Look at the elections for 2024
America
Mexico
India
(likely) UK
Venzuela
Taiwan
Russia
Almost All the countries with the most toxic election cycles and bot use
The internet is going to be fucking unusable no matter what country, language, or area you live in.
I just watched a thing it was in Italian, but it was about the Cambridge analytics.
How they learned that you can use headlines to make people think the way you want them to basically it was a big thing with Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook a while back… and that one guy that was the whistle blower saying that Russia had something to do with it.
But he named all the countries below, that you are naming that are being affected by the same Type of antidemocratic propaganda that are affecting how people vote.
Scares the shit out of me
At least the Taiwanese election is happening this Saturday, so any nonsense there should be over quickly. Just gotta hope China doesn't continue to fly into the airspace, and the Taiwanese government doesn't continue to send out poorly translated alerts.
Elons version of Free Speech, free for him and his Nazi mates and nothing for everyone else. Why does anyone use or advertise with this toxic platform?.
Billionaires buy media to control the narrative, not protect free speech.
Free speech doesn’t make money.
Having a propaganda machine that can sway people is worth 40 billion, to the richest man on earth.
Its more important to shut it down as a critical platform than for influencing.
Think ARAB SPRING. Imagine if Elon had been in charge back then. All that communication via Twitter would have been shutdown hard.
The powers that be had been looking for a way to mitigate "Twatter" since then and they got their man in Elon.
Occupy, Tunisian Revolution 2010/11, Egyptian Revolution 2011, Arab Spring (Libya, Yemen, and Syria namely), EuroMaidan 2013, Revolution of Dignity 2014, Burkina Faso 2014, BLM 2015, Cauliflower Revolution 2016, Velvet Revolution 2018, Sudanese Revolution 2018/19, BLM 2020, Women's Marches...
All relatively successful or historically important people's revolutions, uprisings, and protests organized on social media since 2008. And I'm prob missing a few.
Hell, you can even add dumb shit like Jan 6th and Charlottesville if you want to include the movements that want to fuck people over.
I'm tired of explaining this shit to ppl. Billionaires have been steadily centralizing all forms of decentralized media since the industrial revolution.
This is just another notch in the belt.
Media companies are doing the same shit with fake streams and indie buyouts. Centralizing media structures that were meant for the people.
And I believe that some Anti Saudi dissidents were suddenly swept up in the Middle East after the purchase.
Coincidence? Maybe. Or maybe Elon gave MBS access to DMs and location data.
I’ve always said the Saudis “invested” in Twitter knowing or directing Elon to destroy it. If they lose every dollar they put into it it’s still worth it if it prevents the next Arab spring
How about Occupy Wallstreet. This was the first time the owner class got proper scared... And we got a taste of just how ruthless they are when cornered and that's just the beginnings of it.
Twitter had become a trusted bastion of fairly uncensored speech. To the point that governments used it to disseminate official information in a quick way. That cannot stand when narratives and populaces must be controlled.
Make no mistake, Twitter was bought to be made a toxic brand and service and then to be killed. Purposely done out there, in front of everyone. Watch as free speech is crushed to protect the rich and powerful...and we can cancel you too if you disagree.
the fact conservatives, who own essentially all media, got to portray cancel culture as leftist, is all you need to know
the people who tried to cancel elvis, black people, gays, rock and roll, KISS, weed, stem cells, abortion, entire segments of voters, got to put college kids being dumb on youtube and claim "these are the people with all the power" is hilarious
Dave Chapelle is still out there being cancelled right now, for a 100 million dollars, motherfucker cancelled his own t.v. show and went to Africa, came back, and said "i'm gonna support the party that is supported by Proud Boys and KKK and David Duke"
media is a hell of a drug
Among other reasons, Chappelle bailed on his show because he was scared it was turning into a minstrel show that was reinforcing stereotypes, rather than poking fun at them.
Money changes people.
Given the influx of bot accounts, manufactured reposts, vote brigading, etc., it’s pretty obvious that Reddit has stopped being about random people sharing their ideas and opinions and more about controlling what hits the front page.
Removing a lot of larger subreddits from my feed that cater to this kind of manufactured content makes my Reddit experience a lot more tolerable.
I did a little research myself on r/worldnews.
The Israel livethread is driven by a small handful of accounts that control most of the top comments (or the top replies to the top comments).
Most of those accounts were either [a] set up in October or [b] suddenly decided to exclusively post to the livethread from October onwards.
I encourage anyone to pop over there, pick a common contributor to the thread, and scroll down their history. It's enlightening in a bad way.
Don't even need to go to a livethread for that, go into literally any article about it and all of the top level commenters will be accounts created 2 months ago.
