I understand that this is a doomer sub but man. When you manage to get away from all this social media bullshit for a while then try to poke your head in you realize how relentlessly negative it is at all times, because nobody wants to actually do anything about anything, including go the fuck outside and forget about it for a bit, and everyone with any ambitions of sanity leaves.

Could we start discussing credible strategies to reverse this situation, or at least improve that number somehow? Absolutely the fuck not, never, ever ever. The shit is very literally crazy, I don’t know what I was trying to expect.

But this post is so much like the other posts on the rest of the site it took me a minute to notice where I was. Might as well stop acting like this is just one community, it’s everything.

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The word “troll” just kinda doesn’t mean much anymore, huh.

F me I just went on my facebook for the first time in a couple months and motherfuckers are posting Robespierre quotes on there.

They fuckin misspelled it as Rabespierre and of course it’s a screenshot of letters on black fuck sake.

I been free for a while, buddy. I never cared to play Farmville and otherwise I’d get bored in 20 minutes and leave, so now I have to login every three months and change the password to keep my account from getting stolen and then I’m gone again.

Notice that I am typing this on an open source Reddit clone that has probably sucked down 2 hours of my life tonight somehow.

So, like, all the addicts are over here, I hope facebook is handing out blowjobs or something and I just don’t know about it.

For real though, last time I went on FB there were AI generated panty shots of Jennifer Aniston for some crazy reason that shit’s getting interesting like a dead mall now.

For the record, on Windows 10, I’m using 9GB (rounded up from 8.something) to run Firefox and look at this website, can’t forget Discord inviting itself to my party in the background, and the OS. I had to close tabs to get down here. Streams really eat the RAM up.

Throw a game in there, with FF open for advice and Discord running for all the usual gaming reasons, and yeah, way over.

Notice I haven’t even touched any productivity stuff that demands more.

8? Eat a penis, Apple. Fuckin clown hardware.

It would be weird if I just eat the dill all by itself.

I’ve started calling this stuff “commercial Leftism”. It doesn’t care if it gets results, and it absolutely will not look for a way to interface with the power structure to change laws or force actions. It just keeps running the same ineffective, counterproductive playbook again and again and again because all it cares about is attention, and never results.

This situation and Ukraine are both filthy with propaganda, the real thing, backed by governments or their adversaries, and they already caught The Guardian using a fake AI picture of a weapons cave under a Gaza hospital that isn’t real so why would I believe this? I can’t afford to intake anything about this war/genocide as actual information.

Auto-lock doors have been a nightmare in general. I always roll a window down at least far enough to stick an arm through every time I get out of a running car because of the one time forever ago that I left a 90s Pontiac Skylark running, shut the door, and it autolocked with the keys in the ignition and the motor running. I had to get my girlfriend to drive me back to my apartment for the spare key while the car was humming away, and I never forgot that. If I wasn’t close to home, with a helpful ride nearby, and a spare key on hand, I’d have been screwed.

Talk about features that need regulated out. All because suburban whites don’t want to remember to lock the doors as they drive through the black neighborhood so the car locks itself whenever you put it in Drive.

Right when we literally need to chill, they keep inventing nonsense that is somehow worse. Crypto is literally just machines wasting energy on purpose to create false scarcity, it was already a worst case scenario for truly pointless excess emissions but by god, they managed to top it, this place is going to be a raisin with dead oceans.

Of course, anyone who does anything less than suck the dick of this AI is a reactionary ignorant peasant, at least with crypto everyone agreed it was lame, now we’re back to the iPhone fuck-you-only-change-allowed-keep-up-granny bullshit that lead to everyone but you knowing everything about you, so they can exploit and even criminalize the behavior your phone tells them about. Never the change we need, though. Just whatever makes your stupid line go up.

I guess. Glad I’m not having kids. That’s the only fucking downward pressure on future emissions that’s happening, on any meaningful scale. I can’t wait to see what sort of shitty boilerplate copy and fake fucking pictures makes all this CO2 worthwhile. I’m sure the problem is me, and my Luddite, unseasoned irrational fear.

I’m sure you get it, but this is kinda for whoever is out of the loop on this.

