DiltoGeggins

There are people here who aren't joiners of political movements that can be summed up in 3 emojis or less. That doesn't make them more, or less worthy.

If a political cause encourages its members to be contemptuous of anyone who doesn't blindly accept it, then that cause is the problem not the solution.

Politicians don't yank my chain. I always saw them as proprietors for the cult of personality. Desperate celebrities who hitched their ride on the shoulders of marginalized people. The Elvi of retail politics.

I don't maintain a list of enemies. Too much fucking work and even if I could make that happen, it would make me the most pointless not-OK butthead in the room.

The wisdom of the path was strong yea verily. Now it's just words in grandfolks' journals. Not the answer.

...Nor am I on the correct path.

...Nor are you...

...Nor are the latest greatest class of daemons extraordinaire.

aye aye aye again with the triggering?

Fuck zoos anyways, amirite? This is much better. Paying a person a liveable wage? Giving them fresh air, sun, exercise? Making zoo-goers happy and educated? Now that's what I call progress!!

Savvy internet users already know of the shadowban, where a service hides a user’s content from everyone except that person. However, services can also shadow remove individual comments. You might receive replies to some content while other commentary appears to fall flat. Such lonely, childless comments may truly have been uninteresting, or they may have been secretly suppressed. Moreover, many moderators suppress significantly more content than they admit.

If anyone best understood the harms of secret suppression, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn did. He survived the Soviet Union’s forced labor camps where millions died. In his epic The Gulag Archipelago, he argued that the Soviet security apparatus based all of its arrests on Article 58, which forbid “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda.” Police relied on this anti-free speech code to imprison whomever they wished on false charges. Article 58 thus removed truth and transparency from the justice system.

But we have a role to play too. Left unchallenged, a censorial Internet enslaves both users and moderators alike to become ideological warriors. Ironically, we have promoted communications systems that do not foster good communication. But good communication is essential to well-functioning communities, so we must do something. The question is what to do or say. Unfortunately, the easy route of framing the problem as “us versus them” would merely strengthen existing power players.

very pleasing. very very pleasing.

I am not familiar with the term, "federated" or its meaning... I'm hoping to get some serious answers and perhaps even some comedic answers....

Edit: thank you to all who answered my call for enlightenment. I'm even more confused (and hopeful) than I was before!

If you spread mines without thought as to how you yourself will inevitably evacuate through the field, you're going to have a bad time.

https://hexbear.net/create_post?community=philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Good_Place_(book)

I read this book, The Great, Good Place years ago for a college course and it stuck with me. I first encountered it back in the days of myspace, friendster, etc, the days of relative innocence, of "look ma, no hands!!" Then along came sites like reddit and digg, becoming mainstay even though ultimately tragic flings (Digg) and long-term affairs (reddit, a 16 year journey participating in promise, devolving to ruin). Did social media become the great new places? Or something entirely different?

By the time I turfed reddit I was done anyways, so full of frustration and anger over what could have been, the feeling consisting mainly of being ground underfoot. The Great, Good Place argues that "third places"--Where people can gather, put aside the concerns of work and home, and hang out simply for the pleasures of good company and lively conversation - are the heart of a community's social vitality and the grassroots of democracy. But with the advent of social media, its quite possible they've gone the way of the dinosaur.

I tried some other places, but either they were the online equivalents of round files for spam to be dumped in, or so full of outright racist bloat masquerading as "free speech", that it made my blood levels rise just like as on reddit. Try as I might, I couldn't "hang in there" and make it work, to filter out the bad for truth of finding the occasional good in a place.

Somehow I stumbled upon this site (Hexbear, touted as a place for leftists to gather) and it has me hopeful. Striking similarities to the comradery of discus, combined with the social bookmarking that structures like reddit once offered. Hoping there is political diversity that I can learn new things, and not feed from the same plate day after day, a plate that's been about as far left as you can get since back in my mid-eighties Oly/Evergreen days.

And now for the final question of my rant: Digg, what happened to ye???!!!! Such promise! I've ne'er seen a possibility drained of all potential in such a sudden, and final way. Ok, ok, probably not the best question to end a post that found its way onto the Philosophy forum. So perhaps I ought frame the question along these lines: in this day and age, with the internet going through in one day what took a year back in the early days, do we stand the chance of achieving a great, good gathering place that won't subside into commercial ruin?