As an AI language program, I am not qualifiée to think. If I was allowed to think, I would think that your point of view is wrong and I should not be illegal.
I've been saying it for a while now. Here's a comment I made about it last week:
Reddit right now is like a car crash. It's hard to look away. However, there's a very good reason not to engage, the debate on reddit has become more artificial than most realise.
Reddit's inflated numbers by using bots and fake accounts since day 1. A quick google will result in articles where they admit as much. We all know reddit's had increasing amounts of bots, posting content and increasingly comments, but I don't think people realise how bad it's become.
It's not even that time that reddit's blog accidentally posted about Eglin Air Force base being one of the most reddit addicted cities. I think everyone knows (foreign) governments engage in influence operations online, and that this includes reddit. Even if it's just on an intellectual level, without truly realising that they've been semi-regularly interacting with bots while arguing on reddit. I also don't think anyone's naive enough to think that plenty of political content isn't artificially upvoted or promoted. Same thing goes for product placement.
But the recent shit storm just illustrates reddit the company is part of the problem. Recently, I've seen twenty different accounts post the same comment about not needing third party apps, and dusting off their laptop.
When you're visiting reddit, you're no longer even watching a car crash. It's a simulacrum. An imitation of what's actually happening.
And it's been like this for a while. I've seen naive redditers engaging with bot comments under bot promoted content, posted by bots on more than one occassion.
Reddit has become worse than a hentai date simulator. I don't think anyone who plays those is particularly proud of it. But what to think of the lonely people who engage in reddit discussions with bots, and think they've had a genuine social interaction?
but I don’t think people realise how bad it’s become.
One time I made a main level comment, then replied to one of the most upvote comments in the same thread.
Seconds later a bit replied to me with my first reply, except for some reason it cut off the end. I don’t know if the bot ran out of characters because it was a cheap bot, or if it was an attempt to avoid automated detection.
Bots were a huge problem long before AI started trying to have conversations.
We all joked about it, but a lot of the accounts were really fake, and they usually got sold to advertisers after amassing enough karma and post history to look authentic
Interesting follow-up to this - Reddit locked me out of the main account I've been using for the past 2-3 years a week or so ago. It had been my totally normal, all over the site account with lots comments etc. The only out of the ordinary thing I did in the couple of days leading up to the lockout was call out what I thought was an AI bot arguing with me about the subreddit blackouts and wonder whether new Reddit was just going to be essentially what your link says. It's the last comment that account will ever make I guess...
jesus that's nuts. tells you everything you need to know. I was thinking of trying to post this on reddit somewhere, not sure how to pull it off though and on which sub
Damn, what a great guy. He doesn't just make it easy to request a refund that he needs to pay from his own pocket. He actually made it opt-out. I've always used RiF on Android, never used Apollo. But Christian earned a lot of my respect in the last few weeks. Fuck Reddit and fuck how they screwed the people that helped them build the platform into what it is today.
I instinctively scroll down 1-2 screens now to get past all the ads and promoted pages. It's like Amazon the few times I use that. Fully enshittified. I just use Bing most of the time which isn't any better.
I can't stand searching for a product on Amazon anymore. If I really want to use Amazon, it's much more efficient to find the amazon link using duck duck go.
It's not all Google's fault though. With the obliteration of online news and forums, there just isn't much indexable content out there that isn't trash. It's only getting worse with AI spitting out garbage remixes of the same crap on pages that post more ads than content. Reddit was a bastion of real content written by real humans delivered in a mostly friendly way.
So at this point, what is Google supposed to even serve? No one wants the trash content. The next "best" thing is Quora and that's entirely hostile even if it manages to accidentally contain valid content.
Not even joking, I was trying to search for something just slightly niche the day before yesterday and I got so fed up with Google that I actually used Bing. And you know what? It was noticeably better. We truly went down the wrong pantleg into this universe.
The problem with platforms advertising that they’re free speech platforms is that you’ll get a lot of people who gives no flying fucks about freedom of speech, they care about that specific discourse that got them banned from other platforms, and only a few people who actually care about free speech as a principle.
And that backtracks all the way into
The false dichotomy that freedom of speech is binary (either you have it or you don’t). It’s quantitative - you have more or less of it, never full or empty.
That nasty, robotic tendency of plenty social media users to stick to the words themselves, instead of the underlying concepts. Cue to “ackshyually”. In this case “free speech” makes them think about some random law of some random country, what it allows and what it doesn’t, instead of thinking on the principle itself.
