This is very accurate. Now put in billionaires acting as referees and you have a perfect storm.
this post was submitted on 12 May 2025
102 points (96.4% liked)
Showerthoughts
34879 readers
850 users here now
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Unfortunately, Showerthoughts has a character limit. But in essence, the billionaires that own the major social media outlets are only reinforcing the kind of terrible game that best suits their profit-hungry agenda. I mean, it's not like they would produce any content themselves – that would be the logic of legacy media and far too expensive, therefore not profitable enough in the age of social media.
They pay shills and regime whores to "produce content" and plenty normies will larp it as an "original thought"
Yes, they do, but they don't pay for it; they even get paid for this content.
Explain?
There is a fundamental difference between traditional media, such as news sites, newspapers, and magazines, and social media, meta, Twitter (X), and so on: Social media platforms do not produce content, but merely host content created by their users.
Although traditional media also earned only a relatively small portion of their profits from subscriptions (around 30-40% from people who paid for the content), the business model of social media is even more ad-driven.
Social media companies earn almost all of their revenue exclusively from ads and PR (public relations, i.e., influencing public opinion — what used to be called propaganda).
What I mean is that meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp...) or any other major social media company even gets paid to promote content provided by someone else.
In traditional media, this was called an advertorial – the only difference is that these hidden advertisements are now even more hidden because they no longer have to be labeled as such (this was required by law for traditional media, but is very easy to circumvent due to the way social media works).
Edit: in other words: if you have the funds, you could run whatever viewpoint you like on social media - but you have to deliver your own content or your own content creator aka influencer (maybe they provide even a copywriter or a face to go with it idk - but that's extra for sure).
"team"
Replace that with "state" and you know what I mean.
I don't think the state works. More like political party or "side"
muhh team good, muhh daddy strong. Muhh daddy kick your daddy's ass, your team bad
Generic Political Discourse on Reddit and lemmy.world
In this analogy, I am simply implying that you have no choice in who you are assigned to.
I am not following then...
The online circle jerk ain't country based, it is politics based?
You don't follow politics?
What I mean by this analogy is that democratic states face a massive problem because voters no longer receive decent information, as they mostly get their news from social media. But these sites do not operate according to the logic of traditional journalism (at least halfway researched stories based on a at least somewhat comprehensible standard concerning truth - quality journalists usually go for "both sides of the medallion").
Social media works completely differently: it's not about the value of the information, but just about clicks – and it doesn't matter whether stories that are sold as "news" actually have any truth to it at all. I mean, you may remember the presidential debate in which Drump was convinced that foreigners eat pets — which, of course, is not true, it's of course ridiculous, but that orange moron still has fallen victim to social media misinformation (newsflash: he is even US president now).
As a voter, you have no control over how or where your fellow citizens get their information. Unfortunately, they now get it primarily on social media, where not the truth matters but just how you sell your viewpoint - even if it is absolutely ridiculous. That's why someone like Drump gets away with all his lies – he has simply created his own reality in which what he says is, strangely enough, the truth for his followers.