This seems like it should be fairly simple to solve. Is it unsolved because no one has tried, or is there some big legacy reason why this is actually really difficult?

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Every website you visit has the payload delivered over the network before any JS is parsed. It has to, there's no other way. Same with intuition followed by rational thought

There is ALWAYS an "emotional/intuitive" response that precedes the rational, conscious thought. There's a ton of research on this (see system 1 vs system 2 thinking etc).

There is no way to stop the emotional "thought" from happening before the "rational thought". What you can do is build a loop that self reflects to understand why that emotion was triggered (sometimes, instead of "this feels bad because it's wrong", it's "this feels bad because it points to an inconvenient truth" or "I am hungry and everything I am reading feels bad")

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this is no different from best practices for programming though. People take a rule that generally works well, but a manager who doesn't understand it tries to enforce it blindly ("more unit tests!!") and it stops working

computer engineering & social engineering share a lot of the same failure modes (which is good news, if you are very good at debugging computers, but find people & politics confusing, you can unlock the latter once you see in what ways your insight in one domain can transfer to the other)

This is also true on twitter & blue sky. Looking at the general feed is a completely different world from looking at specific networks.

There's no clear distinction between propaganda, advertising, and what you call "meme-ing". Companies can and do create campaigns that look organic, that do takeoff as people feel they are organic (and then they become actually real as people take them further than what the company is pushing)

For example: Barbenheimer was a meme that got people to watch two movies in one weekend (not a typical behavior for most people). Was that an organic meme, or a marketing campaign?

(If anyone is curious, I keep trying to write a good intro to this rabbithole, see my writeup on the New York Times explaining how a psyop works, which itself very significant for them to be spelling it out like this: https://defenderofthebasic.substack.com/p/new-york-times-is-... )

> And if you think this only happens on one social network, you’re already caught in the wrong attention loop.

> The most effective influence doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t censor loudly, or boost aggressively. It shapes perception quietly — one algorithmic nudge at a time.

this is obviously not a clear line. No money is exchanged when I promote my own product through my own channels, nor when I promote my friends products, whether I disclose it as promotion, or disguise it as my genuine unaffiliated opinion. Sometimes it really is a genuine opinion! Even worse: sometimes a genuine opinion becomes an incentivized one later on as someone's audience grows

the good news is there is a solution that doesn't require playing these cat & mouse games and top down authority deciding what is allowed speech: you want better ways to reach the people who want your product.

Ads are a bad solution to a genuine problem in society. They will persist as long as the problem exists. People who sell things need ways to find buyers. Solve the root problem of discernment rather than punishing everyone indiscriminately

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- humans find useful concept X - they describe it with label Y - it's genuinely useful, it spreads - It gets too big, Y is misunderstood and corrupted - New group of humans rediscovers concept X, gives it label Z

This is the story of humanity. The good news is we're kind of (mostly) stumbling through a upwards spiral. Current religion would be unrecognizable to the people in ancient times. It was never meant to be something frozen in stone. Folklore and things changing as they're retold was a feature, not a bug.

There's a great write up on this [1], but TL;DR, religion is cultural technology. It succeeded in doing exactly what it tried to do at the time (get people to stop killing each other in tiny tribes and allow mass decentralized human coordination to build civilization & empires where humans could be safe from the elements of nature)

[1] https://defenderofthebasic.substack.com/p/a-beginners-guide-...