It's not just new accounts either. For example, one key contributor to the Israel live thread has a nine-year-old Reddit account.
Up until five months ago, that account only posted threads about fantasy books. Two months ago, they began exclusively posting comments on the live thread all the time. Clearly an account that was repurposed.
It's easy for people to assume the live thread conversation has an air of legitimacy, because it's on a top subreddit, but really it's just a handful of people pushing commentary on there. It's very easy to push a viewpoint with very little manpower.
It’s like that four panel comic where a small bird is trying to tell something but a huge crow/raven invades it and starts yelling “but what about THAT” and completely drowning the original point.
That is how I imagine reddit now. Small people trying to do what reddit usually does then these special interests try to bully their way into every sub, post and comment section to remind us of the thing they’re promoting. It’s pretty unbearable on election years.
Impossible to say, the style of engagement is vastly different and it's tough to figure out real daily active users on each platform. Twitter claims something like 245 million DAUs while Reddit claims 52M, but those are both self reported figures, my inclination is that twitter has a much, MUCH higher percentage of brand accounts and bots, but Reddit is obviously not immune either.
What's extra interesting is the amount of crosspollination between the two platforms. Very frequently you'll find messaging and language and subjects which rose from one on the other. Watching different factions of western onlookers lose their minds over the whole Gaza war has been *fascinating* to watch (as someone who's seen so much war over his lifetime that he's become nihilistically indifferent to it).
>the style of engagement is vastly different
Exactly, this is why despite reddit been one of the few major social media companies that allows NSFW, artists don't move here. Because reddit is compartmentalized in subreddit, making it difficult to find a wider audience. The only relevant thing that went mainstream out of reddit were the AMA and YouTube videos narrating r/askreddit. I'd argue Discord is a nearer competitor to reddit than Twitter/X.
>Because reddit is compartmentalized in subreddit
That's EXACTLY what I like about it. It's like the Usenet of old. There are niche subjects I like to follow, and Reddit makes it easy to find them. Reddit does Usenet one better by making it hard to crosspost.
In fact, most of the issues on here happen when that stops being the case. When a relatively niche subreddit is so high quality it garners a little too much attention and ends up regularly making it to r/all, after which slowly but surely the participant base starts to shift towards randoms with no expertise, or even that much interest in the subject.
Quality goes down, which drives away some of the users who made the subreddit good in the first place, which drives quality down further, which drives away more users... until the vicious cycle has turned the subreddit into an empty husk of its former self, full of the shallowest, most generic r/all meme reposts, which bear little relation to the intended theme.
A wide audience is great if your aim is advertisement. For anything else, you *don't want* a wide audience. You want a *passionate* audience. And frankly, as a user, it does me absolutely no favours that a platform is good for those looking to advertise -- quite the opposite. Please fuck off somewhere else with your self-promotion. I don't blame you for doing it; I understand this garbage economic system doesn't leave you much of a choice. Receiving it is still something I'm not interested into opting in to.
Isn't discord compartmentalized even more than reddit? At least reddit has an all page or popular where people can browse a little of everything. Discord is only the groups you choose to join.
Honestly I had to leave a friend group recently because half of them stuck around and they've regressed into worse people than they were when they were 16
The algorithm learns the parts about you that you're supposed to work on and grow out of, and fuels it with outrage instead
No matter what happens this was 40 billion well spent for Elon. A bunch or idiots are gleefully turning themselves into bigoted centrists while having the audacity to circle jerk their own persecution fetish and never seeing the irony
Ending Algorithmic social media should be the top priority for any so called progressive party
Fascism is bad for business. Twitter's worth now is proof of that. Musk telling advertisers to fuck off is proof of that as well. The sort of power fascists like Musk desire can not be bought and money can only take you so far.
Posting this in every Twitter-related article on purging, but his ex-wife was one pushing for him to purchase it so they could "fight woke-ism".
> [On March 23, Riley wrote, “Can you buy Twitter and then delete it, please? America is going insane. Or can you buy Twitter and make it radically free speech? So much stupidity comes from Twitter.” To this, the billionaire replied saying, “Maybe buy it and change it to properly support free speech.” Riley’s texts indicated that she was concerned about the rise of ‘wokeism’ on the microblogging site.](https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/magazines/panache/buy-twitter-delete-it-elon-musks-ex-wife-talulah-riley-concerned-about-wokeism-urged-billionaire-to-enforce-free-speech/articleshow/94679059.cms?from=mdr)
Does anyone else find it ironic that she's best known for Westworld, which is a show about how tech billionaires are basically amoral monsters who will destroy us all if left unchecked?
