C’mon dude, they just asked you to copy a quote from the Capital, not to recite a whole brochure with the latest analysis on imperialism. And/or swear by it,

It is the most basic common ground for every left wing person and a monumental text in modern Western literacy.

Most people I would care to discuss with should have a basic understanding of what is written in there, and I believe it is the same for people running their own instance.

If you take such a vehement stance against “quoting” Das Kapital, then you probably you lie so much off center that I would personally could have no productive discussion with you.

I mean, even the notion that this is some kind of pledge of allegiance is suspicious enough in its own sake, like letting us on you believe leftists are somehow indoctrinated[^1]. I you weren’t a little removed about Das Kapital you could even subvert the text by quoting something out of context so that it says something unintended by the authors.

But indeed, if you are turned off by this playful screening question, then it only shows that such screening serves its purpose most effectively.

[1]: To be frank lemmy.ml does not even defederate neoliberal instances, so perhaps there is a paradigm shift for you right there.

This part is funny

I am sorry but you are wrong: This bit is beyond funny.

So you are a mind reader now?

I used to think it stood for machine learning.

This is not a matter of opinion, rather than centralized control of information.

Musk can shadow ban you, for example, nobody granted him that power except he was able to by it.

This type of social media are a power structure that is despotic in nature, and it is deeply problematic for democracies.

It is not like a nation state banning a religious minority or an anarchist site. That would be censoring of opinions.

In the case of Xitter, it is Musk and a team of political advertising engineers doing the censorship. So they are worse than Nazi apologists for example. The latter we only anticipate they will impose censorhip (let alone murder) once they are in power.

Xitter has that power already at orders of magnitude above what traditional media outlets have. He controls the flow of information. (And he made it a fucking nazi bar right enough).

But I will grant you that we should not expect nation states to ban Xitter. We should aim for its destruction.

In my opinion: abandon - yes. Ban - no

Perhaps it is time to bring this old post of mine back from the dead? I argue that we have to start a war of attrition on mainstream platforms.

Yes, you missed how social media algorithms work, having captivated the attention of whole nations, and carefully control every bit of information that pass in front of your eyes, then some billionaire buying said mechanism and taking part in the government he helped elected, then threatening the nations that have banned him that they will lose the next elections. Did I miss anything?

Real democracies need to shield themselves from this kind of corporate interference, yet most people don’t even understand how it works, or why Cambridge Analytica was a big hit, or where are these experts now and how they are making a living.

That is a total misreading of what I said. I am scarred by the historical fact that the Holocaust happened. If you are literate at all you can see what I am saying about a specific photo. You want to hunt Holocaust deniers? Go after JK Rowling instead. LOL

Removed by mod

Then someone should correct the Wikipedia statement instead.

Stable diffusion? Self-hosted image generative AI?

Indeed, dehumanization of the Nazis made most people think they are immune both to similar propaganda and similar atrocities. They think that Hitler advertised the Holocaust to be elected. It was a war time state secret (although there was the “Hitler’s Prophecy” but no-one took it at face value).

Hitler regime rose to power with the now familiar rhetoric: traditional values, family, order, capitalism, down with the trans degenerates, beat up leftists they poison the blood of our country.

That is why Trump goes out so easily saying “Hitler mught have said that but in a very different way”. He didn’t. It was the same fucking way.

Having said that, consider how the “abstractio ad Hitlerum” advertized as a fallacy actually enabled, eventually, Trump to get away with Hitler shit, just by saying it is a fucking fallacy. (I think this is in turn called the “Fallacy fallacy”) This timeline is history repeating itself as a farce, exactly as Marx predicted.

“All property is theft” is a well-known anarchist adage. I first heard of it when I was like… in my earliest introduction to anarchist ideas. I am genuinely surprised you have never heard of it.

I see where you’re coming from. Perhaps not as obsessed, but I always had a historical interest in the era until it became an alarming parallel to present day news. Most people do not know much about what went down in the pre-war period. They just have knee-jerk reactions to it. “Traditional values” were trending at the time, Nazism was marketed as the modern, cool choice. Education, administration and even scouting and chess clubs were Nazified at the time. I see it with the freaking MAGA hat everywhere nowadays. I just see it and say, fuck this is some Nazi Germany shit. To me now there are two kinds of people, those who see it, and those who don’t. People are so precious thinking that Germans went nuts with the mass murder shit and elected this guy, but themselves have been on the exact same track as Nazi Germany for years: idolizing a dangerous man without ever questioning him. Soon they will have no excuse either, only collective guilt. Some of us won’t be here to see it though, for one reason or another. I have pointed this out in my other comment: once fascists get hold of the state apparatus, there is no horror we can put past them.

This

They do not matter at all.

I beg to disagree. If “useless internet points” don’t matter, why is there a billion dollar marketing industry surrounding them? I mean all kinds of data mining conducted on all forms of internet reactions. People are paid good money to crunch these types of numbers, including who is casting the votes (man, woman, white, black, American, not-American, liberal, conservative, etc, etc). Then there is the troll/astroturfing angle. There are different types of campaigns that pay drones to upvote or downvote stuff, for marketing purpose or state-actor agendas.

Sure basing your self-esteem on internet points is harmful and useless, but seeing internet reactions as a narcissist fuel only is also naive and misleading. Given the OP wants to get genuine feedback to his opinions to use as a political or moral compass, the question of the feedback quality is not moot at all.

It should have no bearing on your life what so ever.

The feedback quality is also indeterminate. We can’t know the proportion of astroturf, spooks/trolls, and genuine users in any upvote/downvote score and/or reaction. This can lead to a situation where the feedback to your opinions is always muddy, and vague. Do my opinions suck or is this their problem? In real life you won’t get honest feedback to your opinions anyway, for reasons of politeness. I read once this is why conspiracy theories thrive in Facebook more than Twitter (old study), because a network of acquaintances will not challenge your BS, but a crowd of strangers will.

For all these reasons I think the OP’s question is a valid problem we don’t yet have good answers to. And it is relevant to any platform, Lemmy included.

convince friends to switch to firefox from chrome

Ah yes, you reminded me of this gem https://contrachrome.com/ (It is Scott McCloud’s Webcomic against Chrome’s data mining)