The Antisocial Network

[mharr]

Eh, no, I really do get it - there's so many shitlords out there, the only safe response is to treat everything said in public as intentional. I stepped on that rake. Problem is it can play into the whole 'passive aggressive snowflakes' narrative, maybe send someone younger and less entrenched further to the right, generating more shitlordery for the future.

This wheel doesn't ratchet in a good direction, but I have no clue what to do about it. Give people more leeway and someone will play stupid games with it, intentionally hurt your regulars and plead innocence.

[Bal]

The left is inherently volatile and prone to infighting. This is probably the greatest challenge we face compared to the right.

[Brantly B.]

Obviously so is the right, they just happen to be galvanized toward a common enemy and that common enemy is their own countrymen. The left is too busy getting hung up on little things like murderers and rapists and terrorists and dictators to focus on the real threat, journalists.

[Bal]

No, I mean historically the left is inherently fractious, prone for forming sub-factions within sub-factions (Read: Life of Brian People's Front of Judea sketch). The right, historically, is of course somewhat fractious, but not nearly as much, and ultimately united by their inherent authoritarianism.

[Yoji]

The left has a thousand little nuanced opinions mumbling into as many microphones, while the right is screaming "DEATH PANELS" in unison. One side is going somewhere slowly, while the other is going nowhere fast.

[Mongrel]

[Mongrel]

Full NYT article

I'd like to imagine that there's a very special circle in hell for Jews who use both cries of "Anti-Semitism!" as well as actual antisemitism in spurious slander campaigns against their various perceived enemies.

[mharr]

Ahahahaha. Twitter have nuked my account (Like I was using it) for telling Trump to die in a fire. Can't have users attempting to "harass, intimidate, or silence someone else’s voice", you see. Unless they're judges, senators, presidents, clergy, or from TV.

My partner just pointed out that she's been trying in vain to get rid of her account to silence their spamming, and this sounds like a fine way to finally achieve that. Maybe it could be a movement!

[Mongrel]

Hm, they didn't ban me for this one:



I guess you just need to be oblique enough about it... >___>

[mharr]

Yeah, I figured there's no way they could shelter him from all dissent, so I can only read this as MAGA signalling on their part.

[Mongrel]

https://www.thrillist.com/amphtml/eat/p ... rger-quest

I Found the Best Burger Place in America. And Then I Killed It.

[Mongrel]

A short, simple, assessment of the current state of affairs:

-record all of your conversations
-note who your friends, family, colleagues and other important people are
-note all the keywords used in your conversations
-note how many times you use certain keywords in your conversations
-note who and what you're talking about, and when
-assess your emotional state -track everywhere you go, even when you're not using your phone
-catalogue what your face looks like, and what your friends' and family's faces look like
-assess your health and financial situation based on your conversations and who you call
-track all of the above information about your children

What if your phone company then:
-took all of that information about you, and allowed really really bad people to have it
-allowed those bad people to pretend they were someone you trust, and call you and trick you into going places and doing things
-allowed those bad people to get OTHER bad people find you. Bad people who want to do horrible things to you.

What if, when confronted, the phone company said that you were in control of
1. Your conversations - you could always opt to not talk to anyone
2. Your phone number
3. Whether or not your number's in the phone book.

But the phone company continues to collect all of the above information with you, and continues to share it with really evil people.

Would you think the phone company needs to be held accountable? Would you think the phone company needs to be regulated?

Facebook and social media are the Wild F*ckin' West. It doesn't matter how many hoodies or shiny self-driving cars are part of the package. They're operating in a lawless bubble. Remember that as our new, blue Congress is sworn in.

[Thad]

...while I certainly agree that we could use increased privacy regulations for social networks and other online advertising companies, analogizing online platforms to phone companies is a disingenuous argument usually pushed by the ISPs as a Whataboutist rationalization for why they shouldn't be subject to privacy regulations (or net neutrality).

Websites are not the telephone company. ISPs are the telephone company. (Usually literally.) Websites are the company on the other end of the phone. Except with much more thorough and easily-hidden data-collection mechanisms.

[Thad]

So I'm no expert on Tumblr. I subscribe to a few comic book writers there -- Gaiman, Simone, Busiek -- but I don't really use it aside from that. So maybe my read on it is off-base.

But my read is, the way it's managed to carve a niche for itself in the age of Facebook and Twitter is that it's mostly liberal, queer-friendly, sex-positive, and focused on creative endeavors. It's like DeviantArt but with more of a focus on blogs than image galleries. Is that about right?

Anyway, all of that comes with the expected issues, as mentioned in the other thread:

Tumblr has a huge bot problem, so their solution was to just... randomly delete people's blogs if they ever used the nsfw tag. Not only that, but they just purged your whole account so if you had a blog they arbitrarily targeted everything else is gone too.

It wasn't a bot problem, it was an "actual minors using tumblr to sell child pornography and arrange prostitution" problem.

tumblr had a lot of problems and refused to handle any of them until Apple of got on their back, at which point it was revealed they didn't know how to handle any of them.

