Reading it on mobile so not seeing anything wrong here, just black background and white text, like I've always liked.
Tashlan
joined 2 years ago
I burned accounts frequently so karma didn't matter, except in terms of meeting posting thresholds. Upvotes/downvotes mattered to me because they were "feedback" for what I said. Other poster's karma mainly mattered to me when trying to sus out if someone was an alt/bot/troll account.
I think the dirty secret is that social media is both an incredibly vital part of people's lives and businesses, but it's free and ad revenue doesn't really make anyone the crazy profits their valuations suggest it should. That it's happening all at once is I think partly attributable to financial tightening -- higher interest rates mean people have less patience with money they've floated, partly that Twitter going weird gave everyone else cover to do the same, and my personal opinion, the Writer's Strike gives a little room for the companies to do dumb shit without having to worry about getting roasted on late night.
Fuck u/spez
Honestly as an early user of Facebook, Reddit, etc., we shouldn't forget that when people first came to these services, they were the smaller, cleaner, more text-based alternatives to bigger corporate bullshit. Myspace was busy, bloated, Malware prone, Facebook was light and organized. Digg became super corporatized overnight, Reddit was clean and simple. Once early users are on that shit when it's good, their friends follow, and eventually communities form and it's very, very difficult if you care about a community to abandon it for an alternative. Websites aren't just "websites," they're people, and just like tech companies eventually always put profits over people, people put people over software. They'll put up with a lot of shit to stay on touch woth the people they loved.
Fuck spez.
I uninstalled RIF. For old time's sake I fell asleep last night browsing many year old threads on r/tolkienfans. Truly relaxing, ad, clutter free, just text, just reading. I hate the idea of a world without that.
Maybe an actual FAQ would be good -- people during fractious times have a tendency to catastrophize and create misinformation.
Oh, then why did CDPR apologize for it?
https://www.engadget.com/cyberpunk-2077-apology-video-roadmap-updates-2021-220043550.html
Shit I can't stand -- people fucking up, apologizing for it, and then later insisting they didn't fuck up. People plead guilty to shit in court then try to retcon it. People who write essays about their behavior and then later say they didn't do it. This shit here. They fucked up, they said they fucked up. The followup for this shit needs to be: Were you lying then or now?
There's a lingering belief that Spez is the same Spez who criticized Digg as too corporate and described Reddit in terms of community. It's difficult, sometimes, for people to realize when fellow travelers are no longer fellows.
There's also some satisfaction in knowing that in the end, you did all you could to avert a bad outcome. Even if it passes, you don't need to have regrets.
Oh yes, I once had someone tell me they wanted my family to die in a fire and suffer while doing so because I didn't think Guardians of the Galaxy was the sort of comic that would make a good movie. I was wrong, but you know, I think I was the only person who ought to suffer for that mistake.
I do tend to think that this is one of those things that the Fediverse, by not demanding everything be monolithic, is uniquely capable of dealing with because instances could provide per-community options (public up and down, private up and down, maybe an actual "fuck you" button) and people could try and figure out what works best for their unique forum.
Someone in jail for a two year stint that ends in December may be emerging to find the email they had for twenty years, which may be the key to most of their other accounts, is gone, which could be hugely impactful.
In my personal life, I do now have the unfortunate task of reminding people to log into dead relative's email accounts so they can preserve some shit they need, which kind of sucks.