PoliticalAgitator @ PoliticalAgitator @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

I can save a pro-gun cultist the effort and just fill in this comment chain in advance:

Cultist: "Shall not be infringed"

Sane people: "Well regulated"

Cultist: "Well regulated doesn't mean subjected to regulations like background checks and not hitting your wife, it means well-functioning, like a watch

Sane people: "It's not that either. Your militia has no training or physical fitness standards, may never had to demonstrate safe and competent handling of their weapon and has an open contempt for the chain of command"

Cultist: "No but its a mental health problem"

Sane people: "Okay, sounds like gun owners should be have to undergo a mandatory mental health assessment before buying guns then"

Cultist: "If you try and make me prove I'm not a dangerous extremist I'll kill you".

Why bother thinking of a good excuse when the reactionary votes and millions in gun-lobby "donations" will keep coming either way? Just say any old shit until it blows over.

You do know what federation means right?

Actually, who cares what you know? You're dull as fuck. You opened with a generic "the bad people called me a nazi" conservative whine and your single trick since then has been sticking stereotypes on people.

I'm not going to read your reply, but I'll just assume it has the word "hexbear" on it.

And you're the one unhappy with the people who were already there and think they should leave. You've reiterated those points multiple times.

What are your plans for the weekend? Turning up to a party you weren't invited to and telling the hosts if they don't like it, they can leave?

I'd love for this place to be as openly welcoming as early reddit.

Don't worry you can start your own server, just like everyone else who disagrees with you is supposed to.

I understand you don't like when normal people come into the frontiers, but that just means you'll constantly need to find new frontiers

Nah, we can just keep calling them Nazis. That's your entire explanation for why those "normal people" aren't here remember?

You'll always have Hexbear tho. For want of a frontier, it's easy to have an island.

Yeah it's pretty clear that your faux-wisdom is nothing more than a premise to label people as undesirables.

Yeah that's fair. Sorry. I was pretty burned out on comments saying "there's not enough content, we need to shove more content into this one place, more and more content forever so we can be more like that other site with all the content in one place only we hate it".

But thank you for elaborating on what content you actually want. There are niche communities that aren't very well served on Lemmy, but I never found them all that valuable on reddit either, often being overrun with low effort memes, "look at this photo of a 3080/PS5/whatever I bought" and a daily posting of questions like "how can I program an MMO".

Chasing some vague, unconditional "growth" just seems like people are rushing to recreate the worst parts of reddit.

You still seem to think this is about me, and it is not.

The longest paragraph in your comment literally starts with "I, personally".

Scattered around that are your opinions about why Lemmy isn't bigger, that you're insisting this thread was created to solicit.

But the moment someone does the same thing, in the same thread, but disagreeing with you about the reasons? "This thread isn't about that".

We can play the game if you want though. Was reddits growth -- literally the measuring stick in the discussion -- thanks to it peppering the centre right with gentle kisses every time they blessed the site with a visit?

Nope. It was about as left-wing as Lemmy and if you said something that was demonstrably bullshit, 8 different people would tell you to fuck off.

The reality is that it became a centralised location for memes and pornography.

Whatever "growth" it saw by giving brave little conservatives a place to call their own had to be repeatedly undone because they just couldn't stop using slurs, brigading threads and advocating terrorism.

So they moved to Voat instead, instantly turning it into a cesspit of mask off neonazim and "not technically child pornography but we're going to use it as child pornography anyway".

How did that "growth" work out for them? Oh right, terminally.

It literally does. I support the fediverse and thus want it to grow. If you need a place just for you, you can find one that aligns with you or create your own.

Yet your solution wasn't "someone should make a center-right server that is more tolerant to our completely reasonable views and harmless slurs", it was "all these perverts and nerds should be nicer to us".

You know, that exact thing I mentioned. You've just made it clearer that your take genuinely is "this platform is overrun by leftists who need to be nicer to us poor oppressed conservatives and if they're don't like it, they can create their own space just for themselves".

I assume the next step is that you join that new instance, complain it's full of leftists and insist they go somewhere else.

Does Truth Social have threads about wanting more people to join Truth Social? Because this is a thread about advertising for lemmy.

Yes. Brainstorming how to "redpill" people is one of the far-rights favourite past times, right up there with using slurs and obsessing about strangers having the correct opinons about their own genitals.

Did you very carefully dodge using the word "discussion" in your reply? Because this is a thread discussing the growth of Lemmy but it looks like we were supposed to just grovel at the feet of your opinion.

Hexbear exists and you can join it.

Have you forgotten which one of us was having a big teary about not feeling welcome because this thread right here was too left wing? I'm fine where I am thanks.

Growth. The thing this thread is about.

Yep. Growth and growth only. The user count goes up by one and we can pretend "bigger number means better" like we're sad little middle managers.

My contribution to this discussion is making it clear just how little genuine value there is caving to your slimy little guilt trip.

I just think it'd be cool to see things other than linux, lefty, & star trek memes on here sometimes

If you're not happy with what you're being spoonfed, there's an entire world of content out there waiting for you.

Millions of songs, books, comics, movies, short films, podcasts, video games, board games, documentaries and every other kind of content. Much of it available for free or pocket change.

My favourite books and bands have zero mentions on reddit. I didn't learn about them from social media, so I inherently learned about them while not scrolling social media.

And of course don't forget you can build things too. I've made some games that do turn up on reddit occasionally and while it's pretty cool to connect with fans and read the discussions, none of the knowledge, inspiration, connections or thoughts that went into them came passively from social media.

