Lads, I've been thinking. I've been thinking that my predictions of a mass exodus away from social media, and/or a rejuvenation of the sector as a whole, in the wake of the Snowden leaks, is not going to happen. I know, I know, some of you will call me a defeatist, but I have to call it like I see it.
Which begs the question, is there any good social media? As far as I can tell, all the mainstream platforms are a nightmare. If they're not actively fomenting conflict between users, then they'll be dumping AI generated "content" on your lap, or desperately trying to become TikTok. Obviously, none of this is especially social, and some of it barely qualifies as media. But, likely owing to the difficulty of turning a profit from online ad revenue, and people's natural unwillingness to pay for anything online (especially if it's usually free), there doesn't appear to be much of alternative. Unless, of course, someone here knows otherwise.
I really like it here and on 4chan. This suggests that rudgwicksteamshow.co.uk is probably decent too, but I never go there, ever. You might argue that these are not social media sites, and I would even be inclined to agree, but if you want a "good social media" site by that very strict definition of social media, I don't think such a thing can ever be possible.
Some websites have good comment sections, but even then, you need to have the sort of personality that just ignores bad comments. There will also be specialist forums for specific hobbies, but those won't be any good unless you are also a fan of electronics/camping/carpentry/badminton/whatever.
Good social media is on your street mate, though I'd say it's worth giving the lesser known services a shot even if they have low user count. It doesn't take much to promote material among a smaller crowd - people are often pleased to get in early as we see with early access services.
I tried looking for that oldschool image of the 'real world MMO', with no level cap an but I can't find it. One of you must know the one I'm talking about? Sun dusted greens, blues and greys if I recall correctly. Low horizon viewing a skyscraper distant, atleast 1 figure in the foreground.
Nah, it's all shite since we let normal people in. People are obsessed with the idea that there's something inherently wrong with social media, like as if it's just something about the deign or the rules that turns people into massive cock-ends for some inexplicable reason. But that's not the case. The problem is that your average person is a massive cock-end.
In and of itself, social media is really just the same thing as forums and BBS and so on has been since the early days of the 'net. But the difference is who's using it. The beautiful thing about the old web was that it didn't matter if you were rich or poor, old or young, black or white, but just the fact you were the kind of person who wanted to reach out over those geo-cities pages, the old school MMOs, the IRC groups, the art communities, it all self selected for a more open minded and curious kind of person. Somebody who was open to the possibilities of seeing what's out there, and prepared to interact in good faith with anyone, knowing nothing about them other than their 50 pixel square GIF avatar. That was an essential part of the character. Of course that isn't to say it was a safe space or hug box, and it had plenty of anti-social and belligerent users, but the ratio was far lower.
To use the cliche analogy of school social groups, because we are all familiar with it, the early internet was for the people who would hide in the library at break times, because they didn't want to be outside with all the other delinquent arsehole kids throwing litter at each other and starting scraps. But now the internet has been appropriated and re-marketed towards the delinquent arsehole kids first and foremost.
But anyway I just stick to here, otherplace, and a handful of sub-rudgwicks. Rudgwick is alright if you are very mindful of the groups you join. You won't ever catch me using Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or TikTok or Snapchat or any of those.
>>29235 >Rudgwick is alright if you are very mindful of the groups you join
The problem I've had with this in the past is some of them lose a fair bit of their identity or quality over time as they grow. As a bit of an extreme example, five years ago r/UKPersonalFinance had around 100,000 members and it now has 1.8million, and it has changed for the worse.
I think you chaps and I have differing visions of "social media". I'd dub imageboards and rudgwicksteamshow.co.uk as latter-day forums. Yes, there's a social aspect, but that's not really the main point of the site. Similar to how you can interact with other users on video hosting sites, but you probably wouldn't tell a new acquaintance to "add me on Vimeo".
Anyway, it seems like there probably isn't a hidden social media site that isn't a load of old bollocks after all. Which is a pity.
>>29235 I'll be honest, I don't think it's the "normal people" who ruin online spaces. I think far more trouble is caused by ideologically or grievence motivated individuals or groups who are spoiling for a fight, for one reason or another. Modern social media is vastly different to an old school forum. Social media is pushing all kinds of flim-flam towards you, whereas a forum is a buffet you can take or leave at will. Forums have also remained more or less the same since as long as I can remember, whereas social media sites are always changing. Whether it's by pointlessly aping the features of their competitors, mixing up the algorithm, or completely overhauling the UI. The biggest difference is also moderation. If two people on a forum take over a thread by arguing back and forth endlessly, a moderator will step in and do something about it. That simply does not happen on social media. Instead half-functioning algorithm polices very specific language, and an under-paid IT worker in Kenya, the Philippines, or such-like, is forced to sift through gore, CSAM, and hate-speech to train said algorithm.
