SJ_Zero

SJ_Zero, hace 11 meses

For real, at some point you gotta go “bored now!” And actually do something.

SJ_Zero, hace 11 meses

Yeah, something productive!

SJ_Zero, hace 11 meses

Yes, even among the different options there’s a lot of diversity. Lemmy, lotide, friendica, kbin, they can all do things similar to reddit.

SJ_Zero, hace 11 meses

Nice!

A short but very nice article, and some good discussion about meta that isn’t just “press the ban button”. It’s important to note that threads and Lemmy probably won’t have much to do with each other since it’s a Twitter clone.

One big thing is what I always say: decentralization is strength. Spread out over different instances and start your own instances or what happened on Twitter will just happen again.

SJ_Zero, hace 1 año

Even among people who like trump, there are plenty of people who know that he lost the election.

Even if Biden cheated (and I’m not saying he did), people who cheat to win elections are called the winner of the election. Laws tend to fine campaigns for cheating rather than changing the outcome of the election.

As an example where a campaign was fined for malfeasance during a campaign, the Clinton campaign was fine for misbehavior in the 2016 election related to the steele dossier politico.com/…/dnc-clinton-campaign-fine-dossier-…

However, although that example was of a losing campaign, up in my home country of Soviet canuckistan, several election cycles ago the conservative Stephen Harper government was fined for election fraud, and that’s all that happened. They were officially in charge and they stayed that way until the election of Justin Trudeau in 2015.

Typically, lawmakers want election issues to be dealt with by the electorate, they’re extremely extremely wary about stepping in and changing elections on their own.

While we’re on the topic though, I would like to remind everybody that it is extremely typical for the losing side of an election to claim that the other side cheated. In 2000, there were plenty of people pointing out fuckiness in the supreme Court decision that ended George W. Bush the election, and in 2004 election machines were singled out as a potential method of cheating by the Democrats when John Kerry lost the presidential election, and in 2016 there were lots of cries saying that there was election interference that led to the election of Donald Trump.

SJ_Zero, hace 1 año

You think so?

Seems like an awfully high effort post to be just a troll. Maybe it’s just that other people don’t have the same views as you do.

SJ_Zero, hace 1 año

You mean like a whole aside about accusations of trolling?

I guess I’ll take your advice.

SJ_Zero, hace 1 año

I will fully admit that I went to some of those alternatives, and left because I’m just not interested in seeing extreme hate for people I don’t actually hate.

I think the difference right now is that the people being driven off of Twitter aren’t just the lunatic fringe, it’s a lot of normal people.

Tmi, but when I was young my parents got a divorce, and so I end up in a situation where I was walking on eggshells because if I said the wrong thing to either one of them it would cause a civil war and I would have to deal with consequences of that. I ended up constantly watching every single word that I said, and it was really bad for me. It wasn’t until much later on in life that I realized that I could open up to people and I wouldn’t get in trouble when they saw who I was. For that reason, I’m extremely sensitive to free speech issues. Not because I want to go off and hate on anyone, but because I’m here to explore ideas, and sometimes when you’re exploring ideas you have to step away from the orthodoxy. I don’t want to go back to those days where I was carefully calculating every word to make sure I didn’t piss somebody off and start a civil war.

On the other hand, a lot of the people who left don’t have my story, and they left because they weren’t able to talk shit about Jews anymore. And because of that, not only did freedom of speech get a bad name but those websites weren’t really very nice to be on. If you’re being totally honest, you ended up with the exact same problem because instead of watching out if you are starting to criticize a minority, you have to start watching out if you are about to praise a minority. The world is a complicated place you might have to do both you, you know?

So I think it’s a good thing that finally the spaces are starting to get filled up by people who yearn for freedom, not so they can be a jerk but because they just want to be free to be themselves and to do so using the tools that they desire.

SJ_Zero, hace 1 año

It was pretty clear to me, that’s why I stopped going.

It was getting toxic a long while back, but I was ok with that – I just deleted my account every few months so I wouldn’t get doxxed. But then I started to realize 2 things: First, many subreddits wouldn’t even let you post without a minimum amount of karma. Second, many subreddits would downvote you into oblivion for any sort of wrongthink.

Don’t get me wrong, I know I’m a wierdo and I have some bad takes sometimes, but you put bad takes out there to put them in the fire and then you get to see they’re bad or you hammer them until they’re good. But in the echo chamber, there was only one answer: Obey.

So I left for greener pastures.

SJ_Zero, hace 1 año

BEEP BOOP I DISAGREE WE SHOULD PROTECT THEM WHAT ARE YOU ANTI ROBOT OR SOMETHING? BEEP BOOP

SJ_Zero, hace 1 año

Ngl, “brand safety” is a pretty dangerous idea. That’s where tech companies start to get a justification to fiddle with speech.

SJ_Zero, hace 1 año

“No nazis or bigots” is a nice slogan, but if people turn off our brains and turn off our humanity and just start mindlessly chanting slogans that justify the punishing of our enemies, then there’s no difference between us and the typical German in 1938.

It doesn’t take a lot to end up in a bad place if we think we’re purely good and in the right and our enemy is purely evil.

SJ_Zero, hace 1 año

That’s a fair point.

SJ_Zero, hace 1 año

Are you familiar with the Salem witch trials, the werewolf trials in France in the 1500s and 1600s and the Satanic Panic of the late 80s and early 90s? Those people thought they were morally justified in anything they did against the accused because they were fighting against literal Satan.

World War 2 ended 75 years ago. Virtually everyone who was a Nazi is dead of old age.

