I think that's true for Reddit because Huffman hasn't done anything dramatic enough to lose the base yet unfortunately. But I think Twitter's base has been melting away. Hard to say because only Musk has the numbers. But with Threads out there now with millions of users and Mastodon having over a million users, the disillusionment with Twitter is much more clearly shown.
Gray
joined 2 years ago
It's funny you say that because that's exactly where my mind went too. A system with elections, but a class of officials that exist outside of that system and that can overrule it and can't be touched by it.
More like... Falawful... I'll see myself out imsosorry.
I think the best part is that an "X" in the top corner of a website is a well known sign to close a page. Like, I need to fight the urge to click it to exit out. Beyond that, how the fuck are you even supposed to search anything about it? X is such an ambiguous name. I don't know why the fuck Musk spent billions on Twitter just to completely rebrand the IP into something so utterly idiotic. Considering his destruction of the platform and firing of most of the staff that maintained it, I would have thought the one thing of value he still had left was name recognition and major cultural ownership of words like "tweet". I can hardly believe that a decade ago I thought Musk was a genius and I dreamed of working for SpaceX (a dream that faded as soon as I saw employee reviews thank God). Now it's clear that the man has no idea how to run a small business let alone something as big as Twitter.
I most recently encountered this fact from the game, Stray! You know, the recent game with the cat and all the robots. Apparently their city design was heavily inspired by the Kowloon Walled City.
This is genuinely quite a scary belief coming from a SCOTUS justice. In effect he is saying that the SCOTUS is the only institution in the US that is completely untouchable by legislation. That elevates the SCOTUS to a level beyond any other government position. Effectively our benevolent overlords. Given how low of approval ratings that the SCOTUS has, their recent series of ideological activist decisions, and the fact that they aren't even elected positions, I find myself increasingly in support of a fundamental redefinition of the SCOTUS as we know it. I don't see why we shouldn't stack the SCOTUS when they've fundamentally abandoned their duty to any level of fairness or responsibility for the citizens of the US.
That's a common glitch on Lemmy right now. Subscribing to communities oftentimes gives you that message, but as far as I'm aware they'll still show up in your feed like normal. I've heard if you click subscribe and then let it sit for a while it can resolve itself to show you as fully subscribed, but I haven't had much luck with that.
Well, for context, Mastodon has around 1.5 million monthly active users. Twitter/Reddit are around 450 million monthly active users. You can enjoy Lemmy's small size but also see that at 60k monthly active users it hasn't even reached a size comparable to many other famous small sized forums. I don't know what N is. I personally think the Fediverse should be the replacement for corporate social media and that social media can be essential in how information spreads through society. It can decide elections. It can shift society's views on issues. I think it does us a disservice to go the hipster route and cling to our small niche thing and resist growth. The beauty of Lemmy is that there will always be small communities regardless. Anyone who wants a small community need only defederate from the big servers and stick to a small, niche server.
Sure, it was there before Trump. It technically can be traced all the way back to Reagan and the Religious Right movement. We saw it pop up its ugly head from time to time. Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, the Tea Party movement, and so on. But Trump gave it new life. He redefined the movement into something so much newer and more sinister. To some degree they unshackled themselves from any illusion of actual well-intentioned religion. But most importantly for this conversation, 2016 was the year that they started actually using the internet as a recruitment tool. The alt right went mainstream. I grew up in rural Wisconsin and it's the year that half the people I knew on social media went rabid conspiracy theory bleeding red Republican. As someone else pointed out, it's the year that Cambridge Analytica started harvesting data from people on Facebook to use for political campaigning. 2016 was an explosion of what was there before that culminated in the election of Trump. And that's the year that I really felt the greatest shift in discourse on the internet. The spectacle of 2016 turned everything towards news on social media and away from personal connections.
I think we're all a bit disillusioned with it now. I feel like on the 2000's era internet we all were showing up bright eyed and optimistic about the possibilities. We lived in a world without the internet and having it felt like a superpower. But in the 2010's and especially around 2016, the misinformation pump got turned on hard and we saw the internet bring some truly sinister real world events to fruition. SEO started getting used more and more through the 2010's. Social media companies started finding nasty ways to profit off of us by being more selective in what we see. And now this has been the year of enshittification with big companies finally making moves that actively worsen our experiences in order to cash in on a lot of investment money that never turned into anything real. Basically I think what happened is a mixture of people becoming more cynical and the internet becoming over-automated and now this year businesses finally realizing that potential profit is worthless without acting on it.
