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Nobody knows what's happening online anymore

theatlantic.com

371–380 of 537 posts

Re: Nobody knows what's happening online anymore

#371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they're using "elite" to signal a mentality Given the nonsensical things I've seen declared "elite" and "nonelite", I'm certain that "elite" is just used as a synonym for "whoever I currently hate".

There's that too, plus the fact that using the word "elite" is itself something that mostly the elite do.

In my experience that's false.

Re: Nobody knows what's happening online anymore

#372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s anecdotal, but I had a friendship dissolve over one friend kind of “canceling” another for a prolonged period. It was very much by the modern playbook, though it looked slightly different. Something offended some sensitivities, though it was a benign as an unexpected break up. My previous friend made a great effort to convince others of how immoral and cruel our other friend was, and some people kind of bought i…

These problems seem to be limited to people who are chronically online. People who live on Facebook and Twitter. I know this is a bold claim but I’m immune to cancellation since I simply don’t have accounts on social media, and don’t use it. I live in meatspace and all of my friends and acquaintances are in meatspace, so good luck taking me down. There could be someone on Twitter right now trash talking me and tellin…

But things are a little trickier if they start targeting your employer

Re: Nobody knows what's happening online anymore

#373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s anecdotal, but I had a friendship dissolve over one friend kind of “canceling” another for a prolonged period. It was very much by the modern playbook, though it looked slightly different. Something offended some sensitivities, though it was a benign as an unexpected break up. My previous friend made a great effort to convince others of how immoral and cruel our other friend was, and some people kind of bought i…

These problems seem to be limited to people who are chronically online. People who live on Facebook and Twitter. I know this is a bold claim but I’m immune to cancellation since I simply don’t have accounts on social media, and don’t use it. I live in meatspace and all of my friends and acquaintances are in meatspace, so good luck taking me down. There could be someone on Twitter right now trash talking me and tellin…

I love the term meatspace! I feel the same way. I do have Instagram and even Facebook but I don't use either much (post travel photos on insta, use market place on Facebook). I generally feel like my friends are very much "meatspacers" first and foremost and any social media is additional and incidental.

Re: Nobody knows what's happening online anymore

#374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it’s a matter of choosing content that is served up by algorithm but by finding the content that the algorithm omits. I find I then have to listen for what are truth statements, for verifiable truth statements, and sift out the emotional language. In fact, the more emotional the tone, the more intention I attribute to the engineering of it being shown to me. This has resulted in me looking at and readin…

How do you know when you found that truth nugget? Why do you think content that is excluded from the algorithm is more legitimate? How do you know it was excluded? What do you think about the notion that many/most people who claim they are neither left nor right end up demonstrating that they are actually pretty right-wing?

[deleted]

Re: Nobody knows what's happening online anymore

#375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Death of Twitter" why are people so deluded and so eager for Twitter to fail? You were a big fan of the previous regime's censorship?

I've never been a Twitter user, never have and never will, so I can't comment on whatever the previous regime was doing, but I see people talking about Twitter much less than they did a year ago, which is kind of what the headline article is about.

Being same as you in terms of Twitter use, I see people talk about it a lot more now (mostly discussing the sudden quirky changes).

Re: Nobody knows what's happening online anymore

#376

Maybe that's a good thing? I remember a few years ago when journalists were outsourcing their reporting to Twitter and we had headlines like "The Internet is Freaking Out About X" when it was really a dozen nobodies on Twitter. The death of Twitter and the re-fragmentation of the internet sounds like a breath of fresh air compared to the purple haze of the last decade's centralized web.

X isn't dead, nor is it dying. Elon Musk took away a bunch of people's status, people who thought they were important somebodies because some nerds in an office met them in person and/or they paid some money to get a verification mark. That's what happened. It's the election of Donald Trump all over again. One of the few people who actually understood what happened in the 2016 election - and was able to articulate it…

Watching leftists flip flop on free speech in real time after Elon took over gave me whiplash.

Re: Nobody knows what's happening online anymore

#377
post #124

Recently I was thinking about how I am completely out of touch with the culture of younger generations, and was about to laugh it off cause that's how it is with every generation, but then I realized that I don't even know how I would know. In the past if you wanted to know what kids were listening to, you change the radio station to that new loud one you normally skip, or watch that new TV show that people are going…

I was talking to my younger sister (college student) the other day, and she mentioned that she and her friends are very reluctant to post their opinions online, especially under their real names. This was a bit of a surprise to me, because she volunteers for the Democrats and is openly lesbian, so I would have thought her opinions are generally a great match for the current cultural milieu. I think maybe part of the…

I can’t imagine communists were too comfortable around other committed communists, being sent to the gulag was always a latent possibility if you were determined to be an ideological enemy.

Re: Nobody knows what's happening online anymore

#378

I periodically check out YouTube while not signed in, to see what YouTube is pushing to the unidentified. It's just like TV used to be, aimed at a pretty low target. And that's nearly all American TV had. At least YouTube still has a longer tail of genuinely good work.

> I periodically check out YouTube while not signed in

I wonder if that actually works... It still tracks location, obviously Cookies (which you probably delete for this) and possibly a lot of other things. Maybe YouTube even maps your IP address to previous logins and uses that information "just slightly" in order to not throw you off...

Re: Nobody knows what's happening online anymore

#379
post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always found this story so fascinating. The amount they get targeted is insane for being a satire website, regardless of if you think it's funny or not.

[flagged]

"Satire is a genre of the visual, literary, and performing arts, usually in the form of fiction and less frequently non-fiction, in which vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, often with the intent of exposing or shaming the perceived flaws of individuals, corporations, government, or society itself into improvement." [0]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satire

Considering the thousands of deaths and people murdered by the US government in places like Libya while Hillary Clinton fumbled foreign policy as Secretary of State, the article is clearly, by definition, satire. QED.

Re: Nobody knows what's happening online anymore

#380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is throttling the New York Times on X anti-free speech? NYT is its own media platform, among the most powerful in the world, why should it expect a separate outlet to promote it? Further, as a powerful media outlet, the Times itself "throttles" all kinds of voices and opinions with which its editorial board and majority of its employees and readers don't agree.

NYT does not claim to be a platform for everyone's free speech, and their editorial board is held to account for the shit they publish. Compleyely diffetent business. Elon wants it both ways - when u ask him, why is there messed up shit on twitter, he sats free spedch. When u ask him, why can't X post on twitter, its because he editorialized it. He wants all the benefits and none of the accountability.

It claims, quite famously, to publish "all the news that's fit to print" and then internally, chooses stories to promote (often with very specious sourcing) and others to squash.
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