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 funniest part of this is the “battle lines” being drawn on differing perspectives.

Usually it’s a culture war thing. Liberals say X, conservatives say Y. Vice versa also happens. Big sweeping statements are made over relatively minor events.

This time the best indicator of what someone thinks of this is how establishment they are. NPR and Fox News are both reporting this as a tragedy. Meanwhile basically every single culture war influencer under the sun is just like “yeah talk shit get hit LMAO”.

In real life, I have friends who aren’t celebrating this. Again the demarcation isn’t political, but philosophical. My friends who are inclined to follow the rules no matter what disapprove, and everyone else finds it sort of morbidly funny. Even then the disapproval is sort of a milequost “even if he had it coming, extrajudicial killing isn’t okay”.

Most people on this list have taken their foot off the gas in a major way, and do more of what they want.

Elon is currently blowing tens of billions of dollars running Twitter into the ground, designs impractical cars because he thinks they look cool, committing light treason, and campaigning for a president who would be detrimental to his business interests.

While the Zuck is still involved at Meta, he also picked up a ton of other hobbies. A lot of them are objectively cool. He also seems to spend a lot of time with his wife and kids.

Bezos seems to spend most of his time having sex with his age appropriate mistress on his $500 million yacht.

I was in college when this happened. Absolutely nobody thought he could win until Florida was called. Trump himself seemed mildly surprised in his victory speech.

Honestly this is sort of ridiculous.

• Biden is a Washington insider now, but that’s because he had a lifetime to make something of himself. He grew up in the middle class
• I think we can all agree Obama was an outsider without any sort of elaboration
• Bill Clinton grew up dirt poor in a state that basically only makes the news when something stupid happens.

All three had to climb the ladder in a huge way, that simply wouldn’t have been possible in a lot of other countries.

I also feel like Trump embodies the whole “anyone can be president” in his own sort of fucked up way. Trump obviously was born into immense wealth and enjoyed tremendous status, but he was in no way ever considered leadership material by America’s political elite. His election was a complete “wtf” moment and wouldn’t have happened in most countries. In a more rigid system we’d probably have had something like a Hillary Clinton v Jeb Bush election, which strictly speaking would have been better than what we got but also let’s be real we would have all hated it.

I’m not saying America is some pure meritocracy. Bush was a third generation political dynasty member. His opponents were also pretty well connected. It’s just that he’s only one of several presidents to get elected in the past 30 years.

Honestly after watching DS9 I think O’Brien is the best engineer in the entire series.

Almost every other engineer we see works on some flagship federation starship. O’Brien has had to deal with:

• DS9, a hodgepodge of three different alien technologies and the occasional booby trap
• The Defiant, which was half baked to such an extent he had to design and implement a complete overhaul of major systems
• The dominion war alliance fleet, where he had to oversee repairs for the ships of three major alien races. Even if he didn’t do the repairs himself, he probably had to have significant working knowledge.

I feel like the only person you could compares is Scotty, and that’s mostly based on his feats in that one TNG episode and SNW.

Look man at this point saying either party has a monopoly on pedophilia is sort of ridiculous. It’s very obviously a rich/powerful thing, not a left/right thing.

I don’t see how anyone doesn’t understand that at some point. Diddy’s arrest was less than 24 hours ago.

No, but the idea that any random white guy could get away with what Trump gets away with is also laughable. Since 2016 there have been a million and one politicians trying to act Trumpian, and none of them enjoyed the nearly success Trump has.

For reasons beyond my comprehension, Trump seems to have this larger than life persona that has allowed him to escape scandal after scandal that would doom literally any other politician.

As a fun sidenote, look up DC Mayor Marion Barry. Dude made Trump look pedestrian.

I’m convinced a lot of those “punch a Nazi” people just wanted an excuse to be violent, and just joined the movement because it gave them an excuse to be violent. In another universe they are joining those three percenter militias.

Look man I don’t know how old you are, but this type of comment is what I’d expect a teenager to write. it’s not just that you’re acting like a massive asshole; You’re using insults and arguments that I’d expect a teenager to come up with. It’s the sort of argument that only works if the vast majority of people in the audience are already both deeply in your corner and also immature. Otherwise you’d just come off looking like a massive jackass.

Do you have any experience talking to people outside of an echo chamber? How does that go for you?

This is a serious answer so it’s gonna get down voted to hell, but whatever.

There’s a huge portion of Americans who are suffering. Their personal lives are kind of awful, they live in communities that are impossible to get ahead and the communities are often that way to due the direct actions of the political establishment in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Above all else, these communities don’t really feel heard by the liberal establishment. They feel as though their concerns are dismissed by what they see as the powers that be. They feel that their anguish is belittled as a personal failure, and often downright mocked. They also feel as though a lot of entities that fucked them are liberally coded.