With all that said though, the Fediverse feels like our chance to finally fight back. Lemmy still only has around 60k monthly active users. We need to try to bring that number up.
You are just a capitalist that likes welfare. Your ideology has absolutely no desire to change the ruling class or overturn the system that is currently burning the world and leading us to destruction.
I don't think you help your case arguing this way. I'm not even dissecting socialism when I say that - just your approach to argument. You don't know my ideology. Creating a strawman of my views isn't going to convince me or anyone else that you have a good point. Hell, for a long time I did consider myself an actual socialist. I would love to lay out my reasons for my movement away from that, but I'm not sure you're ready to have that respectful exchange of views.
The liberals obsessed with the “nordic model” still would’ve downvoted it. They don’t like having to wrestle with the reality of climate change. Our options are socialism or extinction.
Beginning an argument with "Your head is up your ass so far that I won't bother arguing. I'm right no matter what." is a sure way to have people dismiss your arguments outright. I say this all because I want my opponents to be good at arguing. I want to hear persuasive viewpoints. I don't believe for a moment that I have all the answers, so I welcome any opposition to the beliefs that I've come to possess. If you believe that you have the answers, then I'm genuinely all ears. But unfortunately, arguing isn't about being right - it's about persuading other people that you are. The internet has made it easy to lose sight of this and argue with hostility instead of respect. I'm trying to be sincere here. Please consider the purpose of getting into these internet spats. I see so much hostility outright from people on the left and it genuinely sucks. I find that when I try to dig even a little bit into arguments for socialism or communism that I often hit this barrier of hostility. It's not a good way of selling a viewpoint. And you can say that it's not your job, but then I ask why we're even here having this conversation.
Now, I'll stop patronizing you. I'll throw my argument out there so you can tear it to pieces. Back to labels - what socialism looks like to you depends on who you are. You say it's when "the old institutions are thrown out and the new institutions are introduced". I'll take that to mean some form of government is in possession of the means of production across the board? My hesitancy towards socialism is mostly centered on my knowledge of history and the repeated trends of powerful institutions decaying into corruption and greed. I think socialism could genuinely work really well as long as the people in charge were kept honest. But my skepticism is towards the long term sustainability of such a system. Time and again we see institutions decay and fall prey to humanity's worst impulses. The fall of the Roman Republic (and the regular chaos of the Roman Empire for that matter) is my classic go-to for this, but there are plenty of non-western examples as well. The best cases I've seen in my studies of various histories seem to be centered around cultures that dispersed their power into many smaller institutions. My problem with socialism is that it inherently says "we're going to get rid of business corruption and government corruption by combining the two". I think creating an even smaller, more focused center of power in society is a dangerous proposal - it becomes all the more easy for the wealthy elites to worm their way into that power and take control. Essentially you're taking all of those wealthy capitalist greedy dirtbags and then moving them into the government.
Capitalism, on the other hand, removes business from government which allows, in theory, for the government to act as a counter-weight to business. Now, you and I both know that that hasn't stopped wealthy elites from worming their way into capitalism and capturing government interests. But my main point here is that socialism isn't solving that problem. It's throwing fuel on the fire by cutting out the one supposed protection we do have, which is a separation of government interests and business interests. Ostensibly, when capitalism is working the way it should, the government is acting as a counterweight to business greed. I think there are better ways to strengthen that counterweight that don't necessarily fall under the label of "socialism". I think heavily regulated capitalism is better than outright socialism because in the ideal case the government is still acting as a tool of the people, flexing its power in opposition to businesses. The ideal case in socialism has the government acting as the businesses itself, which I believe would encourage greed and would actual cause even less incentive to address things like climate change.
All it's going to take is one scandal for these bullshit bills to cause overwhelming outrage that'll lead to lost elections. These old fucks are so out of touch with modern tech. It's a joke that they're in charge of regulating things like encryption. I can't wait until a generation of people that grew up with the internet ages into these legislative positions.