Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. Merry Christmas, happy Hannukah, and happy holidays in general!)
I kinda half agree, but Iām going to push back on at least one point. Originally most of redditās moderation was provided by unpaid volunteers, with paid admins only acting as a last resort. I think this is probably still true even after they purged a bunch of mods that were mad Reddit was being enshittifyied. And the official paid admins were notoriously slow at purging some really blatantly over the line content, like the jailbait subreddit or the original donald trump subreddit. So the argument is that Reddit benefited and still benefits heavily from that free moderation and the content itself generated and provided by users is valuable, so acting like all reddit users are simply entitled free riders isnāt true.
In an ideal world, reddit communities could have moved onto a self-hosted or nonprofit service like LiveJournal became Dreamwidth. But it was not a surprise that a money-burning for-profit social media service would eventually try to shake down the users, which is why my Reddit history is a few dozen Old!SneerClub posts while my history on the Internet is much more extensive. The same thing happened with āfreeā PhpBB services and mailing list services like Yahoo! Groups, either they put in more ads or they shut down the free version.
A point that Maciej Ceglowski among others have made is that the VC model traps services into āspend bigā until they run out of money or enshitiffy, and that services like Dreamwidth, Ghost, and Signal offer āsocial-media-likeā experiences on a much smaller budget while earning modest profits or paying for themselves. But Dreamwidth, Ghost, and Signal are never going to have the marketing budget of services funded by someone elseās money, or be able to provide so many professional services gratis. So you have to chose: threadbare security on the open web, or jumping from corporate social media to corporate social media amidst bright lights and loudspeakers telling you what site is the NEW THING.
It sounds like part, maybe even most, of the problem is self inflicted by the VC model traps and the VCs? I say we keep blocking ads and migrating platforms until VCs learn not to fund stuff with the premise of āprovide a decent service until weāve captured enough users, then get really shittyā.
I agree that a big part of the problem is financialized capitalism (whether VC money or Redditās stock market speculation or the Putin regime realizing that they could just buy LiveJournal). We also have the right to take generous paychecks from Substack, or host all our video on Youtube for free. But we canāt expect that Substack will be as generous forever or YouTube could offer exactly what it offers today minus the ads and tracking and pay for itself. There are lots of Internet communities which are decentralized or nonprofit or democratically governed but they donāt have the budgets of giant corporate services.
Online communities can also fade for mundane reasons like āfailure to recruit new members as fast as old members leaveā or āfounders have a tiff and the community breaks up into warring factionsā or āold site was designed for laptops and dialup, now we have smartphones and broadband, but our user base does not want to change.ā Financial speculation make this worse but community management is hard.