What do you actually want to see/feel/discuss? Because it might not be a thing you can find on social media, sandwiched between memes and Overwatch pornography, no matter how many people use the site.

Maybe you should try jumping on Truth Social and suggesting they'd have a larger userbase if they're were more tolerant of left wing views?

Why is it always "leftists" who are supposed to welcome any and all political views with a warm mouth?

What exactly are you offering in return besides entitled posts complaining "these people I'm stereotyping with open contempt weren't nice enough when they replied to my unsolicited opinion with opinions of their own"?

It doesn't appear to be posts, moderation, money, code or insight.

But if we had more subs on other topics it should bring in other types of people.

Is that actually desirable or just growth for growths sake? Rage comics and lolcats brought huge numbers of new users to reddit and the quality of content immediately began to decay.

Maybe a social media site that runs out of content is a good thing.

It’s a need, like alcohol and tobacco

Two things that demonstrably haven't grown more popular when they've been made less accessible, despite those restrictions not having 100% success rate.

And although I don't fundamentally object to any of them, calling alcohol, tobacco and pornography a "need" just makes you sound like even more of a child.

I don't see how blocking porn and weed is a winning strategy.

Then you're giving the people involved far more benefit of the doubt than they deserve. They're far-right extremists. It's not hollow rhetoric or exaggeration, they're here and they're passing laws.

If you disregard the excuses that come out of their mouths, this is perfectly aligned with the far-right ideology that has infested the Republican party.

Groups like the Proud Boys, the former head of the Ku Klux Klan and incessant fuckwits like Jordan Peterson all openly promote giving up jerking off and routinely make pseudoscientific claims about it increasing your testosterone, therefore making you more of a man.

They're also working hard to broaden the term "pornography" to include anything that acknowledges any sexuality other than "straight" and any form of gender expression that doesn't clearly broadcast what genitals you have. This allows them to attack teachers and authors that dare say anything that isn't right wing.

Weed is essentially the same story as it's always been. It was made illegal so police could target "undesirables" like black people, hippies, jazz musicians and women who wanted to be more than a source of hot meals and warm holes for a middle class husband.

Literally the only thing they changed was updating the left-wing stereotypes.

Pornography access seems very close to people's heart in here but the claim "it won't decrease viewership, probably increase it" has zero chance of being true.

However insignificant it might be, any amount of faff will lower participation and there isn't a single person in the world thinking "I don't watch pornography or allow my children to watch pornography but now the gubbermint is involved we're going to do nothing else but watch smut".

There are so many shit takes in this thread that I have to assume they're from children upset about their pornography being cut off.

I don't know but it would be very like Valve to put zero effort into ensuring it's not manipulated.

That said, most large polls trend much more mainstream than people expect.

Starfield may have been a bold new frontier in mediocrity but it nevertheless had about 2 million more chances to be someomes favorite game compared to some indie title.

Probably.

Comedians doing stand up usually joke about themselves or their lives. Black comedians make jokes about being black. Lesbian comedians make jokes about being lesbian.

Usually when they start joking about other people's race, gender or sexuality, they've run out of material about their own lives and started punching down to keep their career going.

The biggest obstacle to spreading far-right propaganda has always been finding a platform.

Before the internet, when neonazis tried to shove racist leaflets into peoples pockets at punk gigs, they'd be immediately run out of the venue, despite "angry, dissaffected, young people" being exactly the kind of vulnerability they were looking for.

When the internet did come along, initially things weren't much better. Sure, there were sites like Stormfront, but nobody went there. So instead they'd "raid" other forums to spread their shitty views, getting instantly banned because they hadn't figured out how to be a Nazi with plausible deniability yet.

When they finally nailed that, it was a big moment for them.

Historically, mainstream media also never gave a fuck what the opinions of Nazis were. But the moment they rebranded to "alt-right", the psycopathic, for-profit, neoliberal media companies saw a way to make some quick cash without having to openly admit they were functioning as a mouthpiece for people with swastika tattoos.

From there, the "mask on, hide your powerlevel" stategy was codified. 4chan and far-right Discord servers openly stategized about how to do it best, such as presenting their dogshit opinions as popular, moderate beliefs and blaming progressives for their asshole personalities.

By the time Charlottesville's swastika-waving parade and domestic-terrorism-finale happened, it was too late. Key figures in the far-right funnel had settled into social media like bedbugs at a two-star hotel.

Whenever a platform tried to get rid of them, they'd slip away through cracks in the walls. They would get banned and create new accounts that were slightly toned down, searching for that sweet spot of "as far-right as we can get away with". They'd move to another major platform (or somewhere else on the same platform), because there was no coordinated effort to remove them for good.

But despite the slow, uncordinated response from social media sites, it was starting to work, especially on Twitter. By the time you'd hidden how far-right you were, you could no longer spread your message. Nobody was fooled by the dog whistles, fake engagement and flowery misrepresentations of "freedom of speech" any more.

Intially, they tried their own mask-off Twitter with Truth Social (who conspiciously aren't being sued by Musk for being a Twitter clone). But the numbers were dogshit. It had a fraction of the traffic and everybody there was already far-right. You could keep them frothy, but you couldn't breed more of them.

So Musk bought Twitter. Ideally, he wanted to just hand one of the big three socials back to right-wing reactionaries ane extremists but he also has no problem just killing the platform.

The only thing that mattered was that the deplatforming stopped, before people realised that it works and makes sites 1000x better.