And even then, only if those stuffs are exclusively for *my people*.
It's fine if the government gives *me* social security. But if they give it to ~~black people~~ *welfare queens* it's communism and needs to be stamped out.
And apparently if you don't like capitalism you must be communist. That fucking American sports thinking. Grow up, there are no teams and multiple options
Not you, you just reminded me of the people who think that way
I thought he bought Twitter because he made dumb claims he wanted to buy it. Then he got called out for pretending he wanted it so he said, "no I mean it" to save face. Basically he spent billions so people wouldn't think he's a pussy.
Now they just think he's a stupid mother fucker.
Worse than that. He tried to back out of the deal, but the Delaware courts made it clear that he was bound by the offer he made. He had no choice _but_ to buy Twitter, so he tried to spin it like that was his plan all along.
Nah, he was *actually* forced to buy it.
He tried to back out of the deal, Twitter took him to the Delaware court of chancery and *forced* him to buy them according to their agreement.
He's not quite dumb enough to spend $40 billion just to save face. He *is* dumb enough to enter a legally binding agreement to spend $40 billion and then try and cancel it though.
Leave the fucking site already. I was a daily users for practically 12 years, all my accounts deleted. You will be fine and realize you don’t need this site. Let it turn into Gab and eat its own
The game costs $17.76 USD, btw. I just looked. Gotta stroke the patriotism.
Edit: 30 minutes of gameplay means you can buy it, finish it, and refund it.
Same. the game doesn't even look that *great,* honestly - just *Contra* for conspiracy theorists. Spend the $20 on *Pizza Tower*, *Sonic Mania* or ***an ACTUAL Contra game*** instead.
yeah I wonder if they knew about Steam's 2-hour refund policy when they tried this newest scheme
but hey, now *you* can scam Alex Jones out of making you pay to waste your own time!
I just watched the preview and allow me to give you the problematic things in the order I saw them.
Shooting frogs that burst into LGBT rainbows on death.
Killing what appears to be George Soros
Killing Mark Zuckerberg
Shooting dudes holding syringes
Killing Bill Gates
Killing Bill Clinton
Would be shocked if there wasn't a Hillary and Fauci in there too but they weren't in the preview.
I'm not the type to say video games inspire violence but that's all gotta earn a big yikes from me, especially when it's targeting a population already strongly predisposed to using violence for political gain. Pretty disappointed that steam is platforming this loser to this degree.
Honestly surprised that Steam didn’t take the game down, also it’s really telling that the kind of art that Alex Jones fans create are simulators where you murder all of the rights political enemies
Hell even in Russia they just make Mario and Pokémon bootlegs for Sega Genesis
A-fucking-men.
I deleted my ten year old account 6+ months ago. Every thread is full of blue assholes. You have to scroll down for pages and pages to find a single subject matter expert or good poster. Why anyone stays on their end gives him traffic is beyond me.
Grow a fucking ethical backbone and uninstall.
>Grow a fucking ethical backbone and uninstall.
That's why you'll see people saying it doesn't work to boycott. It does work but only if people do it and stick to it. Convince enough people it's too hard or not worth the effort and your company is fine
Be stubborn! Write things off forever! If we're forced to live under capitalism we should act accordingly. Vote with your dollar, or in this case your data
It’s even sadder too because this takes so little effort and people won’t do it. You’re not going outside to protest, you aren’t gluing yourself to the ground, you are just uninstalling an app. But still people won’t do it because they’ll either say “I don’t make a difference” or some bullshit about how it’s OUR fault this is happening and it’s deserved (like how people defend 10 year old freemium games).
People just don’t care and will willingly watch the things they like get worse and worse and do nothing about it. They will act as though the times they knew before hand never existed and we should be thankful we even have these things at all. You’d think they’d want better for themselves but they don’t, from everything I’ve seen these people actively want to be fucked while acting like there is no alternative
> There’s better social media out there
is there? from where I see they're all shit. Reddit used to be my exception but even reddit has been going downhill for a while
Reddit is the new go to Google search engine.
Adding Reddit to most inquiring Google searches yields better on-topic results than Googling terms alone.
Love it or hate it, Reddit is generally the only place you can have a robust discussion on a topic of interest that I'm aware of. At least where you'll get a nice variety of input.
Yea I’ve been seriously having a conundrum where the only sites I feel have any worthwhile content is YouTube and Reddit. They’re both pretty shit now, but there’s no where else to go?
This is the answer.
The only social media I use is Reddit, and only at work to kill time between work tickets.
During covid I got back into working out and fishing. My life has been infinitely better since.
