VulcanSphere

nicetriangle, hace 9 meses

Most major subreddits show a decrease of between 50 and 90 percent in average daily posts and comments, when compared to a year ago

I want to believe this is due to the protests and people noping out (and I bet some of it is) but this observation ignores the Covid effect.

Reddit aside, basically every online community I frequent has seen a major dip following the end of the worst of the pandemic. Slack and Discord communities I have been in for years have tanked considerably. Tons of YouTubers I follow have dropped off majorly in the frequency of new videos. Forums are way sleepier. Engagement on a lot of social sharing platforms I use is way down.

I think a big chunk of this is people being able to go out into the real world again and also having spent a couple years being chronically online because that was kinda all there was to do. And now they're wanting anything but that.

style99, hace 10 meses

/*
 * Yeah, yeah, it's ugly, but I cannot find how to do this correctly
 * and this seems to work. I anybody has more info on the real-time
 * clock I'd be interested. Most of this was trial and error, and some
 * bios-listing reading. Urghh.
 */

Ah, those were the days.

lvxferre, hace 10 meses

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

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.