Who could have possibly foreseen

Yeah, I’m unclear on whether this is for or against

Great read, thank you for sharing. I know it’s about Reddit, but I’m going to indulge a digression inspired by the article. One of the questions that’s been rattling around in my head ever since I wandered back onto Facebook in December after a 2.5-year hiatus: when is a social media platform “dead”?

My Facebook feed feels like it’s in its death throes, with a handful of hearty souls occasionally posting their own thoughts or pictures or jokes, and like two fun communities that are reasonably active, while the overwhelming majority of content in my feed (other than ads and promoted reels and whatever) is friends of mine simply sharing screenshots from Tumblr/Twitter/Reddit without commentary.

I understand that my feed, full of people and organizations I voluntarily friended over the last…oh god…19 years (?!) isn’t necessarily representative of Facebook as a whole. But it seems like the enshittification, the erosion of Facebook’s most basic utilities—it’s not even good at event planning or photo sharing anymore; it was way better at both of those things in 2012—disincentives using the platform for anything beyond the most anodyne resharing of other peoples’ hot takes culled from other platforms.

Is Facebook dead? It seems like it sucks for promoting/advertising small local businesses, which was one thing it seemed pretty good at ~10 years ago. It sure isn’t good for keeping tabs on your actual friends, and hasn’t worked well at that in a long time. So what does it do? What’s Facebook for in 2023?

(Bigger question for me personally is when to leave it for real, and if I’ll ever have the courage to actually deactivate when, for better or for worse, Facebook efficiently captured a huge majority of my contacts between 2010 and 2015, and I feel a certain amount of anxiety about walking away from that entirely.)

Welp that's a real evening-ruiner. Poor kid.

If you need me I’ll be sipping tea in the middle of a wide open field wearing my ceremonial red coat.

I mean, this right here is a perfect answer

The only reason I keep FB around at this point is that's honestly the only way I have to contact a certain sub-section of people

Exactly. I should use this moment to reflect on how many Facebook “friends” are “must have” folks I should put effort into keeping in touch with outside of FB, and then I should…do that.

But one thing I admit would be tough would be giving up on the possibility (more of a fantasy at this point) of popping into FB for a feeling…for of a general sense of what folks I know are up to. Where they are, what they’re enjoying, what they’re struggling with, etc. Do I need to know how my middle school acquaintance’s cancer treatment is going? Do I need to see pictures of a former coworkers’ dogs frolicking at doggie daycare? Well, no; I maintain my circle of close friends and family without Facebook and can continue to do so. But there was a time FB seemed to provide a sense of being at least casually plugged into a wider community of acquaintances and more distant relatives that I liked and enjoyed. I don’t think we’re ever really going to get that back.

Maybe losing that peculiar late-00s-early-teens sense of a network of real people you kinda care about even if you’re not close is a good thing. Maybe Facebook only ever provided a false sense of community that made us over-invested in near-strangers’ dramas; maybe it pulled us away from face-to-face community building with our actual neighbors. I dunno! Regardless, I’m reluctant to discard it entirely if only because I’m pretty sure we’ll never again see a mass “(almost) everyone is going to gather on this one platform, under their real names, and be at least somewhat reachable through it.”

The possibility that was haunting me was that the Titan might have surfaced but couldn’t communicate its location, so the passengers were just bobbing along, trapped and running out of oxygen, while searchers simply didn’t find them in time.

I guess the other nightmare would’ve been if the Titan got caught on something deep underwater and couldn’t surface or communicate even though the submersible was intact.

As it was, I assume/hope they didn’t know what was about to happen and didn’t suffer.

What a beautiful whippet!

Regardless of where one falls on the “it’s gross to gloat over any person’s death” ↔️”lol let’s put more billionaires at the bottom of the ocean” spectrum, it’s pretty damn disturbing to imagine human beings aboard that contraption, thousands of feet below the surface. What a misbegotten, miserable, wasteful endeavor.

It really was so valuable in its heyday.

When the Russia thing happened circa 2016, I copied mine to Dreamwidth and while it’s been great it’s also pretty lonely. Basically no one in my circle updates anymore; maybe two or three friends read my stuff.

But I’m never going to stop. My whole adult life is recorded on Dreamwidth; I started my LJ the month I graduated from high school, and 22 years later I’m still blathering, just on DW now with no one to interact with. (The loneliness is mostly a result of me making a decision ~15 years ago to limit my LJ friends list to people I actually knew offline, so at this point the number of people-I-know-offline who have any interest in regularly updating DW can be rounded down to zero.) (But it still bums me out and I dream of a Dreamwidth Renaissance.)

There’s been kind of a “last week of school before summer vacation” vibe, which I suspect is related in part to the overall weirdness of this moment as reddit partially collapses and the Fediverse figures out how to absorb the influx of new users and, I dunno, I figure everyone is just feeling kind of impish and punchy.

Anyway I’m a humorless old person and unfond of scatological humor in general, so I emphatically share your sentiment. I suspect it’ll die down shortly, though. In the meantime I hope the literal shitposters are at least enjoying themselves. Everybody’s gotta blow off steam from time to time.