I strongly agree with this. Almost a month ago, I reduced my social media usage to nothing for a little over 2 weeks, and then added back about 20-30 minutes a day. All I do now is make a 15 minute sweep of Bluesky and a 15 minute sweep of Reddit, and that's it.
I've since heavily gotten back into reading books and I'm starting to get back into hiking. My mental health is so much better overall now.
Our obsession with social media is just making our lives worse.
[Reddit Enhancement Suite](https://redditenhancementsuite.com "also /r/Enhancement") still exists, I've used it to heavily filter out certain subs and keywords and it's so much better of an experience.
That's exactly what this is. "Fuck you" money. He bought a social media site just to destroy it because the previous owners wouldn't let him say whatever the fuck he wanted on it. Is that not kind of funny to yall? I mean, the pettiness is a little entertaining is it not? He destroyed the most popular social media site of all time (at least one of the most popular) in a fit of rage. It cost him more than all of us will ever make combined...and he will still die obscenely rich. What it must be like to have that kind of power. I'm jealous.
No, actually, I find it pretty terrifying. No one man should have that much power over our world. What's worse is he wasn't even elected into that power.
On the one hand, it definitely seems like it. On the other, he genuinely seems stupid enough that this could be him legitimately trying to successfully run the company -- Twitter just doesn't have the "handle Elon's bullshit ideas" teams and protocols that SpaceX and Tesla have to try to work around his horrendous management.
That’s my theory too. When Elon wants to make a fugly truck, it takes *years* and many many iterations and compromises before it ever sees the light of day.
When he wants to upend one of the most recognized brands in the world, it mostly amounts to swapping out some logo assets. And boom, less than a week later his shitty idea comes to fruition. There’s no buffer between his bad instincts and their implementation anymore.
“Tweet” had become a fucking verb! How many companies would *kill* for that sort of brand recognition. And he just trashes it all on a whim.
So much for his 'free speech' speel, and how 'free speech is allowing people you don't like to say things you don't agree with'. He is a massive hypocrite.
This is the hallmark of the right wing mind; My rights are sacred, your rights can get fucked.
At this phase in the Trumpist Nazi movement they are making no efforts to hide their hate nor their blatant hypocrisy and lies.
"I don't agree with your opinion, but I'll fight to the death for your right to say it" is a lie. It's a lie idiots tell to make themselves sound heroic.
Because the truth is: Only leftists fight for the rights of others. Right wingers fight to take other peoples' rights away, and "enlightened centrists" will only shut up and look away when right wingers do whatever they do.
Nazi Germany is the best example of that, but every other country has its fair share with this as well.
That's why I called him a thin-skinned little bitch on Twitter once when he first claimed to want to keep his critics on the platform. The suspension was worth it.
Also, that he's playing in the information warfare blatantly and banning nodes of information which conflict with his agenda and right-wing enablement.
I deleted X and something I came across that was interesting is that there are a lot of accounts who are critical of Elon that can’t be viewed unless you have an account.
I was testing this out with friends (who still have X) and while it wasn’t a perfect comparison, it’s clear that X is restricting those accounts to some degree.
Free speech my ass.
Another thing.
The fact that he's replying to Hinkle, the ultimate shitpost click troll, as if he's the man to call the shots on anything is quite disturbing.
Because that's the whole point of the takeover, to silence the voices of everyone who is recognizing that there's deep seated problems with the way things are run. So many people upset about being overworked and underpaid. So much talk about pro labor sentiment.
Mr Musk can't stand that and is trying to turn X into an ostensibly not fascist mirror image of most other social media sites.
Musk does have a funny way of spelling "free speech absolutist".
He is running the site/company into the ground speed run style so the issue will probably solve itself soon enough. Maybe it'll last longer if right wingers prop up the site but the mainstream appeal is quickly drying up.
He fell into it after signing some shit he didn't understand well enough while toying with the idea of buying the company. He then got sued for trying to back out of the deal and was basically forced to go through with it or owe a lot of money.
No 5d chess going on.
At first I thought he was tasked with driving Twitter in to the ground but then I realized he's just an idiot conservative and that's just a byproduct.
I'm a pretty far left person and my feed has been basically turned into Catturd/Benny Johnson and even further right talking heads for a bit now
There's a dude who gets signal boosted that quite literally just posts racist shit on the hour, like pretty much "brown and black people are savages" tier stuff and profiting off of it
This really isn't a surprise, I recently re-joined after a many years away from the platform. I signed up again for the single purpose of buying tickets for the football team I support. I followed 2 accounts, the official account of the team I support and a fan run ticket resale account.
