Sometimes I feel like democrats don’t actually care more about voters, they just care much more about appearances.

My Instagram reels are the most tame shit ever. You gotta redo your filters.

The fact that meta is also banned makes me think a huge part of this is just getting people onto Bluesky.

I get Zuckerberg is an asshole, but Instagram is the least toxic platform for me. That’s because Instagram has keyword and subject filtering.

To be fair that 1950s boomer is putting that pedal to the floor, seatbelts off, zero concern for anyone’s lives including their own.

I do wonder if there’s something up with Michelle Obama. The inaugural stuff is one thing, but I find it odd that she skipped Jimmy Carter’s inauguration.

I mean for all we know they might and just choose not to federate.

DEI was just blockchain but for HR.

I agree. Ironically he also went on a bit of a rant about how the traditional media outlets whittle down interviews to the most salacious bits, and that’s part of the reason the American public is slowly losing trust in them.

While the reason for him saying this is to discredit his previous perception as robotic, he’s also not wrong. All the articles I read “highlighting” the interview hyper focused on a few lines, and in doing so left and incomplete or dishonest impression.

So I watched the entire three hour interview.

Technically speaking, Zuckerberg emphasizes the need for balance. He on multiple times either emphasizes that both men and women should feel comfortable in corporate environments, and explicitly says something like “there has to be a balance” on at least two occasions.

The issue is that other parts of the interview don’t really match that idea of balance. Zuckerberg and Rogan spent like a third of the entire interview talking about bro culture stuff. I’m not even talking about “bro culture in the context of corporate America”. Rogan spends like a full ten minutes lecturing Zuckerberg on the proper way to bow hunt.

Overall I think the media is focusing outrage bait while ignoring the serious implications of the interview. Zuckerberg is clearly lobbying the Trump administration to prevent meta and other US tech companies from being subject to EU regulatory security. It has serious implications both as a consumer and in terms of geopolitics.

You’re on a website where people come out of the woodwork to defend “ethical polyamory” and the biggest cuck you can think of is a CEO trying to curry political favor with the current US president?

Hate to break it to you but reddit isn’t dead.

I still go on reddit. In a lot of ways it’s a lot worse than it used to be. It’s way more corporate. Huge portions of the site seem sanitized, often in obvious and eyeroll inducing ways. There’s also a lot less content in general. The content that does exist is lower effort, and way more repetitive.

However in some ways it’s genuinely better. The discourse is a lot less toxic than it used to be. A lot of genuine cruelty wrapped in virtue signaling that defined the site from 2018 to 2022 is either gone or greatly diminished. It’s also slightly less of an echo chamber.

I think what happened is that after the mobile apocalypse, a lot of the power users left the platform. While these people contributed a lot to the site, they were also extremely toxic people with an even more warped worldview.

The mods are a reflection of this. They are more corporate, which leads to a lot of censorship like this. However it also means that scrolling is quite a bit more pleasant.

Overall I spend more time on Reddit than Lemmy. There’s very little content here once you filter out all the outrage bait.

So there are actually levels to antivaxxers. The granola nuts that think putting anything into your body is a sin are actually the extreme minority or antivaxxers these days.

The average antivaxxer is someone who has extremely little faith in both big pharma and the government as a whole. They usually come from a community that has been screwed over by both. In the US, this translates to older first generation immigrants, the African American community, and low income white people in areas that were hit hard by the opoid crisis.

A lot of these people are cool with the traditional flu vaccine, because it’s been around forever. The covid vaccines on the other hand were met with skepticism, on account of it being “untested”. In their eyes FDA testing and positive media coverage don’t mean anything, because in their eyes both groups have lied to their faces in the past.

A lot of the antivaxxer discourse during covid frustrated me. While there were people who were legitimately just idiots, there were a lot of communities who had fears rooted in genuine trauma and frustration. Calling them a bunch of idiotic death cultists and then celebrating on social media when one of them died just resulted in those communities distrusting the system further.

That’s generally what happens when you win the popular vote.

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.

I mean Trump’s economic policies are a philosophical rejection of trickle down economics. He campaigned on a platform of leveraging trade protectionism and immigration reform to produce higher blue collar salaries. He’s doing so in a way that is giving both Wall Street and economic experts conniptions, because they’ll end up biggest losers. Trump has even explicitly called out NAFTA and one of the reasons he won 2016 was his rejection of the TPP.

That is honestly the kind of policy I’d be opening to supporting in a vacuum. A lot of it is oddly similar to Bernie’s economic plans circa 2014. The problem is Trump is an openly corrupt billionaire, friends with other slightly less openly corrupt billionaires, may/may not be a Russian asset, and probably is in the early stages of dementia. There’s absolutely no way he delivers.

Honestly I have a lot of sympathy for these people.

It’s one thing to invest in some moonshot crypto. It’s another to invest in something claiming to be FDIC insured. There’s also not a good way of verifying that information to the extent the victims would have needed to know something was amiss.

It seems like the FDIC was asleep at the wheel, and didn’t really know or give a shit that someone was leveraging them to mislead consumers. Instead of actually fixing the problem, they just washed their hands of it.

You can call Trump the devil all you want, but the system was broken long before he came on the scene.