I’d say there is a huge amount of bots, then the smart bots, then the actual shills. The smarter ones run complex operations and are able to use their own power to self propel their own stories. And there are a lot of similar ‘power users’ who are not wholly paid for by someone but would do work for the highest bidder. I’d bet that yes, 50% of what’s on the front page of major things is reputation management or Hail Corporate stuff, then I’d wager the mostly less popular stuff is actual people, with a ton of bad posts from all sides at the low popularity

But what is unique is the fact that we have an extremely well preserved corpus of text surrounding him.

IIFC all those writing are dated to well after the life time, like 100 year past it or so. It may be a bunch of written things but there is no/little reason to take those writings as anything but written down stories.

Ever play Telephone with a single word for 5 minutes? Now do that to a epic for 100 years, the end result will certainly be something but it may be nothing like the truth

Sounds like the CCP approach to twain with the "but a ‘kingdom’ in the past had this territory so we are entitled to it.

and do you have one of those? Because form what I hear they beep when you’re being a good drive too and you end up being a worse (than good) driver trying not to get the beeps

can I just use the zester to get some of the acidic bite back into a fresh sqeeuzed thing?

Do you have a written summary of that? I hate watching videos, and the dark forest book was fun but without a clue I don’t understand the change to internet

When in most of our lifetimes has the u.s. presidental election not been ‘the lesser of two evils’?

You mean ‘native advertising’? that is something r/hailcorporate was pointing out for years, I wonder if it’s been banned yet

don’t be stupid.

Rate those places online to warn others. fucking hailCorporate nonsense

the old re-badge where the same car is made by a different company

Did they even contribute any meaningful technology discoveries or anything in the field?

Two things be both be true at the same time you know. Also you may not have a firm grasp on geopolitics if you think some elected guy in the USA can literally stop and change other people’s minds and actions in a magical way then you’ll struggle to get any point across to anyone who doesn’t also believe in magic.

What’s happening is that when things act as an ad they fulfill the same marketing purpose as a paid advertisement. Just because it happened to you, doesn’t mean talking about it online is not marketing in its effect. But I see where you’re coming from.
This idea is like thinking that people with shirt with huge brand names on them are helping to raise that brand’s awareness level with others. Things can be more than one thing at the same time.

but sounded correct to someone who didn’t know better

specious /spē′shəs/ adjective

Having the ring of truth or plausibility but actually fallacious.
"a specious argument."

and then the real answer will be hidden or something silly, or in some cases where money is involved the correct answer might have been removed

They have probably only provided a small amount of available data, and have much more data, of different type.

Yes we’ve got the data, but now we need it from different angles!

They’ve finally gone full /HailCorporate, become the thing some of the original people of the site would probably not have agreed with in many ways

We all agree with this premise and mostly that the FPTP system is a large contributing factor to the TPS saying how it has based on seeing how places that don’t have a TPS appear to do so because the have different voting systems like different iterations of ranked choice voting.

What I am wondering is what ‘we’ think the best way to implement voting would be?

I agree with the title statement. Why do I comment less? Articles much fewer?

I disagree in the sense that I think voting is useful but just up/down is not. A consensus engine that can judge each aspect of a statement alone and in a group can be used to find what is misleading, dishonest, and the like as well as what is simply untrue or lies.