Beefalo @ jayrodtheoldbod @midwest.social

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10

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268

Joined

2 yr. ago

Somebody once remarked that it's funny how everyone acts like Italians all walk around being Mario Brothers but the Italians just roll with it.

It's because some Italians were the people who invented Fascism as a formal political movement, and you know damn well how that ended up, so if going "It's-a me, Giancarlo!" every once in a while gets the world to forget, they'll take it.

But then this happens, and you have to start talking about spaghetti as much as possible.

I'm pretty iffy on 2FA. I'm using it for several things but I don't like that my one and only option for that is this one smartphone. If I drop the phone in a lake, I can't do Google anything anymore, or do some other crucial things. If I decide to step down to a dumb phone, no, I can't. I'm just locked into this permanently, now. Half the internet is off limits if I lose, break, or decide to get rid of my phone.,

I've gone from having two options for net access - phone and PC - so a primary and a backup, to having one option, both of them at once, and one is none.

It's a single point of failure that's already vulnerable to SIM swap attacks and even shoulder surfing. You're highly reliant on the target org you're logging into, and whether their setup process is janky.

2FA makes sense in broad theory, it doesn't make sense in practice, where no options except for your one and only smartphone exist for 2FA. They've not developed some other method and don't appear to be trying. It's just that or fuckin nothing.

It should be smartphone plus other thing as 2FA options, so the phone can be lost, stolen, destroyed, without leaving you up shit creek, and yet that other thing refuses to show itself.

Ah, to sell the meme of your face for $400,000 and walk away from NFTs forever, like a fuckin pro.

It keeps the raccoons off of it.

Reddit has been dying for a while.

Subreddits like AskScience, that it was famous for, are now shells of what they were because the real scientists who put serious time into that subreddit decided they were done wasting that time. This situation is at least a year old, it predates the protest.

You can see this same dynamic across the site. Places that were once vibrant are slowing down, the flood of posts becoming a trickle. Bots are making most of the posts on big subs. Smaller subs that used to hop with human posts are where you can see the truth. It's not normal for a sub with 500k subscribers to see 10 posts in a week. You see that more often, now.

The truth is that Reddit was always small potatoes. It feels like a big deal when you're there, but it's not. The real user numbers are on TikTok, and Instagram, who each have up to a billion users depending on where you get a number. Reddit is barely there, as social media rankings go. There are people with more views on a YouTube video than Reddit has users. Reddit is an also-ran social media site. It's really not a competitor. It's just easy to steal from, because text.

Reddit has long had a bad reputation as a shitty, toxic place. Habitual Redditors don't know this, not really, you have to talk to outsiders. People aren't that interested in coming to Reddit, they just want answers to their Google searches. It's not a recipe for growth.

Now the true power users, who provide those answers, are moving away from both Reddit and Google, speaking of a company who best watch its step. A lot of people are starting to talk about Google search the way they talked about Reddit search, which never did get good.

Reddit doesn't have that far to fall, is what I'm saying. There isn't a mass exodus, though. You're seeing a late spasm from a steady tide that has been going out for years. 10 years is a looooong fuckin time for a social platform to be around, they start to rot after the first or second year. Reddit has been rotten for some time.

I see a lot of people, here, and elsewhere, trying to act dismissive about the protests, or about how important the moderators were, but the site's entire business model depended on hundreds, even thousands of people doing a ton of real labor for absolutely free. If they've decided to take an "everyone's replaceable" attitude and treat volunteers like employees, they'll pay. It'll be their IPO sagging down to a couple dollars as they limp to bankruptcy, or purchase, but they'll pay. I swear I'll have to buy a couple shares as a collectible.

I'm putting it down as yet another well-earned reminder that you have no business building anything that matters to you on a platform that other people own, it is worth the five minutes a day that it takes to post on it, and no more.

Do not make a job of it, ever, unless that job pays you and pays you so well that people think that you're really a stripper and your job title is just a cover story. "Social Media Manager", gotta be code for OF, bro.

