I’ve been saying for a long time (since the 2010s tech boom). There’s needs to be a new term the public lexicon termed “poptech” or popular technology. In the same vein has popsci.
The technology anyone knows anymore is oversimplified for general audiences. These days is almost always imparting wrong understanding.
The industry has been rife with grifters. If people catch on then the bottomless pit of funding will become very shallow.
Most of what I learned about LGBTQ came from homophobes. The ones who would not shut up about it.
For example when I didn’t know that rainbows were associated with the community. I had friend school over one time. He saw a blanket with a rainbow stripe pattern. He basically had a gay panic meltdown. He was so certain we were a family of closeted gays.
So anyways later on he got a degree from a bible college or something. And he joined an evangelical church. One where they travel around to city streets around preaching from megaphones. Kind of like that Westboro Baptist thing.
In our early 20s he sexually assault me. I found out later from another guy we went to school with that he also forced himself on that guy too.
He’s not the only person I’ve known like this but certainly the most crazy one.
If there’s any true to the saying that gays rub their identity in everyone’s face. Then it’s the homophobe ones. It’s got to be a massive projection. It’s like they’re trying to tell the world but it manifests as some kind of self-hate in denial or something.
I think sometimes the author is hoping it may reach certain readers as opposed to preaching to the choir.
I took psychology to get elective credits. That’s how all those classes were. The 101 class was the standard Freud stuff. Then following courses was about the not commonly known psychologists.
One professor was more chatty but I dropped it because I couldn’t handle the course load that semester.
Wasn’t this known? long before the election. All these things have been earmarked for privatization. Something about some guy who already kissed Trumps ass so he has dibs on government weather data so he can sell it back to you. I remember hearing about his.
World leaders have figured out he’s functionally a toddler. Starmer and Trudeau took the same approach.
I only use reddit anymore for the meta. It’s like a zoo. Its users are scarcely self-aware. I know this is conceited but whatever.
I think lemmy being a reddit clone is rather ill-fated but at least for now people generally still post like real human beings. There’s something strange about how dialog is basically an algorithm. Reddit is reached some sort of maximum where nothing you can possibly say will deviate the flow of comment sections from the pre-defined talking points. It’s like they’re all stuck in neurotic thought cycles.
There’s a video with Trevor Noah and John Stewart where they talk about how social media is a performance. It’s not a “town square” or whatever. It’s not really honest in good faith dialog.
Americans love to preach about their rules. Especially about how uniquely exceptional the rules are. Turns out it’s all bullshit. They’re just another tinpot dictatorship ruling over a barbaric shithole.
So is the red line crossed yet or is the goal post once again some indeterminate point in the future.
History won’t tell the beginning of the Trump regime at that indeterminate point. It began when he rode down that piss yellow escalator.
Finally someone else who gets it. I kinda hoped lemmy would have a crowd that would at least be able to talk about this calmly but it looks like it’s no less rabid about this topic than reddit.
They don’t have to agree with conservatives. They just have to go so far as establishment Democrat. The “moderate” who keeps kicking the can down the road. ‘Wait till midterms’. Wait till the next red line so we can move the red line to some time in the future.
The dream is not to become a billionaire. The dream is to become upper middle class. So you can sit in the middle and expound on virtues of those beneath you while reaping the benefits of those above.
You’re a professional victim.
Privatization probably.
They aren’t even beginning a comeback until their Overton Window shifts closer to reality. Otherwise nobody isn’t going to recognize them as anything but descending uncontrollably into backwater hermit state as every nation scrambles to cut ties.
At most 30% of the voting age population understood the assignment trying to prevent all this. That’s certainly an indictment. The majority of the population has departed from reality. Perhaps many were never with it on account of being born too deep into the mythology of America.
The internet was supposed to expand peoples minds offering an antidote to such things as this. Instead it dug them deeper. It’s crazy. Sometimes I wonder what if all this is in no small part due simply to a consequence of reactionaries getting online and seeing too much of the world. Seeing 7 billion kinds of diversity of humanity around the world beaming through their smartphone caused their brains to short circuit. Deciding that being a paranoid hermit state is better than being a nation of the world.
Flat forums weren’t just for downloading Android ROMs. Forums were meant for linear one-to-one discussion. All the eye bleed can be disabled anyways. I haven’t looked at avatars or signatures in decades.
Besides has there been a better solution? People were still using XDA forums last I checked. Which has been several years so I don’t know. XDA evolved around dedicated individuals who kept a top post updated with relevant info. So the problem was kind of solved after a while.
Those were dictators too.
They fell in love with their own reflection. All they can hear is their own words ‘Freedom!’ echoing in their ears. It’s a modern day tale of Narcissus.
I’m posting this from Mars colony. Amazing isn’t it.
He has a few hundred thousand excess COVID deaths.
The first administration fucked over farmers with tariffs and then bailed them out. Trillions of dollars are being grifted to rich. They’ll chip in a few meager billions to farmers again.
Besides they hated when Obama tried to give kids healthy meals. I’m sure they be overjoyed that kids don’t have to eat the woke fresh foods.
You can’t ignore the technical factors. The reddit model is fundamentally a sort machine. The voting and temporal mechanism means reddit style platforms are always sorting for whatever the outcome ends up being. It’s not the popular opinion nor the correct one. It’s been proven time and again that the machine is easily gamed. Be early to engage with certain types of content and you’re guaranteed to dominate the top of the sort.
What we have are not naive social networks. We’ve arrived at some kind of simulacra. In attempting to “digitize the world” we created a mirror of real life discussion. The mirror has tarnished over time. Distorted and by now taken on a form of itself.
It’s a people problem alright. At times people seem to be playing some kind of social media game. Quite often especially on reddit people say things in ways you never hear people talk in real life. It’s bizarre.
For example making up scenarios to be angry about. What is even that??? When they have the crowd on their side then everyone is in on the game too. A rational commenter can say, “That’s not possible. This scenario is completely fabricated.” But it’s too late. Everyone is upset and communally partaking in the original commenters rumination.
This is a human problem but one that was arrived at by the technical design of social media nudging people into very weird forms of socialization. It’s like people don’t know how to be normal anymore.
Moderators not mod tools are very important… That word moderator doesn’t mean what it used to mean. We need to examine definition of moderation. It means to avoid extreme behaviors. Moderators used to provide community guidance. To be the adult in the room. This does not exist on social media. A pillar of old messageboards were people moderators. Someone who would step in when the users misbehave. When people start talking or behaving crazy. Sometimes it was better to just remove a thread all together. These kind of things are essential in solving the people problem.
There’s no mod tool that does this. And don’t nobody tell me we can throw AI at it. If social networks are to be human then it needs human guidance (aka human moderators). Can’t just throw scripts at the problem.