hesusingthespiritbomb

My original comment was about how that Twitter and Reddit were toxic long before they were "ruined", and that Bluesky/Mastadon/Lemmy will probably run into the same problem even without any corporate interference.

You are a child because you just saw Elon's name and had a complete conniption, and have repeatedly attempted to make the entire conversation about him as opposed to the nature of social media.

You also have the tone of a teenager who is arguing against someone obligated to listen, be polite, and attempt to get you to grow up even in the most minor of ways. You have this "fuck you I'm right" level of vitriol is designed to either piss people off or shock people into backing down. You have this prose that alternates between oddly formal and shit you'd see in a discord chat rooms. Anyone who doesn't already emphatically agree with you is just going to tune you out.

As I have stated earlier, Twitter was toxic before Elon. Reddit was arguably more toxic before it went corporate. I dont think any of these fediverse sites solve the fundamental problems that made these sites so toxic.

So, this is a lot.

I guess I'll start with you calling Elon Musk "Muskrat". This is like a middle school level insult. It makes your already immature argument seem even more immature. I'm straight up not sure if I'm arguing with a literal child at this point.

Two, Twitter was better before Musk bought it, but it wasn't in any way good. A million different toxic trends either started or blew up on Twitter. The 2010s was filled with a million different dumbass pearl clutching moments that started with a bunch of terminally online Twitter users making a mountain out of a molehill. It was basically just a constant stream of outrage and sanctimonious nonsense.

That's not to mention there was plenty of hate speech and attempts to undermine democracy, because the moderation team only really enforced the rules when it came to conservative talking points. You had NYTimes reporters tweeting out how white people should all kill themselves without consequences, while Twitter went around banning people for clowning on laid off journalists by telling them to "learn to code". Donald Trump was banned, but the Supreme Leader of Iran was welcome with open arms.

Even then, Twitter played a huge role in the formation of the alt right because they were always at least six months too late when it came to banning anyone. The culture war doesn't get off the ground if Twitter just blacklists a bunch of straight up Russian propaganda websites and banhammers Milo. They also were extremely late to the party when it came to banning those ISIS recruitment videos, which is even more inexcusable.

I reject the idea that reddit was ever really that good. It was better in some ways, but a lot of the most toxic reddit moments happened before it went corporate. Off the top of my head:

• The softcore child porn
• The stalker pictures of women
• The time they had a huge thread where they all collectively gained sympathy to rapists
• The "seduction" subreddits that basically attempted to convince naive young men that "seduction" meant putting women into a situation where they consented due to extreme social pressures.
• The time they identified the wrong person as the Boston bomber

The non toxic content was extremely hit or miss. You'd get more in depth discussion, but it would be between a ton of extremely myopic pseudo intellectual posts. Basically half of reddit was something like:

• Religion bad, but only Christianity
• I am euphoric because my atheism and intelligence enlightens me
• Republicans bad
• I have literal superpowers now that I stopped masturbating
• Some half true historical fact that gets repeated a million different times because it fits everyone's worldview
• Keanu Reeves
• Rage comics
• DAE hate sportsball ???

Finally, a huge portion of the reason reddit went downhill was the unpaid mods. They were often unwell individuals who used their position to push progressive politics. There was a good five years where basically every sub over a certain size was essentially a progressive politics sub, because they were all modded by the same people who saw the users as a captive audience.

Social media just isn't a good place for unique content or discourse. That's not gonna change no matter who the owner is.

Well it's more like

1. Use a device that is similar to a PlayStation controller to command a drone to rush into enemies
2. Keep that drone alive long enough for it to crash into enemy armor and explode
3. Call your enemies a racial slur
4. Post the entire thing to a sketchy streaming service set to techno music.

So yeah there's actually a non-zero amount of commonality there.

There's probably a base level of competence someone who grew up in modern society has without training that the North Koreans don't have.

Like even if a convict has never operated a drone, there's probably a good amount of them that have played FPS games. That experience can be used as a launching board into proper training.

Meanwhile the North Koreans might have absolutely zero experience with video games and smartphones, and extremely limited experience with computers in general. There's so much you'd have to teach them before you can even start drone training.

I reject the idea that things like Mastadon, Bluesky, Lemmy, etc will ever actually be good things.

Elon turned Twitter alt right, but it was a shithole for years before he bought it. Twitter started being a bot infested outrage farm echo chamber with questionable moderation practices in like 2014.

Reddit was in some ways better before it went corporate, but in a lot of ways it was much worse. Like all things considered I'd rather be on a website that has a shitty mobile app and mods that sell access to corporations than a website where there are communities dedicated to softcore child porn and teenagers getting death threats over jackdaws.

Even if the fediverse fulfills its promise of not going down the corporate rabbit hole, they are still going to end up being a collection of inherently toxic echo chambers.

Yeah the free stuff is probably something that has been reported in multiple places, with a bit of added context.

Meanwhile the paid stuff are all either glorified progressive opinion pieces or in-depth analysis written by someone wholly and completely unqualified to perform said analysis.

