@krnel @logiczombie @lucylin @frot @dwinblood, and multiple others I don't remember off the top of my head, powered down most of their stake and got rid of it due to downvoting.
I think if you summed up just the ones I named, it would have been over 250k HP if memory serves.
Thankfully they are still posting on the chain though, and we are able to reward them with our @informationwar + @deepdives curationt trail.
I got sick of seeing other people down voted. I never really got hit by a big brigade. I had maybe a handful of my posts brigaded but that's about it. I just got tired of the hypocrisy and seeing it done to others.
If only people understood the real information war is won by evidence and argumentation instead of blanket downvoting. A lot of the stuff in those communities is nonsense, but that's part of freedom of the press. I can see the argument for downvoting falsehood, but as I noted in a prior post (now past payout) about web2.0 social media, our goal here should be discourse even if we're dealing with Brandolini's Law.
A lot of what most people think of as "press" is nonsense propaganda that is pushed by people who have no problem lying about anything and everything.
The "news" and the "press" has always been ideological throughout the history of the written and spoken word. To control information is to control the narrative, whether it is overtly false or not. In the USSR everyone knew the propaganda was bullshit, but they had to tow the party line or get put into a gulag. In the USA and many western societies we are under an illusion that news organizations are truth warriors and try to report stories accurately/fairly/truthfully/factually and without prejudice, we just haven't had our gulags in the USA yet, but it will come eventually. Every empire collapses given enough time.
Nicholas Sandman successfully had CNN settle with him and is currently in the process of getting settlements from all the other major news, who all lied and smeared him as a racist who did something to an Indian man. Even though the entire encounter was on video, the MSM chopped up the video and spread it around for months and they cut it up to fit their narrative of "white person does racist thing" despite him not doing anything racist.
This is one example among hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands over the years of outright lies, EVEN WHEN we can look up the truth ourselves and see the entire video of the encounter. Iraq's WMDs that the MSM lied us into war with, etc.
The danger doesn't come from "alt-news" that barely has any views, it comes from "Cathedral", the "orthodoxy", the "religious" who consume MSM propaganda and never challenge it ever. These are hugely centralized power structures of 5 major corporations who control almost exclusively "the news" and what politicians and regular people "trust" and do. The danger is from uncritically believing what Don Lemon on CNN tells you, when he says "maybe Malaysian flight that was lost years ago flew into a black hole", yes he really said that, and he wasn't kidding(go watch him say it).
You're not going to find almost any "danger" in our communities that you call nonsense.
I have written extensively on the nature of journalism as we know it. Yellow journalism never went away. It just wore a mask of fake neutrality between ww2 and the dawn of the internet.
There is a lot of nonsense in the alternative media, though. Alex Jones has been right about a lot, but wrong about a lot, too. He's just the highest profile example, of course. We need to exercise discernment most when we find ourselves in agreement with someone else's biases and conclusions.
I agree. I stopped listening to AJ and focused more on listening to people like Dave Smith/Tom Woods.
I think I was as high as 26000 Steempower when I began powering down. That was quite a bit back then.