I just don't find it a convincing argument that the internet was good until people who have jobs and sex showed up. It seems quite clear to me that capital and financialisation are far more at fault. These forces, and the individuals behind them, have norrowed the choices people have regarding where they go online, what they can do once they get there, and even what they can say. Usually not through explicite and draconian measures, but flattening any other options we might've had. And of course everyone spends all their time arguing and making fun of eachother once they get there; every single person on Earth has been pushed into the same social panopticon, but without any real moderators to break up the fights, or stop us mooning one another from our cells.
It's a fair point that the way modern outlets push shite towards you is different to how the old net used to require you to go looking for it. I can't find a link to the sketch from That Stewart Lee Show about raw sewage coming unbidden into your living room.
>I just don't find it a convincing argument that the internet was good until people who have jobs and sex showed up. It seems quite clear to me that capital and financialisation are far more at fault.
Chicken or egg that though, innit. Did the corpos show up because suddenly there was a large enough audience to make a profit on, or did the large audience only become engaged once the corpos had turned up to round off all the sharp edges?
More than anything it was the smartphone that did it, from what I can tell. Before that, using the net that's what they call it in cyberpunk btw required sitting down and connecting on your computer. Ordinary people didn't have the time or inclination to do that for more than a couple of hours at a time, it was only people like us who would sit down on our computer habitually as soon as we got off work/home from school. The rot truly took hold when the smartphone enabled everyone to just reach into their pocket, and bring out the little magic box that let them engage in clickbait rage wars any time they were bored.
I posit that the two are inextricably linked, you can lay the blame at other doors equally but I don't think the average person can be let off the hook completely for being a massive cock-end.
Not social media specifically, but seems liek as good a thread as any to put this in. Very good talk on the nature and mechanics of the "enshittification" scourge we've seen over the last 10 years or so.
After watching it seems to me basically all of it goes back to the same old problem we've complained about for years for everything from the 2008 financial crisis to microtransactions in videogames. The way our economy puts growth and shareholder return above all else is like a cancerous tumour on itself. What do we do about it? Short of scrapping capitalism itself and going full Marxlad, how would we reform the system to fix this bugunintended exploitbalance issue feature?
>>29244 Cory Doctorow invented the concept of enshittification, and he made another fantastic speech a few years ago where he introduced the world to it. I posted it here if you'd like to watch it: >>>/v/25379/
>What do we do about it?
Purely in relation to enshittification, I propose that we do whatever Cory Doctorow says. As your video explains, enshittification is a natural consequence of the removal of capitalist competition. Companies can only enshittify themselves if they are monopolies that we can't move away from. Your video proposes changing copyright law so that people can reverse-engineer these monopolistic platforms. My much older video said we could punish the technology giants by open-sourcing their APIs. The two ideas, both originally from Cory Doctorow obviously, are broadly the same idea. Remember Trillian? If you didn't like MSN Messenger, you could use Trillian, which logged into all your different chat programs and merged them, and just talk to your MSN friends via Trillian instead. If such a thing existed for Facebook, then Facebook wouldn't be able to fill up with spam and slop and adverts and scams, because otherwise everyone would log into the new Trillian (Frillian?) instead, and see all their friends's posts but none of the shit. The shitty Facebook interface would be forced to get good again, or close down due to never being used. Free-market competition would save us, because I think most of us would agree that if we could stay in touch with our Facebook friends without ever actually going via Facebook, that is exactly what we would do. If it was legal and possible to reverse-engineer Facebook to do that, there would be 50 better interfaces for Facebook's services within a week. And then Facebook would have to compete, and its enshittification would be forced to end. It's the only way, because the migration from Twitter to Bluesky has proven that nobody's going to move to a new online platform unless everyone else is already on it.
I will watch your other video tonight. I didn't realise this is the guy who coined the term, I just assumed it was a term some wanker who writes for Wired or something made up and caught on. He wrote the book on it, if I am not mistaken, I would presume it's worth reading.