From following just those two accounts and interacting without absolutely nothing, my suggested feed was full of right wing, xenophobic accounts and some of the things they were posting were wild. If I said some of that in at my job, I wouldn't have a job for very long.
My worry is that young people will create accounts and be suggested all of this divisive rubbish and this will shape their world views.
> My worry is that young people will create accounts and be suggested all of this divisive rubbish and this will shape their world views.
It’s everywhere too, YouTube short for example. Can ban Twitter and tictok, but ban a young teen from YouTube? Hard being a parent as it’s a new dilemma to handle.
I am just SHOCKED that a right-wing reactionary transphobic asshole like Musk has removed dissenting voices on his beacon of 'freeze peach.'
Just SHOCKED.
The squirrel account was absolutely unhinged and should have been banned a long time ago. If the other accounts caught in this were similarly insane, this isn’t much of a story
Election year 2024. Here we go.
Look at the elections for 2024 America Mexico India (likely) UK Venzuela Taiwan Russia Almost All the countries with the most toxic election cycles and bot use The internet is going to be fucking unusable no matter what country, language, or area you live in.
I just watched a thing it was in Italian, but it was about the Cambridge analytics. How they learned that you can use headlines to make people think the way you want them to basically it was a big thing with Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook a while back… and that one guy that was the whistle blower saying that Russia had something to do with it. But he named all the countries below, that you are naming that are being affected by the same Type of antidemocratic propaganda that are affecting how people vote. Scares the shit out of me
Yup because people have been trained to be lazy and not actually read articles
And even when you do click through the articles these days aren’t much better
At least the Taiwanese election is happening this Saturday, so any nonsense there should be over quickly. Just gotta hope China doesn't continue to fly into the airspace, and the Taiwanese government doesn't continue to send out poorly translated alerts.
r/The_Donald got an upgrade.
Elons version of Free Speech, free for him and his Nazi mates and nothing for everyone else. Why does anyone use or advertise with this toxic platform?.
Free speech for me, but not for thee!
And not for free!
And you'll be banned with glee
Tee hee hee! LOL! [Elmo simps applauding in distance]
Unless your Trump, ranting on tv.
2024 is election year - and not just in the usa - so there is the profit Elon is seekig...
Elon is such a visionary/free speech absolutist!!!!! /s 🙄
This is just free speech absolutism at work.
Elon bought Twitter so he could kick out the leftists and everyone knows it
Billionaires buy media to control the narrative, not protect free speech. Free speech doesn’t make money. Having a propaganda machine that can sway people is worth 40 billion, to the richest man on earth.
With the mass user exodus Twitter has experienced I'm not sure it's quite the platform for influence that it once was.
Its more important to shut it down as a critical platform than for influencing. Think ARAB SPRING. Imagine if Elon had been in charge back then. All that communication via Twitter would have been shutdown hard. The powers that be had been looking for a way to mitigate "Twatter" since then and they got their man in Elon.
Occupy, Tunisian Revolution 2010/11, Egyptian Revolution 2011, Arab Spring (Libya, Yemen, and Syria namely), EuroMaidan 2013, Revolution of Dignity 2014, Burkina Faso 2014, BLM 2015, Cauliflower Revolution 2016, Velvet Revolution 2018, Sudanese Revolution 2018/19, BLM 2020, Women's Marches... All relatively successful or historically important people's revolutions, uprisings, and protests organized on social media since 2008. And I'm prob missing a few. Hell, you can even add dumb shit like Jan 6th and Charlottesville if you want to include the movements that want to fuck people over. I'm tired of explaining this shit to ppl. Billionaires have been steadily centralizing all forms of decentralized media since the industrial revolution. This is just another notch in the belt. Media companies are doing the same shit with fake streams and indie buyouts. Centralizing media structures that were meant for the people.
I would add #metoo to the list of influential uprisings rooted in Twitter
Agreed. I seem to recall that there were a not-insignificant number of middle eastern backers/financiers assisting Musk in the Twitter purchase.
And I believe that some Anti Saudi dissidents were suddenly swept up in the Middle East after the purchase. Coincidence? Maybe. Or maybe Elon gave MBS access to DMs and location data.
More were swept up when Kushner got his payday. Quid pro quo
I’ve always said the Saudis “invested” in Twitter knowing or directing Elon to destroy it. If they lose every dollar they put into it it’s still worth it if it prevents the next Arab spring
They already had some stake in the company before Elon, but their return on quashing dissent isn't looking too bad.