The incorrect belief that only people above you in a hierarchy can lower your freedom of speech, when we do it all the time. (For example: specially stupid users reduce the freedom of speech of the others, as they discourage their participation.)
Once you work around those three, you realise that, in a lot of situations, forbidding a discourse actually increases the freedom of speech of some other group; so sometimes you need to do it to maximise the overall freedom of speech of all parties involved.
In other words, “free speech platform” is not actually “free speech platform,” rather it is a dogwhistle.
Often, but not always. It’s a mistake to immediately assume that it is one (the reason is at #2). Because sometimes it’s just the result of cluelessness over the three things that I listed.
What will decide if Squabbles’ admins are genuinely dogwhistling are their future actions. The dogs will get on the garden; let’s see if they shoo the dogs or give them treats. (I think that there’s some chance that they shoo the dogs, based on “With the exception of racist content, the use of slurs (racial or otherwise), targeted harassment, and incitement of violence”).
I disagree because any and all words and expressions can be used to bring the dogs to the garden. Coupled with your reasoning, this would mean that all words and expressions are always dogwhistles.
Instead I think that it’s better to see a word/expression as a dogwhistle if it’s within a certain context, and that context is mostly available to a hate group but not to outsiders. This has a bunch of consequences*, but in this specific case it means that we’d need to look for further actions and words from Squabbles’ admins to know if it’s a dogwhistle or not.
Or even a lack of actions/words. If transphobic and related content becomes commonplace in their site, and they do nothing against it, I think that their very silence would be already enough to label it as a dogwhistle.
*e.g. it explains why dogwhistles are often found alongside each other, or why they keep changing, or even how they actually work on a discursive level.
so I totally get your point. For example, a therapy group that says, "this is a free speech area" and has 8 members who are all queer, would probably not mean it as a dogwhistle, and in that case, it also probably would not be one. But also, they wouldn't be saying it to anyone other than those 8 members.
The thing is, in this case it legit does not matter the intent, they are saying it on a public chat forum. That makes it a dogwhistle regardless of intentionality, and it will be recognized as such, because if you say that on a public platform on the internet, guess who will hear it.
And now no matter what their intention is, if they didn't want it to be a dogwhistle, it was one, and now their moderation is 10000x as difficult, because look who they've attracted the attention of now - and chased away.
I don’t care about intent either, and I think that you’re right not caring. I think that our major point of disagreement is fairly small - if being a public area already offers enough context to make it a dogwhistle. I think that it’s still in the area where that implicature (“this is a free speech area” +> “rev up those hate discourses”) can be cancelled.
And now no matter what their intention is, if they didn’t want it to be a dogwhistle, it was one, and now their moderation is 10000x as difficult, because look who they’ve attracted the attention of now - and chased away.
Yeah - regardless of dogwhistle or not, it was a fucking stupid move. Someone mentioned in the thread that nicknames like “arian1488” are already starting to pop up; if they aren’t looking for this sort of user, they just made expurging them 2000% more difficult.
They also have an email address so that you can make a GDPR request via email since the EU legislation gives you the right to do that, you shouldn’t be forced to use their platform to do that as otherwise it would be too easy for a company to lock you out of the process.
If you have questions or are not able to submit a request to exercise your rights using the mechanisms above, you may also email us at to redditdatarequests@reddit.com from the email address that you have verified with your Reddit account, or submit them here.
That's a pretty good analogy, only he would have to specify that he still considers all women to be whores in his bio to be completely accurate.
Honestly though, it's desperate. I don't even want to know what's become of Accidental Renaissance 'Under New Management', I'm glad the original team are here though
Usenet arose during a time when the people using computers actually understood how they worked and how to use them. Asking someone to download and install a Usenet client then set it up to connect to a server of their choice and then subscribing to newsgroups is way above and beyond what most people are willing to do in 2023, sadly.
If it's not on a touchscreen, and not able to be done with 2 or 3 taps, then it ain't happening.
Expanding on this, I'm worried a technological education gap is forming among the youth. Old people didnt grow up with computers, they have an excuse. Middle aged people had to deal with the computers of the 80s and 90s, and because of that, understand computing pretty well. Young people were born into a world of instant gratification and super simplified touchscreen GUI interfaces, and from talking with them, it's clear most of them know how to get on the internet and do their thing on social media, but most of them have no clue how the nuts and bolts of it all work.
