On the surface I agree - what’s being shown at top headlines, etc. But the PRC wasn’t as TACO as 2025 USA.

Its random and arbitrary enforced.

A direction the US is moving towards…

It was practiced in the Chinese tech sector for a while, then made illegal by their courts - but it is still practiced in private firms there due to lax enforcement.

Now you’re being rational, looking at the big picture. Anyone promoting 996 is, first, using it for shock value, and second, promoting a: me first, me always, me only. perspective on what’s desirable - for the company owners. Workers? Meh, they bought trickle down once, why not try that again? /s

I hope it doesn’t spread outside of China, and I hope it ends (in practice) there soon.

“Although the Chinese Supreme People’s Court ruled 996 illegal in 2021, the practice remains a de facto standard in many private companies due to lax labor law enforcement.”

at the high health cost? Is it really worth it?

Look at who’s promoting 996, I don’t think any of them take any responsibility for their workers’ health.

What he’s saying is that fascism prevents depression. Need more oil? Just go take it.

500,000 jobs eliminated, how many of those 500,000 are still unemployed? Of those, how many have the means to “band together and take the billionaires down?”

It’s obvious that personalized services manipulate people to their detriment. They make people hate one another. They make people hate themselves.

I’d say that depends on who is in control of those services. The “big ones” like FB and X - sure, obviously. Others like BlueSky… less so. Reddit? Depends on how you use it. New Digg? Too early to tell.

And I want a blank slate when I talk to AI

In theory, yes, that’s what I want. In practice, I find that I get the best, most productive, results from AI when I just run a continuing conversation which it periodically “compacts” as its context window gets overloaded, but that remaining context almost always helps me get what I want out of the AI better than trying to re-state exactly everything I want for every interaction. Some of that is laziness, sure I could build my own context descriptions and “control” the LLM better, and I do create a body of specification documents as I go in an AI project, for the LLM to refer back to as needed, but for the main “conversation” I think it maintains the context window automatically better than I am capable of doing manually.

an algorithm that really understands what we want to see and tweaks every single response to match — is manipulating us. And I don’t want to be manipulated.

Some days, Google feels “in control” - I tell it what I like, what I don’t like, and content is shaped accordingly. Here, in the past month or so, I have felt a massive shift in what Google News is presenting me, tons of crap from X - much of it “aligned” to my point of view, but I don’t want “introductions to X” thank you very much, just switch it all off - but they don’t. And other news stories are quite a bit more “diverse” in their viewpoints than I was seeing several months ago, and I really don’t want to read the Proud Boys take on current events, thanks, no matter how elegantly dressed up it is.

If you are happy with a machine picking what you get exposed to, then you’ll do that and be happy.

It’s not that I’m happy, it’s that I really don’t have a choice. I can’t travel the whole world and make my own observations daily, and even if I did I wouldn’t have access to most of what matters… so, some form of curation in the news that reaches me is inevitable. I would like my sources to be as unfiltered and unbiased as possible (with the exception of filtering out sports and “entertainment”), but that’s always going to be an illusion. Cronkite and Brokaw were filtered and biased, they just did a good job of looking like they might not be.

I don’t want AI that I don’t strictly control the context of.

Good luck with that. Proto-AIs that you don’t control have been shaping the information that reaches you and everyone you know for decades now.

Depends on how you count it: https://anvaka.github.io/map-of-reddit/?x=19755.639226167965&y=11639.277543371396&z=34822.44646362009&v=2

Don’t worry too much, young minds have been trained on opinionated BS since time immemorial.

I actually care about the quality of statistical claims and data science

Then you’ve gotta be having a really bad time trying to analyze subjective data about posts in internet forums with basically zero positive identification of the authors.

Even if the study authors bothered to “drill down” and check the posting history of each and every message author in a studied forum, that can be (and undoubtably frequently is) faked with boilerplate AI spam type generic responses all over a bunch of generic forums just to manufacture “validity” for the intended “high value” posts in the target areas.

If this sounds far-fetched, remember that over 20 years ago there were “gold farmers” playing WoW in China for the sole purpose of “earning” in-game value through repetitive play. Literally thousands of WoW accounts were banned just months after the game launched due to obvious farming activity.

All kinds of organizations pay for all kinds of advertising to “shape public opinion” on all kinds of topics. Only a small fraction of that advertising money gets dumped into traditional high profile channels like 30 second Superbowl spots.

Those ex-military “consultant - analysts” gotta have something to do…

Corporate & Trolls Estimates:

A 2020 study (re-circulated in late 2025) found that in the top 100 subreddits—the primary sources for r/all—at least 15% of communities contained content likely posted by corporate trolls or bots designed to promote specific organizations.

Bot and Spam Removals:

Reddit’s Transparency Reports consistently show that “content manipulation” and “spam” (which include paid promotional agendas) account for the vast majority of admin-level removals. For instance, in early 2024, nearly 70% of admin removals were attributed to spam.

Prevalence of Bots:

Independent estimates and user analysis suggest that 5% to 20% of users in high-visibility subreddits may be bots. These bots are frequently used by bad actors to manufacture “consensus” or “outrage” to push specific agendas.

Infiltration Experiments:

Unauthorized research in 2025 demonstrated that AI bots can successfully pose as humans and engage in “psychological manipulation” to change user views in front-page subreddits like r/changemyview without being detected.

r/SFWimaginarywerewolves

old.reddit.com/r/SubsIFellFor

live in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a corporate troll manipulating public opinion.

I can only imagine being paid to post “company” opinions in internet forums (my company pretty much trains / pays us to keep their name out of internet forums…) It seems like it would just be… depressing, soul sucking, dreary, dreadful but not particularly fear inducing.

I’ve never used a Reddit app - just the web interfaces, almost always old.reddit.com these days. I see more like 4% advertisement, but it does vary by which sub-reddits I view. Doesn’t change the number of trolls whatsoever, but they also vary a lot depending on which sub-reddits you are in, typically the more popular, the more it is overrun with trolls.

The 2025 Superman movie hits it pretty hard with Lex Luthor’s “monkey bots.”

Considering that Blizzard had to mass-ban thousands of WoW gold farmers back in 2005, it should be no surprise whatsoever that all kinds of commercial and political “value” are being “farmed” in every major internet forum today, using every kind of cheap labor available.

How many of these trolls are now using AI to auto-generate their content?

the amount of corporate-personalized shit I want in my life

would be zero when unsolicited. Don’t send me SMS, don’t send me e-mails, NEVER have my home speaker announce things I didn’t explicitly ask for.

However, when I search for things, make requests of “the cloud” to bring me information, I do appreciate having my personal history influence those results. I don’t want to sift through all the NFL, NBA, NHL, etc. score results and commentary just to get a weather forecast. I don’t want to see all the “big celebrity / entertainment news” mixed in with my local news. And, this means that some degree of customization of my feeds and search results is necessary to steer those results to my preferences.

Would I appreciate having more direct, intuitive, transparent control of the filtering? Hell yes. Is anybody offering anything better than Google out there right now? Very few, and mostly of very limited capability. Please prove me wrong with links to examples in your responses.

It’s MAD on the local scale…