I understand that this is a doomer sub but man. When you manage to get away from all this social media bullshit for a while then try to poke your head in you realize how relentlessly negative it is at all times, because nobody wants to actually do anything about anything, including go the fuck outside and forget about it for a bit, and everyone with any ambitions of sanity leaves.

Could we start discussing credible strategies to reverse this situation, or at least improve that number somehow? Absolutely the fuck not, never, ever ever. The shit is very literally crazy, I don’t know what I was trying to expect.

But this post is so much like the other posts on the rest of the site it took me a minute to notice where I was. Might as well stop acting like this is just one community, it’s everything.

F me I just went on my facebook for the first time in a couple months and motherfuckers are posting Robespierre quotes on there.

They fuckin misspelled it as Rabespierre and of course it’s a screenshot of letters on black fuck sake.

I been free for a while, buddy. I never cared to play Farmville and otherwise I’d get bored in 20 minutes and leave, so now I have to login every three months and change the password to keep my account from getting stolen and then I’m gone again.

Notice that I am typing this on an open source Reddit clone that has probably sucked down 2 hours of my life tonight somehow.

So, like, all the addicts are over here, I hope facebook is handing out blowjobs or something and I just don’t know about it.

For real though, last time I went on FB there were AI generated panty shots of Jennifer Aniston for some crazy reason that shit’s getting interesting like a dead mall now.

I stopped using upvotes/downvotes at all on Reddit. Unless you were on New, exclusively, it didn’t matter how often you got on Reddit, anything you were seeing was at least fifteen hours old. Any conversation was already done. Any up/downvotes you put in wouldn’t matter at all and probably just got ignored by the system. Anything you had to say would only appear to you, in reality it just dropped to the bottom of the sea, never again to be seen. Thousands had already spoken, somehow, and you were just walking through a snapshot of the past, already said and done.

For now, it’s much smaller here. Sometimes I find myself upvoting a post just to let the person know that somebody actually came in here and gave a fuck about what they had to say, that they aren’t talking to themselves in an empty room.

It makes sense to care a bit more, for a lot of reasons. We’ll see how long that vibe can sustain itself.

What’s the learning curve like? That honestly seems like a much bigger hurdle than cost.

I mean, it doesn’t really make any sense to keep volunteer-modding over there unless maybe Reddit allows that to be as painless as possible. All the money you SHOULD be paying these people who are the absolute backbone of your entire business model, but AREN’T, should easily justify whatever concessions you care to throw their way, any tools that make the job easier, whatever paltry expense.

But I’m reminded of somebody’s tangential advice about toxic workplaces, saying that if the people you work with daily are toxic, well, you can expect that to be part of the company culture that goes all the way to the top. The behavior is designed, encouraged, by leadership. There are none more entitled than Reddit the company. Thus, it’s community.

So of course anybody with real adult shit to tend to said “get fucked” because nothing else makes any sense. It doesn’t make sense to mod their website with shitty tools for pay, never mind for free. We can expect any competence to go with them. Anybody left over and desperate for mod is pretty suspect, and they’re about to lose all the really effective tools, so good fuckin luck bud.

I think Reddit cruises along like ha ha, we win, for another day, but those answers that everyone has been dipping in for were coming from some of the deepest wells of professional competence on the site. People were seriously like, “how do I solve this weird issue I’m having with Rust”, and they’d get that answer from a subreddit, not even from official docs, not a Youtube, no, Reddit was THE go-to place. r/Excel has taught more people to use the software than Microsoft has. Somebody literally shows up on the job trying to run some Excel so they don’t get fired and r/Excel will sort them right out. It’s one of the nicest places on the site, too. It goes on and on like that, as far as subreddits.

The people who provide such answers, for the good of the community, they can price their hourly rate quite nicely. It sure as hell ain’t “free”. Reddit has been the entire West-coast IT community killing company time, is what it’s been. Everything really valuable about the site has been bought with all that downtime that competent administrators have when they need to be at a desk and look busy while their automated processes do the work.

So everyone who’s worth a damn just threw in the towel. As the quality of moderation tanks, the casual non-mod users who still brought knowledge to the table will get fed up with problems and find another time sink. Soon enough all that’s gonna be left of the place is those miserable hate pits that always climb to the top of r/All. Have fun keeping shareholder value up with that shit.

But I gotta step back from Reddit-posting. Looks like there’s a new game in town. Me, I’m a filthy casual, so I’m just trying to hang on Lemmy and be a bro about it.

It’s not addiction, it’s entitlement. The blackouts hit hard across the internet, a lot of people have gotten used to just dipping into Reddit’s knowledge pool when they want an answer. I’m not talking about people you’d really call Redditors. These are the friends who only show up when they want something. When they’re with their real friends, they don’t have much good to say about you.

So when they lost that for just a couple days, they got pretty fussy. I’m trying to find the right words for somebody who considers themselves pretty Lefty almost but not quite ripping off the mask when they are expected to show solidarity with people they don’t really like but have become entitled to as a resource, because that was the vibe.

The only thing I can compare it to is when the Uber drivers tried to strike, and old women were up in their Twitter mentions like, “You better not make me miss work!” Once they rely on you, they expect you as a sort of right, even if your service isn’t a right. If you stop being their appliance, they get mad. They never, ever want to place blame where it goes, either.

That’s the thing, and that’s why Reddit is trying to IPO. There’s more to it than just people having a dopamine problem. It’s more like you’re their Uber driver, and you’d better not mess up their schedule. Fuck your strike and fuck you. Get back to work.

I think a lot of the people who made Reddit what it is and was may have learned their lesson by seeing their needs treated so dismissively, so they’ll be pretty gun shy to put themselves in that spot, again. Figure it out yourselves if that’s how it is. You mod the fucking thing, then.

FYI the way you improve proprioception as a daily practice is that you play drums. They all count. Digi drums, rock drums, Djembe drums, any drums, anything that calls itself drums. So long as you trigger the drum sounds with your body, in time (fingers on a sampler counts) we’re after the whole body focusing itself around the hands to create precise enough results. Just hands on your belly works. Honestly all of music is good for this. It is actuating the whole of your body in space to achieve a result, and the human body loves it. Proprioception.

Everything in the Fediverse is self-hosted on somebody’s dime, if not yours, with the cool part being that you can host yourself and at least have some control for your money and hassle.

Fediverse users seem to tend toward the over-40 set, with lots of people who can eat a $25 monthly hosting fee for their own instance if it matters to them. I think we’re reaching the point as an internet community where a lot more people are saying fine, I’ll pay for the social media thing if I have to, goddamn, fuckit can’t take it with you. All we have to show for “free” social media is communities that turn sour again and again, and a sort of perpetual fleeing of the storm from one site to the next.