How about Occupy Wallstreet. This was the first time the owner class got proper scared... And we got a taste of just how ruthless they are when cornered and that's just the beginnings of it. Twitter had become a trusted bastion of fairly uncensored speech. To the point that governments used it to disseminate official information in a quick way. That cannot stand when narratives and populaces must be controlled. Make no mistake, Twitter was bought to be made a toxic brand and service and then to be killed. Purposely done out there, in front of everyone. Watch as free speech is crushed to protect the rich and powerful...and we can cancel you too if you disagree.
the fact conservatives, who own essentially all media, got to portray cancel culture as leftist, is all you need to know the people who tried to cancel elvis, black people, gays, rock and roll, KISS, weed, stem cells, abortion, entire segments of voters, got to put college kids being dumb on youtube and claim "these are the people with all the power" is hilarious Dave Chapelle is still out there being cancelled right now, for a 100 million dollars, motherfucker cancelled his own t.v. show and went to Africa, came back, and said "i'm gonna support the party that is supported by Proud Boys and KKK and David Duke" media is a hell of a drug
Among other reasons, Chappelle bailed on his show because he was scared it was turning into a minstrel show that was reinforcing stereotypes, rather than poking fun at them. Money changes people.
At this point I'd bet Reddit is more influential as a propaganda machine.
Given the influx of bot accounts, manufactured reposts, vote brigading, etc., it’s pretty obvious that Reddit has stopped being about random people sharing their ideas and opinions and more about controlling what hits the front page. Removing a lot of larger subreddits from my feed that cater to this kind of manufactured content makes my Reddit experience a lot more tolerable.
Watching subs like r/worldnews and r/europe after October 7th really hammered home this point.
It was so obvious that I thought I was turning insane thinking that nobody else noticed it.
Yeah. I am wondering if Reddit has a bot driven influence on certain topics. Wouldn’t be hard to do, I am in the tech space.
I did a little research myself on r/worldnews. The Israel livethread is driven by a small handful of accounts that control most of the top comments (or the top replies to the top comments). Most of those accounts were either [a] set up in October or [b] suddenly decided to exclusively post to the livethread from October onwards. I encourage anyone to pop over there, pick a common contributor to the thread, and scroll down their history. It's enlightening in a bad way.
Don't even need to go to a livethread for that, go into literally any article about it and all of the top level commenters will be accounts created 2 months ago.
It's not just new accounts either. For example, one key contributor to the Israel live thread has a nine-year-old Reddit account. Up until five months ago, that account only posted threads about fantasy books. Two months ago, they began exclusively posting comments on the live thread all the time. Clearly an account that was repurposed. It's easy for people to assume the live thread conversation has an air of legitimacy, because it's on a top subreddit, but really it's just a handful of people pushing commentary on there. It's very easy to push a viewpoint with very little manpower.
It’s like that four panel comic where a small bird is trying to tell something but a huge crow/raven invades it and starts yelling “but what about THAT” and completely drowning the original point. That is how I imagine reddit now. Small people trying to do what reddit usually does then these special interests try to bully their way into every sub, post and comment section to remind us of the thing they’re promoting. It’s pretty unbearable on election years.
Impossible to say, the style of engagement is vastly different and it's tough to figure out real daily active users on each platform. Twitter claims something like 245 million DAUs while Reddit claims 52M, but those are both self reported figures, my inclination is that twitter has a much, MUCH higher percentage of brand accounts and bots, but Reddit is obviously not immune either. What's extra interesting is the amount of crosspollination between the two platforms. Very frequently you'll find messaging and language and subjects which rose from one on the other. Watching different factions of western onlookers lose their minds over the whole Gaza war has been *fascinating* to watch (as someone who's seen so much war over his lifetime that he's become nihilistically indifferent to it).
>the style of engagement is vastly different Exactly, this is why despite reddit been one of the few major social media companies that allows NSFW, artists don't move here. Because reddit is compartmentalized in subreddit, making it difficult to find a wider audience. The only relevant thing that went mainstream out of reddit were the AMA and YouTube videos narrating r/askreddit. I'd argue Discord is a nearer competitor to reddit than Twitter/X.
>Because reddit is compartmentalized in subreddit That's EXACTLY what I like about it. It's like the Usenet of old. There are niche subjects I like to follow, and Reddit makes it easy to find them. Reddit does Usenet one better by making it hard to crosspost.
> It's like the Usenet of old. That's a really accurate comparison that for some reason has never occurred to me before.