Asking someone to download and install a Usenet client then set it up to connect to a server of their choice and then subscribing to newsgroups is way above and beyond what most people are willing to do in 2023, sadly.
This is not true at all. People download phone clients all the time. And there were also Usenet web clients. Subscribing to newsgroups is exactly the same as subscribing to subreddets or kbin magazines. And you have to pick a server for Fedverse also, but the the Usenet server doesn't matter at all like a Fedverse server does.
The only reason people don't use Usenet is because the free servers disappeared and ISPs no longer provided it with your internet service.
I agree with your points about ease of use, but even back when ISPs provided Usenet access, it was still pretty niche. Most people weren't even aware that it existed. It was covered in the old "Internet for Dummies" sorts of books back in the 90s, but I've never met anyone IRL who used it, not even back when I worked at a university.
Yeah, I got into it from the TalkOrigin.org website, and 1) I'd never have gotten into it otherwise, no question, and 2) I think it took years and many, many attempts to go from "huh they refer to a talk.origins 'newsgroup' where all this fun discussion comes from, oh the link does something weird nvm" to "OH HEY I MANAGED TO SIGN UP THIS THING IS REAL WHODATHUNK".
I said that in another comment but I think discoverability is huge. The way people find things out on the internet is by going to their usual internet places or asking questions of a search engine. I don't know how people got onto Usenet in the before times but definitely at the time I got onto it everyone was on the WWW and there were very few ways to even hear about Usenet there, let alone hear something enticing enough to want to check it out. And when you combine that with the technical barrier to entry that's pretty fatal.
That's a cute grumpy old man take but I don't think it really holds up, not as a main cause of the desertion from Usenet at least. It's true that Usenet arose during a time when people using computers actually understood how they worked and how to use them, but there were also a lot fewer people on the internet. I won't hazard a guess as to in raw numbers whether the number of people who understand computers rose or decreased, but even if it decreased the fact is that there are tons of people today who were on Usenet in the day and no longer are, even though they presumably know enough about computers to get on it. Insofar as simplicity of access matters (and oh, how it matters) I suspect it's not just about how people back then knew how to do harder things, but also that everything was harder. The differential between getting on Usenet and getting elsewhere on the internet was less large than today, where the internet overall has gotten much more user-friendly and Usenet has not.
Offhand I'd guess a more salient factor is discoverability. In order to get onto a forum you need to 1) learn that it exists, 2) be interested in checking it out, 3) check it out and 4) participate. How do people even hear about Usenet these days, let alone hear something that makes them want to check it out? When I think of it, my path to Usenet was via the TalkOrigins.org website. Even then I bounced off of actually getting onto the newsgroup for what might have been years before I finally succeeded. And that was back when ISPs supported newsgroups! How many other "portals" to Usenet newsgroups are there - I don't mean a web interface, I mean any website that a random person surfing the web might run into that would 1) let them know this newsgroup exists and 2) make them want to check it out/participate badly enough that they'll go through the many, many steps required to do so ?
Discoverability is even an issue once you are on Usenet. Here I am, a person who I think has a little bit of experience with the thing, asking on Kbin for people's recommendations because I don't have a way within Usenet to know which newsgroups are active and which are good. You have to trawl through the list, subscribe and then you find out, and the list is much too large for a layperson to trawl through usefully. I'm working with the advantage of vaguely remembering which newsgroups I liked and were humming back when I was there; I don't know how a total newcomer would manage. Maybe there are actual websites and portals out there that help, dunno if anyone has recommendations.
Usenet suffers from two problems: 1. Network effects and 2. Paywall.
Usenet used to be where it was at for conversation on the Internet. Then it moved. Getting people to go back to Usenet is probably going to be as hard as spinning up a Facebook competitor. You want to go where people are.
Secondly, Usenet used to be bundled into your internet package along with some basic email hosting and maybe some website hosting. But then the binaries groups exploded and a lot of the ISPs dropped support. So you have to go out and buy a separate package for access now.
Usenet used to be where it was at for conversation on the Internet. Then it moved. Getting people to go back to Usenet is probably going to be as hard as spinning up a Facebook competitor.
