EFF is leaving X

I guess the downvote means yes but we don't like Elon

I think the problem with the free speech ideals is a combination of engagement farms (i.e. a room full of smart phones where people “like” or view particular content so it artificially becomes more popular on social media) and bots (which, with modern AI, are pretty hard to distinguish from people who know how to write) which make modern online content a lot less organic.

In addition, the outrage culture (because anger increases engagement) went from us being “I disagree with you, but I defend your right to say that” to “What you say is so awful I want to destroy you”. It’s this second issue which has made things difficult for the EFF—their original mission was to allow the racists, misogynists, misandrists, and what not to have their soapbox. But that’s something which just doesn’t work in today’s political climate.

Ironically, I think X in a lot of ways was a beacon of free speech in a world where people advocating certain ideas will just be permanently banned from a given platform without question. Yes, they had issues with going out of their way to discourage people from linking outside of their walled garden [1], but they allowed a lot of content that would instantly get someone banned on Bluesky or Reddit.

Don’t get me started on how Facebook has morphed from being a place where I could see what my old college buddy from 30 years ago (who I parted ways with when I changed colleges) was up to, into a place where I just mainly see slop from content farms and troll farms.

[1] I left Twitter because they marked me as a “spammer” because I would link to Substacks or blogs showing men that, no, women aren’t only sleeping with 10% of men.

Self proclaimed libertarians always fall apart when the freedom is used against them.

Reminds me of Christians and free will.

[dead]

Because of the asymmetry of energy required to refute bullshit, letting people spew bullshit and cleaning up afterwards is very expensive. And because some people are very bad at updating information in their heads (worse than the average, which is already poor), people will be told a refutation, agree, and later will forget, and repeat the refuted bullshit. And I truly believe they forget, not just pretend to agree with the refutation.

So preventing some things from gaining a big platform is good.

But, the mainstream media is extremely not neutral. A lot of what is said is not strictly true, because people are pushing an agenda. People have a right to talk about it. People need to resist very bad social engineering experiments being done on them "for their own good". The fact that sometimes people have to issue retractions and apologies and are even sometimes fired proves that if you just accept the first version of every story you hear and don't let people make a fuss about lies, even more lies will be accepted as mainstream truth. There needs to be an opposition to keep people honest. The opposition must be not cranks or enemies, but reasonable skeptics.

People who simply note that men and women are not exactly the same are grouped with rapists and pimps, and that is similar to the strategy to declare classical liberals who are not leftists "far right".

Dating patterns absolutely changed, women's online culture absolutely affects them. When women choose from men they know, like work colleagues, it works out. But on dating apps, women really are only interested in the top men. When judged only based on photo, by the opposite sex, most men are not attractive, while most women are attractive. But now people don't date colleagues and rarely even friends of friends. For many men, 1 match for 10,000 swipes is reality.

Telling the average man that he needs to get in better shape, take better care of his hygiene, dress better, demonstrate that he is a provider and a protector and he wants to spend time with her not only for sex, is not misogyny.

Telling the average woman that sleeping with the most attractive man who will sleep with her is not the way to find a husband is not misogyny.

A lot of dating advice is "adulting" advice. People are immature. They don't know how people perceive them, they don't know how to change that. Their expectations are based on bad fiction. They are overconfident or they are wimps.

Some advice from "the manosphere" should be grounds for imprisonment, and some should be taught in every school, and using a single name for both is terrible.