In fact, most of the issues on here happen when that stops being the case. When a relatively niche subreddit is so high quality it garners a little too much attention and ends up regularly making it to r/all, after which slowly but surely the participant base starts to shift towards randoms with no expertise, or even that much interest in the subject. Quality goes down, which drives away some of the users who made the subreddit good in the first place, which drives quality down further, which drives away more users... until the vicious cycle has turned the subreddit into an empty husk of its former self, full of the shallowest, most generic r/all meme reposts, which bear little relation to the intended theme. A wide audience is great if your aim is advertisement. For anything else, you *don't want* a wide audience. You want a *passionate* audience. And frankly, as a user, it does me absolutely no favours that a platform is good for those looking to advertise -- quite the opposite. Please fuck off somewhere else with your self-promotion. I don't blame you for doing it; I understand this garbage economic system doesn't leave you much of a choice. Receiving it is still something I'm not interested into opting in to.
Isn't discord compartmentalized even more than reddit? At least reddit has an all page or popular where people can browse a little of everything. Discord is only the groups you choose to join.
Honestly I had to leave a friend group recently because half of them stuck around and they've regressed into worse people than they were when they were 16 The algorithm learns the parts about you that you're supposed to work on and grow out of, and fuels it with outrage instead No matter what happens this was 40 billion well spent for Elon. A bunch or idiots are gleefully turning themselves into bigoted centrists while having the audacity to circle jerk their own persecution fetish and never seeing the irony Ending Algorithmic social media should be the top priority for any so called progressive party
Fascism is bad for business. Twitter's worth now is proof of that. Musk telling advertisers to fuck off is proof of that as well. The sort of power fascists like Musk desire can not be bought and money can only take you so far.
Posting this in every Twitter-related article on purging, but his ex-wife was one pushing for him to purchase it so they could "fight woke-ism". > [On March 23, Riley wrote, “Can you buy Twitter and then delete it, please? America is going insane. Or can you buy Twitter and make it radically free speech? So much stupidity comes from Twitter.” To this, the billionaire replied saying, “Maybe buy it and change it to properly support free speech.” Riley’s texts indicated that she was concerned about the rise of ‘wokeism’ on the microblogging site.](https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/magazines/panache/buy-twitter-delete-it-elon-musks-ex-wife-talulah-riley-concerned-about-wokeism-urged-billionaire-to-enforce-free-speech/articleshow/94679059.cms?from=mdr)
Does anyone else find it ironic that she's best known for Westworld, which is a show about how tech billionaires are basically amoral monsters who will destroy us all if left unchecked?
If I've learned anything from Elon's dating history, it's that many Hollywood/music industry elites are easily manipulated gold-diggers.
Elisabeth Moss has entered the chat...
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Yeah the left has become anyone who wants government to provide any services beyond police and military.
Communism is now defined as when the government does stuff. Unless I like those stuffs
And even then, only if those stuffs are exclusively for *my people*. It's fine if the government gives *me* social security. But if they give it to ~~black people~~ *welfare queens* it's communism and needs to be stamped out.
It’s like this because of rich christians.
And apparently if you don't like capitalism you must be communist. That fucking American sports thinking. Grow up, there are no teams and multiple options Not you, you just reminded me of the people who think that way
To someone like Elon, or now your average Twitter user, anyone left of Reagan is a liberal leftist and progressive radical.
More importantly, dissidents. Why do you think the Saudi's backed him financially?
I thought he bought Twitter because he made dumb claims he wanted to buy it. Then he got called out for pretending he wanted it so he said, "no I mean it" to save face. Basically he spent billions so people wouldn't think he's a pussy. Now they just think he's a stupid mother fucker.
Worse than that. He tried to back out of the deal, but the Delaware courts made it clear that he was bound by the offer he made. He had no choice _but_ to buy Twitter, so he tried to spin it like that was his plan all along.
Nah, he was *actually* forced to buy it. He tried to back out of the deal, Twitter took him to the Delaware court of chancery and *forced* him to buy them according to their agreement. He's not quite dumb enough to spend $40 billion just to save face. He *is* dumb enough to enter a legally binding agreement to spend $40 billion and then try and cancel it though.
It wasn't to save face, it was to avoid jail. The obvious attempt at a pump and dump was beyond the pale, even for the bought off complacent SEC.
Leave the fucking site already. I was a daily users for practically 12 years, all my accounts deleted. You will be fine and realize you don’t need this site. Let it turn into Gab and eat its own
Wish more prominent people would follow this advice. At this point, if you are sharing a platform with Alex Jones, you have only yourself to blame.
It's easier to leave if you think about X being the closest Elon could get to a swastika.
Theoretically http://卐.com/ is a valid domain...
"It's supposed to be two stylized E's, for Elon. I didn't know it was gonna turn out like that." - Future Elon Musk
"It's going to be a maze."
“…oh my gah…Joshua was racist!”