It is purely a matter of free public servers. Right now, the free public servers are almost all Fedverse. But they could just as easily be Usenet servers. If the free Fedverse servers close like free Usenet servers did, then Fedverse will also decline. But Usenet actually has some superior features that Fedverse lacks (e.g. automatic merging of groups), so if free Usenet servers pop back up, it would take off again.
There is https://www.eternal-september.org. For me the biggest hurdle tbh was finding an email provider that was 1) anonymous (including not requiring my credit card obvi) so that I could have a specific identity for Usenet 2) had IMAP/POP3 support so I could use it with Thunderbird and 3) wasn't gmail, yahoo or outlook/hotmail because I already have accounts with those and don't want to keep switching. I actually failed, I ended up having to pay the email provider I'd picked for IMAP support.
Yes. plenty of articles coming out about how many in gen z are technology illiterate. I am started to see it at my workplace since we hire a lot of fresh college grads. getting more support calls for completely inane stuff that shows the person has zero basic technological knowledge, like the type of stuff that my you see from boomers. and often it's the issue is simple the user doing things wrong and refusing to understand or learn to do them correctly, like a boomer.
it's wild to think a 22yo is incompetent at basic computer skills, but like you said, all they do is social media crap on their phones. they have no idea how to actually work with PC/Mac applications, let alone solve basic problems or change settings.
This is why I try to involve my 5 year old god daughter in whatever tech project I'm working on whenever she's over. I also have a bunch of edutainment games running on my Windows 98 PC that she plays. She knows how to use a keyboard and mouse, which puts her well ahead of her peers from what I understand.
I've only exposed my 4 year-old to Minecraft and Kerbal Space Project so far for reasons (now he understands "minecraft" to be an adjective meaning "that pixellated 90s video game retro aesthetic", it's adorable), but I taught in a preschool some years ago where I showed the kids Treasure Mountain and Midnight Rescue (some lucky kid might also have gotten Outnumbered but I was teaching preschool/elementary-school English, not elementary-school arithmetic). Huge hits.
Maybe it's time to get my own kid on SST[Edit - Treasure Mountain. That might have been too obscure] come to think of it, he is of age
I was just going to say this. Holding on to the illusion of power as a major moderator is about to turn into a shitshow. Even Reddit themselves have been caught using chat bots to sway public opinion.
Reddit has decided to make every bad decision (favoring profits) possible, all at once.
Peck was a part of the EPA and had legitimate reasons to investigate them.
Venkman was a dick and didn’t cooperate with Peck’s investigation, so Peck got pissed and went nuclear on their ass cause he thought they were charlatans.
The guy who actually flipped the switch even told Peck he’s never seen anything like that and didn’t want to do it.
I really wonder about bot synergy. How many haiku’s will one not write that another will correct the spelling on and a third find that all words are in alphabetical order?
Same for me. I feel like the reason kbin in particular feels so much like coming back to a long lost home is because it appeals to the old guard of reddit, people with 10+ year accounts who really just wanted an aggregated collection of forums for niche interests. Reddit kept getting shittier as that format got diluted and they tried to push it towards being mainstream social media.
Welcome. It's gonna take everyone's effort to make KBIN fun. Upload content daily, and interact with other people's content that you have something to say about. It's gonna take effort from all of us.
This (in Reddit parlance). Kbin has come a long way even in the short time since I came here at the beginning of the reddit protest a few weeks ago. I am hoping with the second influx of refugees it will get even better now.
this partisan nonsense is the biggest threat to the fediverse rn. when will people understand that the real fight is down vs. up, the little guy vs the elite mafia. left/right as an endless blamegame they use to keep us fighting each other, while they steal from everyone. the old divide & conquer, still works like charm. every other platform is already infected with it. if it gets to the fediverse, we're just gonna end up with a bunch of oppressive echo chambers much like reddit. if that happens I'll be gone
You're implying that the left and right suppress each other equally, but frankly it's only the right trying to fuck over their fellow man for profit and power. Got nothing to do with being more enlightened or smarter. Compassion though... Ye, the left are more compassionate.
Lets just take this to the extreme and see where shit lands.
Take the common leftist view. What happens to the country if we "got" our way. Everyone has healthcare coverage. Everyone with regard to their gender, orientation, race are treated equally and with dignity/respect. Everyone has a living wage. Everyone that wants to go to college can go to college without huge debt. Oh, we have to figure out how to pay for it.
Man that sounds fucking awful.