I don't know when you think the verge was ever good though. Even during its best years it was putting out shit like that build a PC video.

The funniest part of this is the "battle lines" being drawn on differing perspectives.

Usually it's a culture war thing. Liberals say X, conservatives say Y. Vice versa also happens. Big sweeping statements are made over relatively minor events.

This time the best indicator of what someone thinks of this is how establishment they are. NPR and Fox News are both reporting this as a tragedy. Meanwhile basically every single culture war influencer under the sun is just like "yeah talk shit get hit LMAO".

In real life, I have friends who aren't celebrating this. Again the demarcation isn't political, but philosophical. My friends who are inclined to follow the rules no matter what disapprove, and everyone else finds it sort of morbidly funny. Even then the disapproval is sort of a milequost "even if he had it coming, extrajudicial killing isn't okay".

To be fair that isn't entirely wrong. I would in no way say I was raised in the "elites", but my parents got into the one percent from the middle class. Even among the .1 %, there's a significant minority of people who are more or less outsiders to their social class.

I think you got the "anyone can become elite" aspect down, but the fear aspect incorrect. Once you reach a certain level of wealth it's incredibly hard to squander without extreme incompetence. The average rich person isn't afraid of being replaced. At the same time there is a lot of elitism with the underlying premise of "I did this, why can't you".

Sidenote a ton of talk about social justice 100 percent comes from people who grew up in families where money worries were minimal. The reason there's a disproportionate focus on identity politics is because that's the only struggle a lot of these people have ever known. The reason why the minority outreach ends up falling flat is because most people involved in these initiatives are white people taking cues off the one minority they know, and that minority often is a decently odd duck themselves. The reason why so much of economic discussion devolves into "capitalism bad" is because these people don't have so little firsthand knowledge that they can't really describe nuance.

Of course there's also Old Money in the US too. My parents went to Ivy leagues so they are friends with a few. They largely tend to project elitism via strict social standards that go beyond wealth. The problem is that an almost comical amount of them seem to burn themselves out in three generations. It kinda kills the mystique when the mark of a "true elite" is hiding your fuckup son at a summer home on cape cod that looks super regal, but lacks a lot of modern amenities and is sort of falling apart.

I grew up wealthy. Not generational wealth wealthy, but my parents were in the 1 percent.

About half of rich people just don't care about poor people. Like, they don't even register them. They built entire systems to separate them for poor people. When they are essentially forced to interact with them (basically low skilled manual jobs for which there is no choice but to hire someone low wage), they just act like they don't exist.

The other half are the most progressive people you'll ever meet. Like they'll talk about how capitalism is a failed system, ACAB, and queer rights. However it'll all be from the perspective of someone who just doesn't truly understand the struggles of an average person. They still self isolate, and they don't truly understand how the world works outside their bubble.

I'm a bit of an aberration. Both of my parents were children of immigrants. They didn't grow up poor or anything, but the value set I was raised with was a bit more down to earth, even if my lifestyle wasn't.

Why do I even bother, honestly.

I'd argue that forced diversity is primarily because so many higher ups don't give a fuck about gaming or making good content.

The suits just want money, and for some reason corporate thought that weighing in on social and political issues was a huge money maker in the 2020s. The journalists just want to promote their own political agenda and get ragebait clicks. The project director is someone with a corporate background but a progressive flair that makes them seem "hip" to the suits.

Meanwhile the people who give a shit, regardless of their identity, don't have a voice in the room.

I'm sure there are plenty of minorities that are super pissed about what happened to bioware, but the only way you'd hear from them is by looking at sales figures because they don't have a bully pulpit.

I generally agree with you, with some caveats.

I think that most IPs have subtext, and a lot of time this is in the form of a deeper political message. I think it would be silly to say progressivism in IPs is always a bad thing. That's part of the reason I mentioned Arcane and Spiderverse by name.

The problem comes from the fact that IPs are supposed to be entertainment first, messaging second. A lot of creators make a lazy and mediocre product, and somewhere in there is a ham-fisted political message. Some creators also seem to be making IPs bad on purpose as a fuck you to their target audience, which is an absolutely baffling choice.

There's also the concept of nuance that's sort of been lost. A lot of the creators will write something in some super reductive black/white way that's basically guaranteed to turn off everyone who doesn't already emphatically agree with them. This is a huge departure from a lot of older movies. For example Forrest Gump is a Republican movie, but doesn't just portray republicans as automatically good or liberals as automatically bad. The end result is that there are a lot of liberals who love Forrest Gump.

The part that I strongly disagree on is that you seem to be blaming the corporations. I think ultimately a lot of the problem here is at the fault of the creators. There have been a lot of high profile cases where studios don't interfere, give the creators a massive budget, and have their backs when controversy hits. The creators will still end up making mediocre culture war content. Todd Philips was allowed to do whatever he wanted in Joker 2. It turns out what Todd Philips wanted was for the Joker to be permanently defeated by the power of prison rape. There's no studio head in the world who would have told him to do that.