To these people, Trump is the guy who makes those people seethes and tells them to fuck off. That endears them to him and offers extreme loyalty. They often dismiss the allegations against him because at some point every single conservative has been implied to be a disgusting person in popular culture.

Ironically I think a lot of Trump’s worst actions solidified the support of his base, because of where America has been at since his political ascendency. The US culture war has been raging for a decade now, and both sides have a habit of taking extreme positions while vilifying their opposition. That is naturally going to cause people to get more aggressive, which in turn villifies Trump.

An example I love to use is vaccine skepticism during covid. There were two huge groups of vaccine skeptics in America: rural whites, and black Americans. Both had suffered greatly at the hands of an aloof medical establishment, and both had their suffering ignored. While the Black community’s wounds run deeper, the rural white community was fresh off the opioid crisis. They had every reason to be skeptical about big pharma lying to them for profit, because that’s literally what happened just a few years prior.

The liberal response to the black community was understanding and outreach. The medical community made a huge effort to reach out to black community members and popular figures in black culture. There was a direct acknowledgement of the medical establishment’s bigotry in the past. There was not a culture of shame for people who did not choose to get vaccinated. This was also reflected in news articles and social media posts.

Their response to the rural white community was basically the opposite. The medical establishment’s outreach was extremely limited by comparison. The opioid crisis was written off as a failure by the Sacklers as opposed to any systemic issues that the medical establishment needs to address. Vaccine skeptics were repeatedly and aggressively shamed, with open discussion in regards to simply enforcing vaccination via mandates. Basically every MSM article talked about how the vaccine hesitancy was a character flaw. Social media went even farther. Not only did they call conservative vaccine skeptics things like death cultists, but there were forums dedicated to making fun of antivaxxers dying of covid. People would post private Facebook posts of people they knew by two or three degrees of separation, and then liberals would more or less celebrate their demise. You even had the return of the word “sky fairy” on reddit to describe when these people prayed to God.

Trump, for his part, encouraged people to get vaccinated. He stated multiple times at his rallies that vaccines could end covid, and that they were making him look bad by not doing so. He was, at his own rallies, booed so loud he had to stop talking. He quickly changed his tune.

A consistent trend in liberal circles is the belief that they have complete moral and intellectual authority, as well as the belief that this authority gives them the ability to treat people who don’t conform like shit. I’m pretty sure I’m voting for Harris, but there are also times where I felt like I should just say home. It’s completely fucking insufferable, and ironically has a ton in common with evangelical christian politics that dominated the US in the 1980s. So long as that mentality is there, you’ll have people like Trump gaining undeserved support.

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.

Look honestly I don’t think this is that dystopian.

Smoke detectors existed in bathrooms forever. The main use in high school seems to be catching particularly dumb teenagers smoking cigarettes in the bathroom. When I was in high school they were tuned to be super sensitive to the point where water vapor could set one off. I remember one time where the entire school had to stand out in the rain after a fire alarm went off, in what was later determined to be just two teenagers smoking in the bathroom.

Teachers also have been trying to catch students smoking for like 50 years. Back in the 20th, there were assistant principals that basically roamed the halls looking for whiffs of cigarette smoke. Part of the reason memes about hanging out under the bleachers started is because it was the best place to smoke on account of being outside, out of the way, and old school gym teachers just not giving a fuck.

This dudes app just seems like a modern update on very old concepts. Instead of teenagers smoking cigarettes, they are vaping. Instead of a smoke detector, you have something designed specifically for vapes. Instead of some super anal assistant principal on patrol, you have some super anal assistant principal sprinting across the school. Who knows, maybe this is the thing that forces teenagers to touch grass because I’m willing to there aren’t vape detectors under the bleachers and gym teachers still don’t give a fuck.

Oh this is another thing. I know some women who are perpetually single despite heavy usage of OLD. I used to have a lot of sympathy, but at this point I’ve met many women in relationships via OLD, and the entire process took them six weeks. The second category of women weren’t “higher value” or whatever, they just had more realistic expectations and were less shallow.

I’m 30 years old, and even when I was 15 I wasn’t really friends with the super mean girl gossip types. Throughout my life, I’ve been friends with women who largely identify as feminist and sort of reject those stereotypes.

The problem is that post #metoo it became normalized to take the whole “support women” thing to such an extreme that it enabled toxic behavior. While there were women who tried to pull the whole “it’s sexist to criticize me for making poor life choices” crap, other women would get super offended for them attempting to use feminism in that way.

It’s extremely frustrating that the 19 and 20 year old women I knew in college had better moral compasses than the 25 to 40 year old women I know now. That’s really not supposed to be how it works.

Okay so what instances do you think are not betrayals? The only thing that I can see as subjective is the “roster”, and I’ve had a good amount of single friends express their own feelings of betrayal on that.

Unless you’re actually just getting salty on me calling out open relationships, in which case the betrayal is assumed because of the inevitable breakup.