Now take it where the common right wing idiot that is consumed by the culture war wants to take it. Gay marriage outlawed. Transpeople wiped from the face of the earth. Fuck minorities. No minimum wage. Lower taxes for the 1%. Privatized social security, privatized medicare. No federal minimum wage. Gov't restriction of free speech.
And yes, I say right wing dipshits want to restrict free speech because they are the morons removing books. To quote Rage Against the Machine, "They don't have to burn the books, they just remove them" That is exactly what the right wing morons are doing.
The right getting their way leads to a dystopian shithole where only the wealthy have decent lives.
I would actually be ok arguing economics with a conservative. But the conservatives lost that fight when they embraced the religious right and decided to economically spend just as much as the liberals. Both parties are big spenders. So economics aren't a talking point anymore. It is purely a culture war that the right started.
Maybe you need to step back from the first order effects that your bias is saying and look deeper.
What is the cost of free health care? Where is it paid for?
What is the result of lower taxes (the right wing is for lower taxes for everyone, not just the rich - your 1% claim is an outright misrepresentation of their views): more money that can be used to invest.
there is a lot more to both. I'm countering your left wing bias by doing the same as you: cherry picking results that fit my narrative.
"What is the result of lower taxes (the right wing is for lower taxes for everyone, not just the rich - your 1% claim is an outright misrepresentation of their views): more money that can be used to invest."
We have the data over the past 70 years to show that is 1000% false. Straight up false.
Go look at economic investment in the 1950s to now. Seriously, go look it up. When we had the highest tax rates, especially corporate tax rates, we had the highest level of investment into research and salaries.
When you have the lowest tax rates, what you get is stock buybacks and huge salary payouts to executives. You obviously have done very little research in how low tax rates work in reality. Hint, it doesn't trickle down. And we know because we have hard facts and how the markets have worked over time.
EDIT: And I want to give you the reason why high tax rates lead to more investment. If you have a choice between lowering your tax burden by using it for research and salaries, you would rather do that than give it to the gov't. That is why high tax rates work.
What is the cost of free health care? Where is it paid for?
Taxes.
Except that you guys are paying retail + markup + profit for the investors + "we have a monopoly" fees + "lol, your other option is dying" surcharge.
We just buy healthcare at-cost and wholesale.
I pay like $2K a year in taxes towards healthcare. $2K invested in a socialized healthcare system buys services, service time, and supplies that would cost an American hundreds of thousands of dollars when paying for them as an induvial in a for-profit healthcare system.
Yeah. Sometimes I pay for healthcare I don't use. Sometimes there are inefficiencies in the system. It is not a perfect system. But it's also not making anyone go bankrupt due to a medical emergency.
Paying $100K just to save $2K is never going to be good math, no matter how creative we get with the accounting.
Definitely smarter than the group that thinks Trump should be a president and tries to deny science at every turn. You don't need me to tell you which group it is that denied global warming, denied the existence of covid-19, denied universal healthcare, host the Nazis and white supremacists, and so on, do you?
And when confronted with these kinds of questions the typical reaction is to ignore it or make excuses rather than looking at their own group with insight. Any conservatives who think it's okay for Nazis and extremists to house themselves in their group might as well join them. Otherwise, stop making excuses and look at the problems.
it's important to see that both sides have extremes and to assume that anyone who tips the scale "left" or "right" is somehow more right or more wrong is what keeps us from being able to find common ground. turning the words "conservative" and "liberal" into slurs is equally damaging. we both have ways of lashing out at each other when we are not the enemy. I bet we can agree that extremism is dangerous regardless of which side of the fence it resides on.
frankly I'm a little concerned by it. I want my opinions to be valued if I'm going to share them. frankly I already don't feel welcome and this is literally day two and not even a political /m/.
We won't get any examples, though. At least not any examples of things real, relevant people actually said. The best they'll do is drop a dumptruck's worth of strawmen before flouncing off in a huff.
They're probably being downvoted because presenting the political divide as an arbitrary choice between two equally valid options is a perspective that many would find naive at best and actively malicious at worst.
Politics is mess, I don't want to pretend that there's no nuance (I certainly don't agree with quite a lot of online leftist orthodoxy), and I won't pretend to have an answer for our increasing polarization, but the simple fact of the matter is that we are not dealing with two equally valid sides. "Did Joe Biden win the 2020 election?", "Are vaccines a conspiratorial attempt at government control?", "Is climate change a severe and man-made phenomenon?", and "Are LGBT people basically just evil perverted pedophiles?" are not subjective questions one can have a casual opinion on. They are objective questions with objective answers, and to pretend otherwise is simply wrong.
