Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media

kingthrillgore@kbin.social to Reddit@lemmy.world – 120 points – Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media
catvalente.substack.com

This has probably been posted already, but this article came to mind when reddit entered its death spiral. An interesting observation on the rise and fall of social media.

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God I love this rant.

Prodigy was upset that people were, by and large, using the free communication service they tossed on there just to have more content and not their weird Random Garbage You Don’t Need Storefront. And in many ways, that complaint has only gotten louder over the decades. Stop talking to each other and start buying things. Stop providing content for free and start paying us for the privilege. Stop shining sunlight on horrors and start advocating for more of them. Stop making communities and start weaponizing misinformation to benefit your betters.

It’s the same. It’s always been the same. Stop benefitting from the internet, it’s not for you to enjoy, it’s for us to use to extract money from you. Stop finding beauty and connection in the world, loneliness is more profitable and easier to control.

Stop being human. A mindless bot who makes regular purchases is all that’s really needed.

I feel this in my damn bones.

Hello, world. Come in from the cold. This will be a good place. For awhile. And then we’ll make another one.

Hello, world. Come in from the cold. This will be a good place. For awhile. And then we’ll make another one.

I hope you're right. I'm betting on the Fediverse, and the fact that it is not corporate owned and can be forked anytime it needs it. I'm hoping that really all it needs to run is servers, moderators and administrators willing to moderate and administer. I'm hoping that the lack of corporate involvement allows it to continue and be a place where we can actually build communities.

As an aside, we need to do away with the idea that corporations are people. We need to remember that they are run by people but are not people themselves.

YEP. The US "corporate personhood" law has always struck me as one of the most on-the-nose examples of dystopian capitalist BS, tbh.

Not corporate-owned...yet.

In my experience, which is pretty similar to the author's, it always finds a way.

Until then, pull up a chair.

Agreed, it does seem to always find a way. Hopefully it takes longer due to the nature of each instance being separate. The recent apoplexy at Threads joining the Fedivervse seems to indicate that many users are aware of the need to not have anything to do with any monied interests beyond server costs.

This article is filled with good lines. I particularly liked this visual describing the communities and audiences built by artists being taken over and destroyed by Musk:

“You have to be very famous to be safe from the effects of your biggest microphone being crammed up a rich white man’s ass and set to reverb. I am certainly not. Few of us are.”

Buy things? How? The rich are hoarding all the money.

almost all the money. Which is an issue that needs to be addressed.
If the poor finally have no money at all they will be happy when feudalism is reintroduced, so everyones debts can be erased and we can finally switch to the superior class-based society.

Of course they have all of today’s money, but there is still lots of tomorrow’s money, so they just need to figure out how to get us deeper in debt.

I'd be lying if I said this didn't actually move me with that same sense of helpless anger and sense of loss. Really powerful writing.

It is such a disappointment seeing the freedom and openness of the early promised internet turned to the personal rat cages and playpens of the rich, greedy, and powerful ... Just like everything else in the real world, unfortunately.