic. For example this part:
For the last five or so years, I’ve been noticing a surge of anti-intellectualism. People are not any longer ashamed to publicly dismiss “smart alecks” and “know-it-alls”.