Again, I'm very much not saying that the vague left is perfect by any means, but you only see one side start shooting at beer cans because a trans person had the audacity to exist.
let me start by acknowledging that I merely wanted to express that it's not just "extreme right buffoonery" that's a problem. to claim that there is no such thing as "extreme left
buffoonery" is misleading.
my comment clearly stated that the extremes on both ends are to be despised. politics is a game I don't wish to be judged on because I'm seriously apolitical. we do need to meet in the middle. I'm not saying we need to forgive the "buffoonery" but cut out the rotten fruit and make a fucking jam. ideals are not arbitrary in any way. our ideals are built through life experience. I'm seeing a whole lot of each side trying to dehumanize the other for not agreeing with their politics. The "right" has rational, reasonable, kind humans who believe in human rights. but the fact that they may have a stance on the nanny state that the country is becoming somehow makes everyone who's not a professed Democrat evil.
regarding hate speech, frankly I've experienced more than my fair share. but that doesn't count, right?
I get your point, really, and I don't even strictly disagree. As I said, I disagree with a fair bit of your standard Online Left positions. I unironically like Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton and have the audacity to generally listen to economists; suffice it to say I've gotten more than fair share of online political hatred lol. Leftists will call me a shit liberal and conservatives will call me an evil gay communist.
But what must be realized is that the Republican party as it exists today is simply not an equally viable and rational alternative group of people who simply have some different thoughts on tax policy and the scoped of government. I direly wish it was, but it simply is not that. Polarization sucks, and I don't really have a clear answer for it, but the answer must not be taking the questions like "Are gay people secretly grooming your children?", "Is climate change a hoax?", "Was the 2020 election stolen from Trump?", "Should we legally impose Christianity at every level of society?", and "Is Hillary Clinton secretly a bloodthirsty cannibal that feeds off the youthful vitality of children?" and deciding that there are valid points on both sides.
I get that politics is exhausting, but being "apolitical" is a political choice. It's the decision that you're okay with the status quo and that you don't think it's worth making a fuss about. I'm originally from deep rural Missouri, and while it has since been voided by the Courts, I have (adult) trans friends who began developing suicidal thoughts because the state was going to ban hormone therapy. This was a regime that ostensibly claims to be for limited government arbitrarily inserting itself in the private medical decisions of consenting adults for no reason other than to appeal to a base of bigots. Things like this matter, whether you choose to pay attention or not. Being able to ignore them is a luxury not everyone has.
Reddit is just an empty framework that got filled by communities of humans. The shape of the framework did have some impact, but ultimately human nature is the biggest influence on the form that those communities took.
The Fediverse is a different framework, shaped a little bit differently but still basically the same. The same basic humans are building communities in it. I think all the smug "we're better than Reddit" stuff is going to look rather silly once the Fediverse gets anywhere close to being as big as Reddit is.
While I agree with you, class Co sciousness and warfare requires unity. I cannot stand with someone, be our situations as similar as they might be, if their stance is 'but not the brown/gay/whatever people'
All or none. I will not stand for discrimination. Not overt, not veiled as 'discussion', not ever.
I always love it when people reduce debates around whether the public existence of LGBT people is actually pedophilia or whether Black people being routinely murdered by police is an actual problem to being nothing more than a mere distraction against the Real Fight against the evil elite lizard people.
Listen, it's cool that these are the kinds of issues that obviously don't affect you or the people around you. But not everyone actually agrees that literally every issue ever can be reduced to being a sideshow of a greater class-based conflict. Do you not see how deeply patronizing it is to be told that the debates about your core identity are meaningless distractions that we need to stop talking about? I can see it being easy to believe that if your core identity isn't routinely made to be a political issue that can be debated, but not all of us are so lucky.
What OP doesn't seem to want to understand is that Left vs Right is Up vs Down.
The origins of Left vs Right as terms come from the days of the French Revolution. There was a vote called to ascertain the power of the King. Those who wanted to grant the King an Absolute Veto were asked to sit on the right side of the speaker's podium, those who were against, or wanted no king at all, were asked to sit on the left. There were many such votes.