Yeah, right now the meta for pro-choice women is to delete and remove all period tracking apps under the assumption the apps will snitch directly to the government on you, so that, say, Texas lawmakers will know if your period is overdue, and thus you are expected to be possibly pregnant. Then, if that data leads them to certain conclusions, they assume an abortion has happened, and they want that fully criminalized.

It is not unlikely to expect an incarceration in order to “protect the life of the baby”, even if you have made no move toward abortion, but once the tracker app and its data tell the patriarchy that you might be pregnant, all bets are off.

Even worse is that sometimes a woman’s period is just irregular, or even disappears for a time, especially if she’s on some serious athletics and a tight diet, so there’s a lot of room for false positive “pregnant” results with possible felony charges on the line, over the fucking tracker app on your phone.

The same situation drives the daughter’s actions, doctors will often snitch, and the problem of anti-choice doctors getting you incarcerated because they think you might be pregnant is well known.

Basically this information is now expected to be used to monitor for pregnancy, possibly by law enforcement directly, and it becomes very compromising, especially for a teen girl who already lacks the rights she needs to take herself away from unwanted situations and states. She also likely wants to normalize this behavior for herself, so that others wanting to hide pregnancy do not set off “red flags” when they try to maintain privacy.

I stopped using upvotes/downvotes at all on Reddit. Unless you were on New, exclusively, it didn’t matter how often you got on Reddit, anything you were seeing was at least fifteen hours old. Any conversation was already done. Any up/downvotes you put in wouldn’t matter at all and probably just got ignored by the system. Anything you had to say would only appear to you, in reality it just dropped to the bottom of the sea, never again to be seen. Thousands had already spoken, somehow, and you were just walking through a snapshot of the past, already said and done.

For now, it’s much smaller here. Sometimes I find myself upvoting a post just to let the person know that somebody actually came in here and gave a fuck about what they had to say, that they aren’t talking to themselves in an empty room.

It makes sense to care a bit more, for a lot of reasons. We’ll see how long that vibe can sustain itself.

What’s the learning curve like? That honestly seems like a much bigger hurdle than cost.

they gotta fight on what they train on

Servers: I’m tired boss!

Ruud: That’s too damn bad!

I mean, it doesn’t really make any sense to keep volunteer-modding over there unless maybe Reddit allows that to be as painless as possible. All the money you SHOULD be paying these people who are the absolute backbone of your entire business model, but AREN’T, should easily justify whatever concessions you care to throw their way, any tools that make the job easier, whatever paltry expense.

But I’m reminded of somebody’s tangential advice about toxic workplaces, saying that if the people you work with daily are toxic, well, you can expect that to be part of the company culture that goes all the way to the top. The behavior is designed, encouraged, by leadership. There are none more entitled than Reddit the company. Thus, it’s community.

So of course anybody with real adult shit to tend to said “get fucked” because nothing else makes any sense. It doesn’t make sense to mod their website with shitty tools for pay, never mind for free. We can expect any competence to go with them. Anybody left over and desperate for mod is pretty suspect, and they’re about to lose all the really effective tools, so good fuckin luck bud.

I think Reddit cruises along like ha ha, we win, for another day, but those answers that everyone has been dipping in for were coming from some of the deepest wells of professional competence on the site. People were seriously like, “how do I solve this weird issue I’m having with Rust”, and they’d get that answer from a subreddit, not even from official docs, not a Youtube, no, Reddit was THE go-to place. r/Excel has taught more people to use the software than Microsoft has. Somebody literally shows up on the job trying to run some Excel so they don’t get fired and r/Excel will sort them right out. It’s one of the nicest places on the site, too. It goes on and on like that, as far as subreddits.

The people who provide such answers, for the good of the community, they can price their hourly rate quite nicely. It sure as hell ain’t “free”. Reddit has been the entire West-coast IT community killing company time, is what it’s been. Everything really valuable about the site has been bought with all that downtime that competent administrators have when they need to be at a desk and look busy while their automated processes do the work.

So everyone who’s worth a damn just threw in the towel. As the quality of moderation tanks, the casual non-mod users who still brought knowledge to the table will get fed up with problems and find another time sink. Soon enough all that’s gonna be left of the place is those miserable hate pits that always climb to the top of r/All. Have fun keeping shareholder value up with that shit.