@anathema_device: Well said! I guess I haven’t quit it entirely because walking away feels like abandoning even the possibility of keeping up with a ton of people, when maybe that was never really possible in the first place.

It never ends

…I was right! My husband saw the preview image and asked if it was a Gambian pouched rat and I said no, I think it’s a quokka. I feel so validated.

I will return anything sent to me in an Amazon package.

Ooh, that’s a good one. I might need to adopt this policy.

I kept mine. Previously I only used this handle for Reddit, but now I have it here (and on Metafilter, where I created a new account after flouncing 10+ years ago—seems weirdly fitting as I originally learned of Reddit’s existence from Metafilter.)

Sure, and while I think it’s important to remember that (lest any of us assume too heavy a burden of responsibility for any of this), it’s also worthwhile to be mindful of our personal habits and how we engage with and consume content on Reddit etc.

I guess it’s analogous to environmentalism in that I know my personal consumer habits and household decisions aren’t going to reverse climate change, but there’s no harm in examining those habits and decisions and doing my best to, like, reduce the amount of single-use plastic in my life.

Oh yeah, that one haunts me. Such an unusual, eerie case. I hope her family gets real answers someday. What a nightmare.

Behind the Bastards: a Terrible Story About the Internet. Two parts, with guest Margaret Killjoy.

5/10/22 Part One: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/behind-the-bastards/id1373812661?i=1000560258046

5/12/22 Part Two: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/behind-the-bastards/id1373812661?i=1000560735697

Like I said, this isn’t actually about furries, but a lot of the “how” in this saga can, I think, be applied to the rise of anti-furridom in the early-mid aughts. Maybe some of the “why,” too.

(And seriously, proceed with caution. It’s an upsetting story rife with mentions of child abuse, ableism, sexual assault, elder abuse, racism, transphobia, suicide, stalking/harassment—I’m sure I’m leaving things out; be advised it’s rough. That said, it’s well done imho and worth a listen if you want a better understanding of how the internet got the way it is.)

I think there was a wide and deep vein of “look at these fucking weirdos” that shaped a lot of early aughts internet gathering places. I’m thinking of Something Awful in particular but the phenomenon was certainly a lot more widespread than SA.

While “look at these fucking weirdos” was by no means confined to dunking on furries, I feel like for whatever reason furries kind of became the highest profile subculture to be brought to wider, mainstream attention—and derision—during this era. I vividly remember poking around on SA when I was in college circa 2003-04 and there was a lot of anti-furry sentiment (much of it grounded in the assumption that for all furries everywhere furridom was exclusively a sex thing.) Eventually that anti-furry sentiment was felt across the internet. LiveJournal, for example, was home to a lot of furries but also to a lot of furry-hating trolls.

The internet in the first decade of the new millennium was a deeply weird place. For a good (though extremely distressing!) overview of how and why places like SA became what they did, the Behind the Bastards series on Chris Chan is solid. It’s not furry-related, but a similar “let’s gather around and gawk at and eventually harass and provoke this fucking weirdo” thing played out in Chris Chan’s “discovery” by Something Awful. I’ll put a link below with a caveat that basically every type of content warning you can imagine applies to these episodes , though imho Robert Evans and Margaret Killjoy handle the Chris Chan story with as much sensitivity and compassion as one could hope.

He boards at her house, marries her mother to get closer to her, and after her mother dies he kidnaps her, yes

There’s a lot about OceanGate that confuses and alarms me but the thing on my mind this afternoon is why there isn’t any way for the people inside to get out without an external crew. That just seems insane—all those ways to theoretically ensure the Titan makes it to the surface in case of emergency but then you just bob there, oxygen running out, too bad? (And the submersible is white?! Not neon orange?? I hate everything about this.)

I’ve lived a life mercifully free of pain, but one notable exception was after my weight loss surgery, when referred gas pain near my shoulder made it feel like someone was taking pruning shears to my clavicle. Once they figured out what was going on, some simethicone chased it away pretty quickly. I never would’ve guessed mere gas could hurt like that.

SUCCESS! Thank you. Now we're cookin'.

@Mugox

Darling! I endorse this.

Behind the Bastards just did a two-parter on this phenomenon but with children’s “books.” Icky stuff. Great episodes, but ugh that this is even a thing.

Part One: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/behind-the-bastards/id1373812661?i=1000617646703

Part Two: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/behind-the-bastards/id1373812661?i=1000617949358

Taco Time, a regional chain, is my all-time favorite. I’m terms of national (US) chains…probably Dairy Queen or Wendy’s? I just like fries and ice cream.

Yeah this sounds like a bespoke Hell created just for me in case I am very, very evil in this lifetime. Inconceivable that people would pay actual money to experience this. :(

I don’t know what it says about me that I really kind of want this to happen. Probably nothing good.

Thanks, @Mugox! I’m on mobile so far but I’ll check it out—been meaning to log in on my desktop and see what kbin is like not-on-my-phone.

He went on to gain notoriety online, with Twitter banning him for saying women should "bear some responsibility" for being sexually assaulted. He has since been reinstated.

Super cool, good job Twitter.

Fuck this guy. Hope he’s convicted.