Anyway yeah, the trouble is I don't think those solutions go far enough. They are the solutions of somebody astute enough to see the problem but too timid to really grasp it by the roots, as it were. Free markets tend towards monopolies, that's how we got here; we just have to keep having big crashes and meltdowns to reset the playing field when it gets too choked at the top. I think the suggestions on copyright would definitely be a start but I am frankly an anti-IP law firebrand in general, it is my belief that copyright and things like the patents system does little other than stifle innovation and weaken consumer power anyway but these companies will always do anything they can, no matter how dirty the tactics they have to use are, to weigh things in their favour. We need something on a base line systemic level that removes the incentive for unsustainable, anti-competitive practices to begin with. Like, restrict the amount of stock market financialisation they can have against their value or something like that, I dunno.
Just basically to stop companies in general turning into shareholder zombies. Also, ban the entire concept of private equity firms.
>>29246 IP isn't an inherently bad thing. The main issue is entitled cunts demanding ever longer and ever stronger protection for it. The first Copyright Act in the US set the period at 14 years, and after that if you were still exploiting the work you could apply for another 14 years. There are notoriously works that entered the public domain when the registration wasn't renewed properly, and even a few that accidentally became PD because they copyright notice wasn't correctly formatted.
Cliff Richard was complaining a few years ago because the rights on some of his early works were about to expire after 50 years following recording. He wanted his rights as the recording artist to be the same as the writers - PMA70. There is literally no proper justification for granting rights after death, apart perhaps from making provision for one's non-adult children. Demanding that you be paid royalties for something that your great-grandparents did that you had no hand in whatsoever is the height of entitlement.
I agree that platforms should be opened up, and there have been some steps towards that in the EU, though they almost certainly don't go far enough yet.
This is a bit of a tangent, but: My position on copyright issues can be summed up by the Klon Centaur guitar pedal.
It's "boutique" overdrive (i.e it's the kind of pedal made by a bloke in a shed, not a big company), that attained massive popularity and has seen its price on the second hand market surge up to figures in excess of £4,000. The reason for that is that the guy would only build his pedal for direct mail order customers, and even then, he'd only do it if he liked you. Some would argue that he was just one guy who could only do so much, and wasn't under any obligation to increase his production, while some might argue he was artificially inflating his products value by restricting supply. Being quite cynical, I pretty much think it's the latter.
Over the years people have got around this by making legally distinct ersatz versions in the way we've all gotten used to. They just call it a slightly different thing. But for a long time these weren't exact clones, partly because the original maker covered his circuits in epoxy (known in the community as "gooping") to prevent people being able to see the design; but also partly because people didn't want to risk legal trouble. Thing is, though, you can't actually copyright a circuit, a circuit is just a series of components in a certain order, and if you were able to copyright them it would lead to all sorts of stupidity. But regardless, it was eventually reverse engineered. The original maker was then just relying on the IP protection over the brand, the Centaur name, to stop "competitors" (even though he wasn't competing, because he refused to build more than about 4 pedals a year). If you wanted the exact pedal, and weren't willing to fork over the price of a used car, you could only buy "pirate copies" from certain builders who were willing to do it hush hush, or the ersatz slightly different version from bigger companies.
Recently there was a big controversy because Behringer decided to say "yeah fuck that. We're making a Behringer Centaur, we're going to copy it almost exactly, we're going to call it a Cantaur, and we're going to test out how strong the IP law this guy is relying on actually is." And as far as I can tell, they won. You can buy a Behringer Centaur, a pedal which is 1:1 the exact same circuit, therefore sounds the same and behaves the same, for £70. And I think that's a good thing for everyone. It enables more people to access a tool that will aid them in their creativity. Same reason I'll always defend piracy. And so far, to an extent, AI. But I do acknowledge it has plenty of drawbacks too.
So, while there's legitimate reasons for people who have created and invented things to be given some degree of protection from the fat cats just immediately taking their ideas and exploiting it, stuff like this shows how the system as it currently exists is pretty naff almost from the word go. Copyright is, at the very core of its purpose, a tool to avoid competition. I like this example because it shows things the other way around, small guy vs big guy, not just big guy vs small guy, which I think sort of helps illustrate the issues on a fundamental level and not just as a power and money dynamic.
TL;DR I agree with Doctorov and otherlad's basic idea that open sourcing and such leads to better competition, I am just perhaps a bit more anarchist about it. If the capitalists want a free market, they can have a free market, know what I mean.
