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.

Well it’s more like

1. Use a device that is similar to a PlayStation controller to command a drone to rush into enemies
2. Keep that drone alive long enough for it to crash into enemy armor and explode
3. Call your enemies a racial slur
4. Post the entire thing to a sketchy streaming service set to techno music.

So yeah there’s actually a non-zero amount of commonality there.

There’s probably a base level of competence someone who grew up in modern society has without training that the North Koreans don’t have.

Like even if a convict has never operated a drone, there’s probably a good amount of them that have played FPS games. That experience can be used as a launching board into proper training.

Meanwhile the North Koreans might have absolutely zero experience with video games and smartphones, and extremely limited experience with computers in general. There’s so much you’d have to teach them before you can even start drone training.

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.

I didn’t have anything specific in mind, but a lot of this matches up based on the one episode I watched. There weren’t any sex scenes though.

The Air Nomad genocide happens within the first ten minutes, while Aang is on a walk or something. It’s billed as this super metal moment that shows you this isn’t for kids. However it looks so fucking cheap and is written so badly. I just sat there rolling my eyes.

To be fair, the online discourse part also didn’t match up. The show got good but not great reviews. Avatar is a lot more popular that most adaptations, especially among millennial bloggers who do these reviews. While there were the usual 9/10s, there were also a ton of reviews written by people who grew up watching the show that were just like “yeah this is disappointing in every way. I guess it’s okay if you didn’t watch the original show, idk you do you 5/10”. Because of the diversity of the original IP, there was no culture war BS either.

Honestly never heard of it lol.

So I’ve noticed that there are a lot of streaming movies and TV shows that match a lot of these patterns:

• IP is announced. Adaptation of extremely popular series with existing fanbase
• IP is billed as “adult” with “mature themes”
• Producer/Director goes on a podcast and compares IP to “Game of Thrones” a few weeks before release. Said comparison treats GoT as an ideal to aspire to instead of a cautionary tale.
• Producer/Director also insults existing fanbase for some reason
• IP is previewed to critics, gets amazing reviews
• IP comes out, and gets high streaming numbers day one
• Writing ends up being terrible
• Plot ends up being surface level, with all the subtly of the original adaptation cut out. This somehow is true now matter how basic the source material may seem
• Acting is terrible. There is at least one race swapped character, who they also butcher from a writing perspective
• VFX is terrible, and expensive scenes are cut out
• Costumes are terrible to the point where everything looks like shitty cosplay
• There’s a few violent scenes that are extremely gratuitous. VFX and writing are so bad that it’s comical instead of jarring
• There are a few random sex scenes thrown in. The sex scenes detract from the pacing of the story, and are blatantly thrown in so producers can brag about them
• Sex scenes tend to focus on the female form. If men are involved, they all are hairless and look like boy band members
• If it is a gay sex scene, it blatantly written by women and for women with an extremely limited knowledge of men as a whole
• In a few days, the Internet erupts with needlessly vitriolic discourse about said IP.
• A year post release, the show is essentially forgotten.

In that context it’s no surprise younger people don’t like sex scenes. It’s basically a canary for a low quality show and extreme toxicity.

Look I’m sorry but this is ridiculous. The type of people to not be able to afford $15/month most likely don’t have insurance, or even access to a pharmacy. While there isn’t any real data on the venn diagram of people having sex more than once a day and being too poor to afford an extra 50¢ per day for every extra sex session, but I suspect it is vanishingly small.

At some point this is just virtue signaling. It’s eyeroll inducing.

The condom part is silly.

Cost and availability aren’t barriers to condom usage. They sell 36 packs of condoms at Walmart for like $15. Basically every single convenience store sells them for prices that, while massively inflated, are pretty low in the grand scheme of things. Most college health centers give them out for free.

The reason people don’t wear them is because doing it raw just feels better.

I feel like in a few years Valve is gonna have another go at Steamboxes, and both Sony and Microsoft are going to end up being caught off guard.

Well duh that’s what they Keyblade is for

If you think this is a conservative thing I really don’t know what to tell you. Anyone who has been paying attention for the last five years could tell you that this is a problem that goes beyond political affiliation.

Lol maybe if you’re a white guy in a middle class neighborhood below the age of 60 that doesn’t have any open indication of being queer or a ethnic/religious minority.

Men are much more likely to be a victim of every other violent crime besides rape.

I know “rich” means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but “paying for priority boarding” should not be included in a reasonable definition of the word.