That's how much money you should be making doing labor for a multimillion-dollar corporation. It was fuckin Conde Nast for a hot minute. If the boss can just take your mod and your community away, then you only ever worked there, for free. You were never building a community, you were building their property, for free. You have to stop doing that, and you have to stop presenting it as a virtuous act, unless some fundamental things change.

If you're going to put a lot of work in for your own reasons, then you owe it to yourself to do it under your own control, or not at all.

I see an opportunity on the Fediverse to start from the old model of internetting and jump off to something new that just looks old, where it makes sense to put that work in, but for now it is what it is.

Reddit still lives, like Theoden cobwebbed in his throne, but nobody will come and banish Wormtongue. It's still gonna take years for that old man to die.

Fuckin Yahoo isn't anywhere close to dead. Neither is Digg. Well, maybe Digg.

The thing we North Americans are always a bit too arrogant about is if Reddit somehow gets big in India, or Brazil, then they don't need us, and we'll never know because we don't speak the language. So it's gonna take time for Reddit to fuck that up, they got options.

But don't be too dismissive about the idea of "mass exodus". Digg lost most of its userbase, literally overnight, and it was because of shitty ads. If the only app you can use now is the app that sucks and serves lots of shitty ads in your face, that will do it. People aren't that habitual. It is very, very easy to leave a social site.

I quit TikTok over one shitty post that was my last straw, you just delete the app and forget about it. Yet TikTok is social media heroin. Reddit is a bunch of dudes yelling about shit that isn't worth yelling about. It is much easier to quit. The phone app era means once you delete, it's gone, and it helps to break the cycle. It can and probably will happen, 90% of the remaining users will drop it like it's covered in bedbugs, they just have to stick huge unskippable ads in everyone's face, and they're fucked.

I just don't think that is going to make the splash you'd expect.

But no, no mass exodus, not yet. I'd keep the popcorn bowl close by if I were you, though. I will not put it past them to turn an IPO into a fail state.

"Gettin shitty", my buddy's personal phrase for getting drunk, probably hoisted from his dad.

A man had to go to the trenches for that line, it is no wonder that it lives on so long.

Indeed, Raptor looks even more thoughtful now.

Oh hell yes, break open the vaults, release the sacred texts from their dusty tombs.

The big exam comes around, you show up with your pencil and calculator. Nope. Can of beans. Sorry sir, once you've sat for the test there's no leaving. Good luck. 80 college students pounding it against the floor at once.

He comes to us again, at the turning of the tide

The answer is learn to eat fuckin beans.

What it comes down to is that you never get a choice. Over and over again, it's always sign this 10,000 word EULA written by our lawyers to give us all the rights, now, and any rights we want to have in the future, or you can throw that $800 device in the trash if you don't click yes. Likewise, if you want to participate in modern socialization, sign or fuck off.

There's no point in reading the EULA, because it's not like you can negotiate for better terms. If you do read it, you just get to find out how it screws you in detail. It's always take it or leave it, and somehow they paid the devil to make sure that this is popular with everyone else, so you walk through our gate on our terms, or you get shut out of everything, everywhere.

It doesn't even matter if you're smart enough to wade through the agreement, it's still take it or leave it, and the dummies don't even try. They know the deal, they click the button. The smart people click it, too, they just feel worse about it. Take it or leave it. Fatigue isn't the right word. Coercion. That's the one.

Having any leverage in consumer transactions is becoming a rapidly fading memory. Everyone has just given up. Remember when you could buy a TV without signing an onerous legal document that a rational person would never sign, in order to use it? Pepperidge Farm remembers.

I understand that we're talking LOTR memes, here, but I found a site called Quote Investigator, where they take famous quotes, like the things Ghandi apparently said, or Einstein, or whoever, and they run the quote down, and find the original, they find out if Einstein ever actually said that.

My dude.