So who are you stomping?

SJ_Zero, hace 1 año

If you look at my post history, I tend to write long things a lot, but I like emoji reacts too – Sometimes you just want to “yeah, love it!” or “Huh, made me think” or “Shocking!” and that’s not really appropriate for a whole post.

SJ_Zero, hace 1 año

Polyamory has benefits, but it also has big problems.

One is a scaling problem. Let’s say you have a couple. Then add one person. Now instead of one relationship, you have three to worry about. Add yet another person, now you have 4 relationships. Add another person, now you have 9. Have each new so get a so, now you have 30.

Relationships are hard. Most people can’t manage 1, so the idea of managing 3, or 9, or 30 is starting to get really difficult. You can split people off and say “hey, I’m going to just have time with girl 1 today and girl 2 tomorrow”, and that can set up a sort of firewall, but there’s a bit of a resource problem there where there’s only 24 hours in a day and someone’s going to feel left out or someone who needs more support won’t get it.

The resource thing also hits in other ways. A lot of women want children eventually, and ideally children require resources – space, time, money. In a monogamous relationship, a woman can monopolize a man’s resources, whereas under polyamory she needs to share. “Sharing is caring” rhymes so it must be true, but the data shows that a child’s quality time with their father is directly responsible for positive outcomes, so in that case maybe sharing isn’t caring after all.

On the topic of kids, there can be a real problem if a woman gets pregnant. Whose is it? Now maybe one of the men steps up and says “it’s mine” even though it isn’t clear that’s the case. What if he doesn’t though? A shared responsibility often becomes nobody’s responsibility.

Honestly, you can make it work, but it’s hard mode. It’s much more difficult to make polyamory work than monogamy, and many relationships that should die get drawn out by people who think just adding more people will fix things. In reality, a strong polyamorous relationship is based on relationships that would be strong monogamous relationships.

SJ_Zero, hace 1 año

I’m an old fucker, to me it seems like the tipping point started in 2008, and really started to get bad in 2016.

I was already chatting on online forums in the late 90s, and on slashdot starting around 2000. There was lots of discussion, some of it first, but it was just discussion. Not a lot of politics per se.

In September 2001, al queda attacked the world trade center, the Pentagon, and another plane was flown into the ground. This led to lots of discussion online and a massive increase in political conversations.

In 2003, America went to war in Iraq. This was a generational event, and it fundamentally changed internet conversation. Partisanship really started to show up, in part thanks to George W. Bush’s “you’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists” rhetoric.

At some point along the way, I stopped using slashdot. I tried using kuro5hin for a while, then Digg, and eventually landed on Reddit.

Two fundamental changes that happened in 2008 were the election of Barack Obama, and the Ron Paul revolution. In both cases, internet ground game ended up having an outsided impact on politics. Barack Obama ended up being an internet sensation, and his Democrats got the presidency and both houses of Congress by a wide margin. Ron Paul didn’t come close to winning any primaries, but the shadow of this campaign cast a long shadow over the Republican party, arguably leading to the tea party faction taking over the party for a time.

This made everyone perk up in politics. Where a few candidates realized before that this Internet thing could be powerful, 2008 showed that it could fundamentally change the game.

While reddit was highly political in 2008, there were many factions. That’s what made it a fun place to be – there were right wingers, religious people, libertarians, liberals, socialists, and social justice advocates. I think at this point, however, forces started to work to take over the discourse. By 2015, subtle changes had taken place to really make anyone who wasn’t part of a specific ideology feel unwelcome, including a differential treatment of different groups. Most brigading subs were handled by admins (by shutting them down), but notably /r/shitredditsays which brigaded “bigoted” comments was allowed to stay up. Powermods were previously a problem on Digg, eventually the same problem seemed to start occurring on Reddit where a small group of mods were controlling hundreds of subreddits.

By the time I left for good, it was clear to me that reddit wasn’t anything like the place it used to be. Many subreddits either through social engineering or through bots would see posts that were not part of the mandatory orthodoxy immediately hammered into the dirt. “The downvote button is not an I disagree button” clearly didn’t apply anymore. Until that point, I was deleting my account every few months and making a new one because doxxing was a growing problem and I didn’t want to have my real life destroyed for having an opinion people disagreed with, but eventually the site lost all value to me since I knew you couldn’t have discussions on the discussion site any longer.

The successful election of Donald Trump put everything into hyperdrive. Controlled subreddits became graveyards of dissent, and polarization became total as people picked sides. At that point I no longer returned to reddit in any regard because there was just no point.

The cultures of the different highly polarized sides became quite different, all toxic in their own ways. The left became ridiculously authoritarian to keep outsiders out, the right became ridiculously offensive to keep outsiders out. The fact that there was one website (whatever that website was) meant that you could kinda play for keeps – take over a website with authoritarian moderation or with extreme offensiveness, and you win that front.

My hope is that the decentralized nature of the fediverse helps. When Lemmy.ml or beehaw go too authoritarian, people can just find something else on the same platform that’s more reasonable. If certain websites are too crass and offensive, people can go find something else on the same platform that’s more reasonable. In it’s built-in diversity, the fediverse is set up so everyone can have their space, and the worst that can happen is someone shunts you out of theirs (but you get to keep yours).

I’ve found the fediverse actually deradicalized me a lot. There are still people I disagree with, but I get to participate in discussions that remind me that whatever the “other side” is has some good ideas, and also I get to see that I actually disagree with extremists of all kinds. Being exposed to bad ideas doesn’t make me agree with them, it helps illustrate how bad they are regardless of source.