Liz

There’s 7, including the applicant. They meant 3, then 4.

Yes I’m aware. I am not saying everyone with dumb opinions is a bot, far from it. The world is drowning in idiots. But concentrations of message-friendly people is for sure one of the places you’d want to test narratives, not every message is intended for every audience. You need to recruit new folks to your cause and maintain your base. Messages that do well with your base are likely to attract cause-curious folks.

With pipeline stuff? Sure. There's an infrastructure cost involved in switching sources. With tanker and rail stuff? Nah, it's comparatively trivial to switch suppliers. Unfortunately for Russia, the most obvious declines are from pipeline sales in the first year of the war. The rest have decreased too, but those are the ones where you can just wave your hand at the graph and it's obvious. They basically can't afford to sell at market rate because their oil comes with too many indirect costs to the buyer at the moment.

More like, I’m trying to make a narrow point about international oil markets and they keep reading it as moral judgmet, East vs West, and/or Grand Narrative stuff. Also they keep getting verifiable facts wrong, which is annoying because then I have to correct them, distracting from the oil market conversation. Anyway the reason I believe .ml is much more likely to have a higher bot ratio than other instances is that it’s a convenient concentration of Russian and Chinese friendly people, where narratives can be tested. The good ones that resonate get pushed by other members of the bot network outside the test bed (along with organic sharing and so forth). There are other test environments for narratives, but both China and Russia are surely interested in .ml more than other fediverse spaces. To be clear, Western interests also have a presence here, but they don’t have the same kind of obvious choice for an instance to hang out in and test natives. I would guess they would pick lemmy.world to have more user-noise to hide in and less fear that their instance might collapse, but fuck if I know. In any case, we’re very much the backwaters and testing grounds for these bot farms. They’re not interested in us as some kind of nexus for narrative control, we’re just one of the many many places they test out stories and see which ones are worth amplifying with their big accounts on big platforms.

I’m sure .ml is loaded with bots. I’m currently chatting with a person who thinks Russia is a brilliant strategist for selling oil at a steep discount.

I'm sure .ml is loaded with bots. I'm currently chatting with a person who thinks Russia is a brilliant strategist for selling oil at a steep discount.