So Tumblr's parent, Oath, the Verizon division whose understanding of the Internet is best summarized by its decision to purchase Yahoo and AOL, steps in to try and fix these problems. And does the absolute worst possible job of it.

It reeks of "Something must be done. This is something. Therefore, this must be done." It betrays a total lack of understanding of what Tumblr actually is, what its value is, and who uses it.

I don't know that this will be the end of Tumblr. After all, MySpace and LiveJournal are still around. But...well, I chose those comparisons on purpose. I think that's probably the direction Tumblr is headed.

It occurs to me that Tumblr's functionality could be implemented pretty easily through a Wordpress plugin. Is there such a plugin? Has anybody tried to do this?

It seems like it wouldn't be difficult to create a federation of interlinked but independently-operated blogs with no central authority -- maybe copy Mastodon's model, have multiple different networks that could choose to interact with one another or not.

As always, I see the problem here as being that users opted for a silo instead of the open Web -- and put themselves at the mercy of a for-profit corporation and its shareholders and advertisers.

It would be great if people would stop doing that and would turn to solutions that they can control themselves. But I think what's likelier is a lot of new users signing up for DeviantArt.

[Mongrel]

Yeah, Deviant Art is my guess. A freebie renaissance for them.

The idea of "a federation of interlinked but independently-operated blogs with no central authority", has come up a few times. The fun bit is a couple of my friends started joking that we should bring back webrings.

Which of course led to the inevitable joke references to:



("Would you like to turn on Frames?")

[Blossom]

DeviantArt has similar hard bans on any sexual content. "Artistic nudes" get a pass as long as they're very careful about what is or is not depicted.

They're also owned by an Israeli company, which is a bit of a turn-off for a lot of folks.

[Blossom]

If you're wondering what the entire Tumblr thing comes down to, it's really very simple: the inability to sell ad space next to porn, and a desire to monetize the social justice and fandom crowds. The child sex trafficking just shortened the timetable.

Apple's app store ban was the nail in the coffin, because the rules on what you're allowed to have on Tumblr now are exactly what you're allowed to have to stay in the app store, and what every reddit app has to impose in order to be listed in the app store. Apple's actually in the Supreme Court right now on an antitrust suit over the restrictions they place on the app store and the iPhone ecosystem. But that's not gonna mean anything because Verizon's running with it, chasing ad dollars that won't ever show up.

[Yoji]

But my read is, the way it's managed to carve a niche for itself in the age of Facebook and Twitter is that it's mostly liberal, queer-friendly, sex-positive, and focused on creative endeavors. It's like DeviantArt but with more of a focus on blogs than image galleries. Is that about right?

Sounds about right, at least from my experience. I don't know how it happened, but I seem to have filled my following list with lesbians who post Mass Effect and Assassin's Creed gifs, talk about feelings for about eighteen hours a day, and- when the stars are right- draw Avatar Korra's butt. All told, kind of a warm and fuzzy place, at least compared to other social networks.

Guess I shouldn't be surprised it's being nuked from orbit. Can't have nice things, y'know.

So Tumblr's parent, Oath, the Verizon division whose understanding of the Internet is best summarized by its decision to purchase Yahoo and AOL, steps in to try and fix these problems. And does the absolute worst possible job of it.

It reeks of "Something must be done. This is something. Therefore, this must be done." It betrays a total lack of understanding of what Tumblr actually is, what its value is, and who uses it.

Oath... I only just a couple weeks ago heard Tumblr was bought by Verizon, but that sure explains some things. I'm still mad at them for pretty much straight up saying "We're going to read your emails to try and figure out how to sell you shit." I mean, I kind of assumed that was being done in some way or another already, but it's something else to hear it said so explicitly.

The idea of "a federation of interlinked but independently-operated blogs with no central authority", has come up a few times. The fun bit is a couple of my friends started joking that we should bring back webrings.

Which of course led to the inevitable joke references to:

I felt the same thing when I left Facebook* in June. I had to leave Omelas, even though I have no idea where to go. I like the idea of going back to smaller personal networks- I'm pretty sure I've gushed about our own fair dinosaur-based forums- but that all kind of requires lots of people to pull in the same direction.

*by that I mean no longer posting. I still have friends who use it as a primary IM solution, but it's not like my permanent web address anymore.

[Mongrel]

I seem to have filled my following list with lesbians who post Mass Effect and Assassin's Creed gifs, talk about feelings for about eighteen hours a day, and- when the stars are right- draw Avatar Korra's butt.

The first thing I rushed to check on Tumblr (where I have no account and actually follow almost no one - nothing against it in principle, but the UI always drove me bananas) was to make sure Makani's account was still up.

Luckily most of her posted work is "messy black and sketches", so she says the the only thing which was taken down was an image used to jokingly punctuate a post:

[Brantly B.]

"We're going to read your emails to try and figure out how to sell you shit."

On addresses that previously had no relationship to Verizon at all, mind you.