Hey, tildes!

A few weeks ago, I brought attention to Russian propaganda being shared on reddit. I deleted my reddit accounts, but I'm still tracking propaganda being shared on social media. The midterms are approaching quickly, so I'm asking for your help with the project I'm working on.

1. Help with code: Improve what exists and add more features, heck, even documentation would be an improvement (I'm not a programmer).

2. Find more propaganda sites: Right, left, Russian, Jamaican, whatever.

3. Spread the word: Social media, irl friends, media, politicians, etc.

78,143 reddit posts total.
16,831 deceptive Russian reddit posts.
5,588 deceptive Iranian reddit posts.
1,416 tweets total.

Here's the full output. Check the 'Overview' tab first.

Happy to answer questions if you have any.

For those unfamiliar an open collaboration is just a broader term than open source describing non software related projects like Wikipedia.

I have been thinking a lot about how much potential exists in open collaboration and somewhat confused we don't see more of it. I know that at least in open source software a significant portion of projects die or lose support. Why is this?

I’m not recommending this for Tildes or anything, I just wanted to know your thoughts on it.

For those who are unfamiliar with it, on Medium, you can “applaud” articles and comments. To do this, you hold down the clap button, and depending on how long you hold it down, the more applause you give (up to a limit of 50). The best example would probably be if you go on any Medium article and try it yourself.

I’ve never really seen any discussion on it, so I was interested in hearing your thoughts.

I think the idea of essentially having to convert time holding down a button to a number of likes is interesting.

The problems that come to mind are that you could easily automate it, and that it could suffer the “5 star” rating system problem, where the majority of people will either dislike something enough to rate it 1 star, love it enough to rate it 5 stars, or not care enough to rate it at all (or in this case, give it 50 claps or nothing).