I started https://kbin.social/m/BostonTerrier and I’m trying to post multiple times a week, but it’s difficult sort of throwing things into the void. Plus, I only have two dogs!

It’s a variety of purposes, but in this type of social media space it’s usually to push specific agendas, often political. The accounts will often engage primarily by “reposting” comments to give a profile appearance that looks like a person. Then they engage in manipulations of conversation in specific ways. For instance, they might play “devil’s advocate” in left-leaning political spaces to plant certain view points. One of the quirks of the human brain is that we tend to believe things we read over and over, regardless of the source, because volume breeds validity. It’s a part of being a social species and being hardwired to be part of the herd.

If you hang out on social media and you read over and over, from multiple posts, that someone is a war hawk, that becomes part of your “sense” of them. Often these conversations are subtly shifted just by posting opinions with little to no substantiation. Your brain starts to think “wow, there are a lot of people saying that guy is a war hawk” and, since we’re wired to conform to the group, you wrap that into your total opinion of the person. You’ll also see just general “shaping” posts without a clear angle where the intent is to shape your perception of a public figure negatively or positively.

Think about the way your opinion of a public figure. Just your sense of who they are. Do you actually know facts that guide what you feel, or do you just have a sense of them based on all the things you “know” about them?

It serves the same point it served on Reddit. There are huge bot farms dedicated to shaping the social media landscape. There is a new social media “boom” so the bots want to get in on the ground floor.

I’m sorry for your loss. I know saying goodbye is painful. We lost two of our dogs in the last year, aged 13 and 14, and it still feels like there’s an empty place where they belong.

You gave him love and he loved you in return and that makes the whole thing worth it. He is beautiful. Thank you for sharing him with us.

I mean, I guess from their side they send a craft and it just…never comes back?

It’s a dopamine hit. That’s why you did it. I’m finding myself reading whole news articles instead of the first paragraph and then two pages of other people’s comments about it, so that’s probably good for my overall mental health.

I have an elderly dog (Boston Terrier) that eats wet food only and can’t eat chicken or grain. Her food is currently costing me about $200 a month. It’s rough. I mean, worth it because she’s amazing and I want her around as long as possible, but it’s rough and I am lucky that I can afford it at the moment.

I think this is the direction they should all take. Open but “quiet quit” and either do like /r/scams is doing with requiring approval but working on their own timetable, or let the subs devolve into unmoderated bot-a-thon mess.

How in the world is this of any value for the FBI? WTF?

I’m really hoping the relentless public scrutiny will keep her from behaving like the Trump sycophant she is, but somehow I doubt it.

Well, there’s zero chance the bill is going anywhere but maybe they can get people “on record” voting against it, I guess. I have so little faith in our system of “checks and balances” anymore. One thing I’ve learned over the last 7 years is that our entire government is underpinned by “handshake” agreements with no rule of law and no methods for accountability and the people who make the laws aren’t really interested in fixing that.

Yes. That’s exactly it. The fact that transgender people exist in the world is abhorrent to them so it’s an affront to their senses that anyone would acknowledge them as human beings. They need something to hate in order to feel alive and they’ve latched onto trans-hate as their new socially acceptable hatred.

I’m grateful for the brave public figures who are absorbing so much hatred and rage but standing tall in who they are none the less. We need them to fight back against the hatred just by virtue of existing in the public space so that we can move forward, however slowly.

As a woman who has hands small enough to wear children’s gloves, this love for giant tablet-size phones is so frustrating. I have a pixel 5 and I can’t even operate it reliably one-handed. I want a nice camera too, dammit!

Same for me. Participating on Reddit sometimes felt a bit like screaming into a void anyway and it was getting so overrun with bots. Every thread had a half dozen comments copied and pasted by random bots. It’s fun to step away try new things.