Once they run the quote all the way to ground, it turns out Einstein never said it. The original quote was nothing like that, and the person who said it was a guy named something like Bill Ackerman at the Regional Banking Convention somewhere in 1963, where Bill gave a speech. The speech got printed out in Regional Banking Magazine, which is how the quote started to circulate.

His actual quote had a lot more words than the one you know.

So, over time, they decided to massage the quote so that it got shorter, pithier, and would fit on a bumper sticker while they passed it around and around.

Ol' Bill was clever enough, but his name didn't have enough clout, so they kinda slide him under the rug. Instead, this seems like something Gandi would say, so maybe let's just pretend Gandi said it. Next thing you know, the quote is a completely different sentence with a brand-new author who has no idea the world is attributing Bill's words to them. It helps if the new author is dead, so they can't pop up like,"Yo, I never said this shit."

And eventually it ends up posted on Facebook in some janky font with a purple background. Or worse, hanging on a piece of wood in Hobby Lobby.

That's nearly every famous quote you've ever come across. Over and over and over. It kept Quote Investigator busy for a while. At best, the original speaker did say it, but they took a machete to the original sentence until it was meme length.

Pretty crazy. So you are partaking in a grand old tradition. Carry on, I guess.

y'all did say shitpost. It was shit. I posted it

No, I do mean sites like Reddit. The advanced users are making everything act like a dating site when they need it to, because things like tinder don't work for everyone, so it's double crazy that they're making Reddit work for that.

What I was truly referring to is Discord, and all those little communities in there, lots of people making their connections, not just sex, but international friend networking. Snapchat, group chats, all that, they're busy doing the same, there. Meanwhile, I live as a ghost, interacting with dozens of people a day online, thousands over the years, with nothing much to show for it.

Even out in the real world I'm the kinda guy who can work some place for two years and leave with no new numbers in my phone. It does keep me out of the drama, but I don't feel I'm striking a balance, either.

So yeah, I wish I knew.

I have the barest grasp on what "proprietary fork" actually means. All I know is that Meta is probably here because everyone is bailing to Mastodon, especially journalists. Fuckin Fox News threw up an outpost, they're all there, the userbase is ramping up past 8mil. Meta sees that, and wants a piece of Musk's market. The question is how, exactly, they are going to make the model become something they control properly, or worse, they manage to engulf the whole thing and somehow this all becomes facebook against everyone's will. Hopefully they make their own walled garden out of it and we can all stay safely outside the cursed thing, being dweeby and free.

I don't have the background to judge the situation, and I don't like it. Somehow I went as far away from facebook as I could and ended up back on facebook, gimme a fuckin break

My dude I do not even know. I have managed to be around some people who aren't like me and gathered the strong impression that people were using social media like it was social, and not anti-social, which I am fluent in. So now I am on a brand-new policy, in the dark and stumbling around. All I can tell you is that the other people are using this thing to meet each other and exchange phone numbers eventually like actual friends. Which makes fuckin sense. If you reply back to other people like you are texting, it changes the nature of the thing. We must both be at peace with letting the thread drop, tho.

I must remind you that the normy world has been using social media to find other people to have sex with for a while, basically pull up the app, swipe swipe swipe until you find a friend for the night and put the phone away, instead of letting the demon consume the next 4 hours somehow. There's a whole nother paradigm. It seems more entertaining.

But yeah, I think you just treat threads like chats, be cool, and see what happens eventually.

You just avoid that Reddit thing where you come in with your 1500 word truth dunk, that ain't it.

I really have to play more chess

I had a blanket "Cool guys don't look back at explosions" policy to posting on pretty much every other site. I decided to turn over a new leaf on the Fediverse, and try not to post anything I don't actually want a reply to. It does tend to gentle you down a bit. Also, I noticed other people were at least giving themselves a chance to form friendships that way, so yeah, new deal.

The thing that really sucks about social media is how many people are just using you as a vent pillow to scream into. It's amazing that so many people are using so many websites that pretty much amount to somebody else's emotional punching bag.