Congratulations, you’ve successfully gaslit yourself into defining away everyone who disagrees with you as a “bot” and now find yourself haunted on all sides by your shadowy enemies.

And for everyone else: what do you think the odds are some of this unfortunate poster’s brainworm infestation was seeded by literal CIA/State Department astroturfing bots? I give it about a 50/50 that that was an important infection vector, and a good 90% chance that they’ve nodded along while looking at CIA copypasta bot and uncritically believed whatever racist thing it was telling them to.

So you’re just gonna double down on the “actually my shadowy enemies are both impossibly more technologically advanced than the imperial core, but also too stupid to use that advantage and instead waste massive amounts of effort specifically in preparation to gaslight me, the main character, due to their impossible prescience that one day I, the main character, would be using a fringe social media website in the middle of the night, prescience that is literally only used for that one purpose and that purpose alone because it so import to trick me, the main character,” theory then?

Or you could go and look at the three years of post history the community has, which notably does not revolve around some herculean effort to gaslight a tiny handful of people from sites that did not exist for 90% of hexbear’s existence and that no one had any realistic expectation would ever exist.

The entire theory rests on the idea that [insert bad country] had LLMs that were five years ahead of the curve and the supercomputers to run them, and this was devoted to generating massive amounts of content on the speculation that maybe someday it would provide legitimization in a fringe internet community, instead of using that massive technological and material advantage to spam as hard as possible with infinite free burner accounts on mainstream social media sites.

You’re talking about one of the oldest lemmy instances, the most active established instance, and the instance with highest per capita activity, at a time when activity has suddenly become higher than ever because suddenly there are a bunch of redditors saying awful shit all over our feeds and we can go dunk on them without needing to bother with accounts on different sites for the first time in over three years.

You’re also vastly overestimating what bots require and do: all we have to do is look at the largest and most sophisticated botnets - the CIA/State Department astroturfing botnets - to see how even the laziest and crudest copy/pasta spam is all it takes to completely dominate and drown out opposition. Literally no one needs to be sneaky, just yell the exact same verbatim press release quote over and over from ten thousand firstnamelastname12345 accounts with stock photo profile pics and you control the conversation completely and no one cares if you get caught out, like the CIA/State Department bots constantly do.

You’re also claiming that the instance was built up with chatbots more sophisticated than anything there is today - and all of those still-not-coherent most-sophisticated AIs are extremely expensive to run - starting at a time when the most advanced language generating AI was GPT-2, which was only a step or so above old markov chain babbling. You can literally go and look at the ancient post history yourself.

And of course every car there is a suburban assault vehicle too.

The best part was that it was always just the fact we were all terminally online and saw the same frontpage threads as everyone else. It was (almost) never an actual brigade, just the result of having a bunch of very active posters with better politics than the average redditor. That’s all it took to make the worst people on reddit over being unable to consistently silence people with better opinions than their own.