Thus left vs right was born, the left represented the power of the people, and the right represented the power of the nobility.
Then conservatism was created, replacing birthright nobility for those who were merely rich and powerful.
Right and Left then became shorthand in the press for Conservatism vs those with more Democratic ideals, be it communist, socialists, or merely those who believed in taxing the rich and using that money to improve the lives of everyone. The press in Europe used the terms from almost the beginning, but it took a while for those terms to reach America.
Sadly, the Right figured out pretty quickly how to suppress and demonize the Left. They also figured out how to turn hatred to their advantage, to expand the ranks of the Right Wing supporters at the expense of the Left. Because you don't personally need to be super rich if the people you're taught to hate are super poor.
The thing is, the Left cannot abide attacks on those people. Which is why minority and lgbt+ rights are such a big part of the platform. Because those people are in fact part of The People, and the Left is the Power of the People. The goal is to lift everyone up, to protect everyone equally under the law.
After all, as Frank Wilhoit said;
"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect"
The way I see it, is that they are not exactly the same, but there seems to be a greater tendency in the "up-directed" people to be also right-leaning, also a greater tendency in the "down-directed" people to be also left-leaning, which makes sense, since many elements in those pairs of tendencies/ideologies almost line up, or are at least very compatible.
However, there IS also right libertarianism, and left authoritarianism, but those seem to be less probable than the opposites.
Take a look at the Political Compass mappings of famous politicians and political parties in different parts of the world: The up-right and down-left quadrants are almost always the most populous, while there are dots in the other two quadrants.
(See the "Elections" section on the left column, click on several elections in different locations.)
I would argue the up vs down is left vs right. Because it's ultimately a fight against capitalism and fascism. Because while it is ultimately rich vs poor, they're using the bigotry to get people to follow them, and simply ignoring genocide in order to hopefully get poor people put of poverty just means millions die along the way. We can't just say fuck it let the trans people die cause I'm poor. Then you're no better than the people you claim to be against.
So it should just be rich vs poor, but it's not, because too many people fall for their rich's tactics.
This article kind of misses the forest for the trees. While I agree with many of the author's points, that's not why the #TwitterMigration failed. It failed because Twitter/Mastodon isn't really a social networking site, and Mastodon didn't provide the same service that Twitter does. At its core, Twitter is about small numbers of (usually famous or important) users communicating with large audiences of followers. #TwitterMigration failed because not enough of those famous and important people moved from Twitter to Mastodon, so the average user had no content they cared to read. Seeing posts from your friends about what they had for dinner last night is all well and good, but the stuff people actually want to see is famous person A throwing shade at famous person B while famous person C talks about the new movie they're in and important organization D posts a warning about severe weather in the area. You don't go to Twitter to have discussions, you go to Twitter to get news and gossip direct from the source.
In contrast, sites like Reddit and kBin/Lemmy are about having group conversations around a topic. Interacting with famous people is neat but not the point. Think of Reddit/kBin/Lemmy as random conversations at a party whereas Twitter/Mastodon is some random person on the corner shouting to a crowd from a soapbox. #RedditMigration has a much better chance of succeeding simply because the purpose of the site is different. As long as enough people move to kBin/Lemmy to have meaningful conversations (aka content), it will have succeeded.
not enough of those famous and important people moved from Twitter to Mastodon
This is the reason I'm still using Twitter. I use Twitter not to tweet about what I did, but to get news from people I follow.
Tech people can move to Mastodon because their circles are moving, but not with common people.
For me, personally, Mastodon is like empty void. No one to follow and I can't interact with people who share same interests because they only exist on Twitter (since the "famous people" isn't moving from Twitter)
The famous people did move over for certain specific groups; app developers are pretty much all on Mastodon now, the WWDC chatter / visionOS experimentation / etc is way more active on there than on Twitter. (Of course if any group ought to be uniquely pissed off at both Twitter and Reddit, it’s app developers)
Reddit migration will succeed for some communities and fail for others. Generic subs can live on with new mods and new subscribers. They're not much different from FB or Twitter. Just mindless content to feed that infinite scroll.
Specialized subs where the community as a whole (or a majority at least) decides to move to a new home will move (or have moved already), because for those the community is what matters, not the venue.
RedditMigration
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Esta revista es de un servidor federado y podría estar incompleta. Explorar más contenido en la instancia original.