Comment by scarecrowbob

I feel the same.

I think there are two things in play.

First, folks on this site don't know what real propaganda looks like. Based on growing up in Texas, as far as I can tell you'd have to publish and mandate textbooks to make a meaningful impact on peoples' belief systems. I have seen it happen, and I've had the experience of often leaning that things I had thought were true (or some underlying assumption) was in fact false, and then been able to trace that to my early education. So propaganda feels likely, but it also doesn't seem like some easy magic that can happen at the behest of some autocrat somewhere.

Unfortunately the folks here don't really have much perspective to judge the ways in which their own assumptions about the world are shaped by the rhetoric of the systems that raised them.

Second, many people likely generally haven't had many positive and genuine experiences on social media, or at least not on contemporary short-form video social media. Having been on the net since usenet days, I believe that it's possible to learn how to have those kinds of experiences, just as it's possible to engage with trolls and have a bad day or whatever. I don't consider HN to be fundamentally different than other social media sites, but I also understand that is a marginal view.

However, since folks here have generally never used something like Tiktok in a way that has had a positive impact in their life, the folks using it look like they are addicted doom scrollers instead of people highly engaged in conversations with their community.

I've personally gotten a lot out of Tiktok- the quality of the discussions there is much higher and more diverse than HN. I've also interacted with a lot of folks there in ways that make me fairly certain that I am dealing with actual humans and not, like, a PRC Botnet or something.

It's tough for me to disregard my own experience:

TT doesn't feel any more propaganda-laden than any other media stream, and certainly not in ways that are driven more by the PRC than by the content creators themselves

Further, I feel a little fury at folks who are happy engaging in whatever crappy media they like: mass sports, bad sitcoms, poorly written TV news, etc and feeling like the hour they might spend with that is somehow better than the half hour I might spend listening to some lakota guy talk about some nuance of tribal politics, and then have the gall to tell me that I'm addicted.

However, at the same time those folks apparently have a lot of power- they can happily elect folks who will hake it harder for me to hear some conversations that I found useful. So I suppose it's important to understand that these sociopaths view me as just another addicted, over-propagandized NPC.