The Internet will continue to function just fine, just as it has for 50 years.

Sounds of intercontinental data cables being sliced

Turns out the Basilisk was just Rich People.

For decades, the Woke Left has complained that we live in a bifurcated society of privileged middle class professionals and trod upon lower class manual laborers. But Donald Trump is resolving the contradiction. Now everyone gets to enjoy the hyper-surveillance, the stochastic violence, and the suffocating revanchist propaganda once reserved for poor people.

Leftism is just a fat woman with pink hair yelling at me for no reason.

I’m not a Leftist, I’m a Pan-sexual Afro-Future Longtermist Egalitarian Social Radical Centrist With Kropotkin Characteristics. I believe in a single worker owned commune unfettered by the cloistered norms of a 50s era revanchist white colonialist culture. But also I reserve the right to think white women with pink hair are shrill and want nothing to do with them. That’s why I voted for Trump.

Exactly the kind of guy who detonates his rented Cybertruck at the Trump Vegas Hotel because he’s mad at the Woke

😡

Less voicing of views, period. Reddit doesn’t want user interaction. Only views. The bots generate the content while the users are there to generate ad revenue.

Fucking cowards sending out the messages from an account that you can’t even reply to?

Not even really cowardice when you consider how bare bones their staff is. Even if they gave a shit about users, real monetization costs money and Reddit hates spending.

2017 was more than several years ago

And they saturate the media environment, particularly in children’s entertainment. If you have a political agenda, you’d be crazy to ignore the channel that is synonymous with child advertisement. The morals and attitudes espoused by Disney characters regularly shape perceptions of their viewers into adulthood.

So the goal of Disney Executives is to keep things bland and superficial and inoffensive as possible, to the point where critics (particularly conspiracy-minded ones) really need to wade into deep water to find anything resembling offensive content. You can watch Pocahontas and never really develop an opinion on colonialism. You can watch Robin Hood and Lion King without shaking your views on Monarchy one way or another. You can enjoy Frozen or Moana without challenging yourself on feminism.

It’s all just a beautiful magical carnival of adventures. Empty head put happy story in, slide over perfectly smooth brain, come out as laughter.

Truly, the modern Opiate of the Masses.

The problem with these systems is that the more they are bureaucratized and legalized, the more publishing houses and attorney’s offices will ultimately dictate the flow of lending and revenue. Ideally, copywrite is as straighforward as submitting a copy of your book to the Library of Congress and getting a big “Don’t plagiarize this” stamp on it, such that works can’t be lifted straight from one author by another. But because there’s all sorts of shades of gray - were Dan Brown and JK Rowling ripping off the core conceits of their works, or were religious murder thrillers and YA wizard high school books simply done to death by the time they went mainstream? - a lot of what constitutes plagarism really boils down to whether or not you can afford extensive litigation.

And that’s before you get into the industrialization of ghostwriters that end up supporting “prolific” writers like Danielle Steele or Brian Sanderson or R.L. Stein. There’s no real legal protection for staff writers, editors, and the like. The closest we’ve got is the WGA, and that’s more exclusive to Hollywood.

Oh, so now you’re just going to surrender our precious natural resources to the Imperialist Chinese?!

Guys, I think we’ve got a Wumao over here. Someone get what’s left of the FBI to arrest him and show his ass the fucking door.

Gentlemen, this is democracy manifest!

What is the charge, officer? Eating a meal? A succulent Chinese meal?

Reddit. Doesn’t. Want. Active. Users.

It wants bots. It wants HailCorporate promotional accounts. And it wants your eyeballs to look at their ads. It doesn’t want you to participate in any meaningful way.

Stop using the site. Stop pretending this site is intended to be used by real people. Be glad they’re doing this and not simply baiting you along with fake interactions while you’ve been shadowbanned and left to unwittingly scream into the void.

Like, don’t get me wrong. Lemmy’s a better place than Reddit ever was. There’s reason to be hopeful. But I see a lot of reflexive naivete and simple ignorance surrounding what this community functionally is and how it works.

The biggest threat to Lemmy isn’t a security vulnerability or a procedural defect, but the simple value it accrues through its own success.

💘

It seems that the data shows that most school shooters are white.

Most Americans are white, so that’s not a surprise. But white communities aren’t over-policed and over-surveiled like tanner neighborhoods. So white students will look “generic” while certain black, brown, and Asian students will pop out of the data as “suspects” more visibly.

Case in point

Big corporations cannot take control of our spaces.

There is no particular reason why a committed group of business professionals couldn’t work their way onto the largely volunteer Lemmy team and hijack the project, buy out major site administrators, or point the Feds in their direction like they did with Aaron Swartz or Ross Ulbricht.

There’s nothing magical about the Fediverse. Its still the product of human labor and hardware, just like every other online space.

An entire community just upped sticks and left because they got shitty with the mods.

That wasn’t a one-and-done. The community had been bleeding for years, thanks to the increasingly reactionary vibe on the site. Mods built a life-raft (not unlike CTH or The_Donald after the purges in 2020) and decamped eventually. But it wasn’t spur of the moment, and it certainly wasn’t with the original user base intact.

I can see an entire instance being largely abandoned in a matter of days if they got offside with their users badly enough.

I see entire instances shut down overnight. But, again, this tends to be after the admins have purged the mod crews and the community at-large has either splintered or evacuated. Users tend to be sticky within their communities, even after a great deal of disruption.