Jesus Christ it’s like the SNL Pongo skit in real life.

My original comment was about how that Twitter and Reddit were toxic long before they were “ruined”, and that Bluesky/Mastadon/Lemmy will probably run into the same problem even without any corporate interference.

You are a child because you just saw Elon’s name and had a complete conniption, and have repeatedly attempted to make the entire conversation about him as opposed to the nature of social media.

You also have the tone of a teenager who is arguing against someone obligated to listen, be polite, and attempt to get you to grow up even in the most minor of ways. You have this “fuck you I’m right” level of vitriol is designed to either piss people off or shock people into backing down. You have this prose that alternates between oddly formal and shit you’d see in a discord chat rooms. Anyone who doesn’t already emphatically agree with you is just going to tune you out.

As I have stated earlier, Twitter was toxic before Elon. Reddit was arguably more toxic before it went corporate. I dont think any of these fediverse sites solve the fundamental problems that made these sites so toxic.

So, this is a lot.

I guess I’ll start with you calling Elon Musk “Muskrat”. This is like a middle school level insult. It makes your already immature argument seem even more immature. I’m straight up not sure if I’m arguing with a literal child at this point.

Two, Twitter was better before Musk bought it, but it wasn’t in any way good. A million different toxic trends either started or blew up on Twitter. The 2010s was filled with a million different dumbass pearl clutching moments that started with a bunch of terminally online Twitter users making a mountain out of a molehill. It was basically just a constant stream of outrage and sanctimonious nonsense.

That’s not to mention there was plenty of hate speech and attempts to undermine democracy, because the moderation team only really enforced the rules when it came to conservative talking points. You had NYTimes reporters tweeting out how white people should all kill themselves without consequences, while Twitter went around banning people for clowning on laid off journalists by telling them to “learn to code”. Donald Trump was banned, but the Supreme Leader of Iran was welcome with open arms.

Even then, Twitter played a huge role in the formation of the alt right because they were always at least six months too late when it came to banning anyone. The culture war doesn’t get off the ground if Twitter just blacklists a bunch of straight up Russian propaganda websites and banhammers Milo. They also were extremely late to the party when it came to banning those ISIS recruitment videos, which is even more inexcusable.

I reject the idea that reddit was ever really that good. It was better in some ways, but a lot of the most toxic reddit moments happened before it went corporate. Off the top of my head:

• The softcore child porn
• The stalker pictures of women
• The time they had a huge thread where they all collectively gained sympathy to rapists
• The “seduction” subreddits that basically attempted to convince naive young men that “seduction” meant putting women into a situation where they consented due to extreme social pressures.
• The time they identified the wrong person as the Boston bomber

The non toxic content was extremely hit or miss. You’d get more in depth discussion, but it would be between a ton of extremely myopic pseudo intellectual posts. Basically half of reddit was something like:

• Religion bad, but only Christianity
• I am euphoric because my atheism and intelligence enlightens me
• Republicans bad
• I have literal superpowers now that I stopped masturbating
• Some half true historical fact that gets repeated a million different times because it fits everyone’s worldview
• Keanu Reeves
• Rage comics
• DAE hate sportsball ???

Finally, a huge portion of the reason reddit went downhill was the unpaid mods. They were often unwell individuals who used their position to push progressive politics. There was a good five years where basically every sub over a certain size was essentially a progressive politics sub, because they were all modded by the same people who saw the users as a captive audience.

Social media just isn’t a good place for unique content or discourse. That’s not gonna change no matter who the owner is.

I reject the idea that things like Mastadon, Bluesky, Lemmy, etc will ever actually be good things.

Elon turned Twitter alt right, but it was a shithole for years before he bought it. Twitter started being a bot infested outrage farm echo chamber with questionable moderation practices in like 2014.

Reddit was in some ways better before it went corporate, but in a lot of ways it was much worse. Like all things considered I’d rather be on a website that has a shitty mobile app and mods that sell access to corporations than a website where there are communities dedicated to softcore child porn and teenagers getting death threats over jackdaws.