But I gotta step back from Reddit-posting. Looks like there’s a new game in town. Me, I’m a filthy casual, so I’m just trying to hang on Lemmy and be a bro about it.

It’s not addiction, it’s entitlement. The blackouts hit hard across the internet, a lot of people have gotten used to just dipping into Reddit’s knowledge pool when they want an answer. I’m not talking about people you’d really call Redditors. These are the friends who only show up when they want something. When they’re with their real friends, they don’t have much good to say about you.

So when they lost that for just a couple days, they got pretty fussy. I’m trying to find the right words for somebody who considers themselves pretty Lefty almost but not quite ripping off the mask when they are expected to show solidarity with people they don’t really like but have become entitled to as a resource, because that was the vibe.

The only thing I can compare it to is when the Uber drivers tried to strike, and old women were up in their Twitter mentions like, “You better not make me miss work!” Once they rely on you, they expect you as a sort of right, even if your service isn’t a right. If you stop being their appliance, they get mad. They never, ever want to place blame where it goes, either.

That’s the thing, and that’s why Reddit is trying to IPO. There’s more to it than just people having a dopamine problem. It’s more like you’re their Uber driver, and you’d better not mess up their schedule. Fuck your strike and fuck you. Get back to work.

I think a lot of the people who made Reddit what it is and was may have learned their lesson by seeing their needs treated so dismissively, so they’ll be pretty gun shy to put themselves in that spot, again. Figure it out yourselves if that’s how it is. You mod the fucking thing, then.

eh, just lurk. Look, don’t stress it. There’s no business model here. We don’t need growth. It’s nice, it’s cool, it makes it all worthwhile, but somewhere a greybeard sysadmin (sup Ruud) is running a server for the fuckin lols at his own expense and THAT is the fediverse. It’s just all those people chained together, and we need to spread that load across as many people as possible.

This Fediverse thing does NOT require, but it does accept that someday you might want to bite some hosting fees and do your own little part, just one more instance, one more server, picking up your load and that of a few of your friends. If somebody is hosting an open server, they’re already okay with you freeloading, so freeload to your heart’s content.

For every one person who is willing to nerd down and host something, we need like 100 people or more to fuck around in the thing being hosted and make it worth doing. It’s all set up so that if the person who is paying to host gets exhausted, well, those 100 people aren’t screwed. It’s set up so hosters can drop in and out at will. The Fediverse expects and plans for the person who is hosting your nonsense on their own dime to say fuck this, and drop out, and yet you have a setup that leaves you whole, you might not even notice. You can at least migrate elsewhere with minimum friction.

Just engage with shit. Updoot it or whatever. Fuck around and be here. Login and poke around. None of us will see it but the person hosting the instance (waddup Ruud) will see it, and that’s enough. Your engagement is not the difference between life or death. An exponential growth in users is a requirement for commercial socials to thrive but here? That just makes it more expensive for your gracious host to host you. If another 50,000 people show up tomorrow that will probably kill the whole damn thing, it’s why Beehaw is having problems, they were planning on 200 users a month and got 3000 because Reddit.

This whole Fediverse thing is what is left of the Old Way, where places to be online existed because some normal person wanted to put up a server for a forum or whatever and it was running out of a box in their bathroom.

The good news is that all those people are pushing 50 now, they have spouses and children, they aren’t crazy people. The deranged bastards who ran a box in the bathroom like they were the Emperor of Fuck Town have all died from probably substance abuse and what is left is sane people running servers out of their bathroom (for cooling purposes) on a remarkably high level because that’s their job. They run servers for like, Amazon Web Services or some shit, so running a Fediverse instance is child’s play. That is what you’re enjoying right now.

Or they’ve paid cloud hosting fees so that even though they have no idea what the fuck they’re doing some greybeard sysadmin is handling every thing that matters. That’s the situation. That’s why this clown show runs a lot better than it should.

So don’t stress lurking. If you were a lurker on Reddit, lurk here. Just hang. We already have a Shitposting subLemmy or whatever, so go post shit, or don’t. Don’t worry about it. If you don’t personally contribute to the exponential growth needed for a commercial social to thrive, nothing bad will happen. You could be here for a year just lurking and then get inspired to post your ass off, that works too. You got options.

Don’t worry about working for it. It’s not necessary. Welcome to nonprofit social media.