Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. Merry Christmas, happy Hannukah, and happy holidays in general!)
Its not nihilism to observe that Reddit is bigger and fancier than this Lemmy server because Reddit is a giant business that hopes to make money from users. Online we have a choice between relatively small, janky services on the Internet (where we often have to pay money or help with systems administration and moderation) or big flashy services on corporate social media where the corporation handles all the details for us but spies on us and propagandizes us. We can chose (remember the existentialists?) but each comes with its own hassles and responsibilities.
And nobody, whether a giant corporation or a celebrity, is morally obliged to keep providing tech support and moderation and funding for a community just because it formed on its site. I have been involved in groups or companies which said “we can’t keep running this online community, we will scale it back / pass it to some of our users and let them move it to their own domain and have a go at running it” and they were right to make that choice. Before Musk Twitter spent around $5 billion/year and I don’t think donations or subscriptions were ever going to pay for that (the Wikimedia Foundation raises hundreds of millions a year, and many more people used Wikipedia than used Twitter).
you’re either not understanding or misrepresenting valente’s points in order to make yours: that we can’t have nice things and shouldn’t either want or expect them, because it’s unreasonable. nothing can change, nothing good can be had, nothing good can be achieved. hence: nihilism.
Not at all. I am saying that we cannot all have our own digital Versailles and servants forever after. We can have our own digital living room and kitchen and take turns hosting friends there, but we have to do the work, and it will never be big or glamorous. Valente could have said “big social media sucks but small open web things are great” but instead she wants the benefits of big corporate services without the drawbacks.
I have been an open web person for decades. There is lots of space there to explore. But I do not believe that we will ever find a giant corporation which borrows money from LutherCorp and Bank of Mordor, builds a giant ‘free’ service with a slick design, and never runs out of money or starts stuffing itself with ads.
I kinda half agree, but I’m going to push back on at least one point. Originally most of reddit’s moderation was provided by unpaid volunteers, with paid admins only acting as a last resort. I think this is probably still true even after they purged a bunch of mods that were mad Reddit was being enshittifyied. And the official paid admins were notoriously slow at purging some really blatantly over the line content, like the jailbait subreddit or the original donald trump subreddit. So the argument is that Reddit benefited and still benefits heavily from that free moderation and the content itself generated and provided by users is valuable, so acting like all reddit users are simply entitled free riders isn’t true.
In an ideal world, reddit communities could have moved onto a self-hosted or nonprofit service like LiveJournal became Dreamwidth. But it was not a surprise that a money-burning for-profit social media service would eventually try to shake down the users, which is why my Reddit history is a few dozen Old!SneerClub posts while my history on the Internet is much more extensive. The same thing happened with ‘free’ PhpBB services and mailing list services like Yahoo! Groups, either they put in more ads or they shut down the free version.
A point that Maciej Ceglowski among others have made is that the VC model traps services into “spend big” until they run out of money or enshitiffy, and that services like Dreamwidth, Ghost, and Signal offer ‘social-media-like’ experiences on a much smaller budget while earning modest profits or paying for themselves. But Dreamwidth, Ghost, and Signal are never going to have the marketing budget of services funded by someone else’s money, or be able to provide so many professional services gratis. So you have to chose: threadbare security on the open web, or jumping from corporate social media to corporate social media amidst bright lights and loudspeakers telling you what site is the NEW THING.