Even if the fediverse fulfills its promise of not going down the corporate rabbit hole, they are still going to end up being a collection of inherently toxic echo chambers.

Yeah the free stuff is probably something that has been reported in multiple places, with a bit of added context.

Meanwhile the paid stuff are all either glorified progressive opinion pieces or in-depth analysis written by someone wholly and completely unqualified to perform said analysis.

I don’t know when you think the verge was ever good though. Even during its best years it was putting out shit like that build a PC video.

The CHIPS bill was a massive disappointment. It was cut down to 1/5th from the intended size due to house committee BS, and then the Biden administration decided to use it as a platform to enact a bunch of wholly unrelated social policies.

I’m not saying that jobs should not offer onsite daycare or have lofty environmental goals. However this was a bill designed to ensure the US maintains an advantage in a critical industry. Maybe put that stuff in another bill.

Yeah I just think it’s funny a Senator took time out of his day to be like “we need a lobster emoji”

Does anyone remember when one of Maine’s US Senators lobbied Unicode to create a lobster emoji?

Different divisions. This is more akin to when Sony decided to stop making floppy disks. The market is there for now, but it’s just not worth it from a financial perspective.

The amount of people burning their own blu rays is minimal. Even the type of people who emphasize owning their own content just use a NAS system.

Honestly if they got the cost down and figured out a better interaction mechanism than an app, I could see it being useful for older or disabled individuals.

For example, imagine someone is 55. They are still with it, and decently active for this age. However they have arthritis in their hands that makes tasks that require dexterity mildly uncomfortable. These kinds of shoes would be a pretty big boon for them in terms of staying active.

The issue is that they tried to make it some cool fashion accessory for Gen Z sneaker heads to buy.

You can tell the exec who greenlit this was a boomer because they went with IBM.

An AI drive through was always going to be difficult. IBM simply isn’t the company that can do stuff like that anymore, and they haven’t been for decades at this point.

We went through this with the whole “Windows 10 in S Mode”. The end result was a lot of pissed off consumers, both because of OS limitations and the fact the the HW specs of those devices were crap.

All new Google TVs have a “dumb mode” that you can configure at startup.

I would absolutely love for this to be true, but I don’t really have faith in a project that has had so many issues. I think there will end up being more cost overruns, more finger pointing, and more failures. I half expect Brightline to both start and finish their LA to Vegas rail before this project comes to its final conclusion.

Okay but Elon also makes crazy grandiose statements on a daily basis.

To everyone implying that Elon leveraged the concept of hyperloop to kill high speed rail in California:

California killed high speed rail in California. The project is like 3x over budget with no real end in sight. If Elon dedicated his entire net worth in 2013 to the project it would still be over budget.

I can argue that everyone on Only fans is a pornstar, just that some are softcore pornstars. On the flip side some are prostitutes.

Twitch IMO is fucked up in a different way. This is a platform that pre-pubescent children frequently use. Allowing for nudity essentially creates a pipeline where kids hit puberty, form parasocial relationships with pornstars, and get unhealthy ideas about women.

Like in the past there used to be a lot more of a disconnect. Like if you went on pornhub, you were explicitly going to watch porn. The porn videos were well known to be completely over dramatized to the point where it can’t be taken as a realistic depiction of sex. The porn stars were explicitly porn stars. You had no idea about their personality and there was no concept of getting an emotional connection to them. There also was a general acknowledgement, even among the most liberal circles, that sex work was incredibly unhealthy.

Nowadays all of this shit is not only normalized to an insane degree, but the line between fiction and reality has been blurred to an insane degree.

Every time this comes up someone says “Oh what’s the harm? PRUDE”. There are some things that are harmful in ways that are difficult to explain, and not at all immediately clear. I feel like our current sex culture is a good example of that.

I’m gonna get downvoted, but this culture where teenagers can form parasocial relationships with what are essentially softcore pornstars and a culture where women can very easily become pornstars isn’t healthy.

If this becomes common enough there’s gonna be a whole cottage industry of jailbreaking cars.

How do they have this many employees and an absolutely trash android app?