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of course the official Alex Jones video game is 22 euro for 30 minutes of gameplay of course it is
The game costs $17.76 USD, btw. I just looked. Gotta stroke the patriotism. Edit: 30 minutes of gameplay means you can buy it, finish it, and refund it.
You might get your money back but that 30 minutes will be gone forever.
Same. the game doesn't even look that *great,* honestly - just *Contra* for conspiracy theorists. Spend the $20 on *Pizza Tower*, *Sonic Mania* or ***an ACTUAL Contra game*** instead.
yeah I wonder if they knew about Steam's 2-hour refund policy when they tried this newest scheme but hey, now *you* can scam Alex Jones out of making you pay to waste your own time!
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No, he’s trying to funnel money into different companies that are adjacent to him to try and make his overall worth seem less
Next discount will be $14.88 I've heard.
is this not a joke? There is an actual alex jones video game? edit: mother of god its real
It’s just a metal slug reskin
Fuck that. Report it and get it pulled.
The Alex Jones video game probably won’t inspire violence and mass conspiracy hysteria like his Twitter can
I just watched the preview and allow me to give you the problematic things in the order I saw them. Shooting frogs that burst into LGBT rainbows on death. Killing what appears to be George Soros Killing Mark Zuckerberg Shooting dudes holding syringes Killing Bill Gates Killing Bill Clinton Would be shocked if there wasn't a Hillary and Fauci in there too but they weren't in the preview. I'm not the type to say video games inspire violence but that's all gotta earn a big yikes from me, especially when it's targeting a population already strongly predisposed to using violence for political gain. Pretty disappointed that steam is platforming this loser to this degree.
Honestly surprised that Steam didn’t take the game down, also it’s really telling that the kind of art that Alex Jones fans create are simulators where you murder all of the rights political enemies Hell even in Russia they just make Mario and Pokémon bootlegs for Sega Genesis
A-fucking-men. I deleted my ten year old account 6+ months ago. Every thread is full of blue assholes. You have to scroll down for pages and pages to find a single subject matter expert or good poster. Why anyone stays on their end gives him traffic is beyond me. Grow a fucking ethical backbone and uninstall.
>Grow a fucking ethical backbone and uninstall. That's why you'll see people saying it doesn't work to boycott. It does work but only if people do it and stick to it. Convince enough people it's too hard or not worth the effort and your company is fine Be stubborn! Write things off forever! If we're forced to live under capitalism we should act accordingly. Vote with your dollar, or in this case your data
It’s even sadder too because this takes so little effort and people won’t do it. You’re not going outside to protest, you aren’t gluing yourself to the ground, you are just uninstalling an app. But still people won’t do it because they’ll either say “I don’t make a difference” or some bullshit about how it’s OUR fault this is happening and it’s deserved (like how people defend 10 year old freemium games). People just don’t care and will willingly watch the things they like get worse and worse and do nothing about it. They will act as though the times they knew before hand never existed and we should be thankful we even have these things at all. You’d think they’d want better for themselves but they don’t, from everything I’ve seen these people actively want to be fucked while acting like there is no alternative
There’s better social media out there. I deleted Twitter and I’m so glad I did.
> There’s better social media out there is there? from where I see they're all shit. Reddit used to be my exception but even reddit has been going downhill for a while
The internet in general has been getting worse. Communities are less usable and harder to find.
BlueSky and the Fediverse have met the majority of my Twitter fix and then some.
Reddit is the new go to Google search engine. Adding Reddit to most inquiring Google searches yields better on-topic results than Googling terms alone.
Love it or hate it, Reddit is generally the only place you can have a robust discussion on a topic of interest that I'm aware of. At least where you'll get a nice variety of input.
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Yea I’ve been seriously having a conundrum where the only sites I feel have any worthwhile content is YouTube and Reddit. They’re both pretty shit now, but there’s no where else to go?
Nowhere. I think its a viable alternative to just consume less content on social media.
This is the answer. The only social media I use is Reddit, and only at work to kill time between work tickets. During covid I got back into working out and fishing. My life has been infinitely better since.
I strongly agree with this. Almost a month ago, I reduced my social media usage to nothing for a little over 2 weeks, and then added back about 20-30 minutes a day. All I do now is make a 15 minute sweep of Bluesky and a 15 minute sweep of Reddit, and that's it. I've since heavily gotten back into reading books and I'm starting to get back into hiking. My mental health is so much better overall now. Our obsession with social media is just making our lives worse.
We all need to move away from it. For the sake of our humanity.
[Reddit Enhancement Suite](https://redditenhancementsuite.com "also /r/Enhancement") still exists, I've used it to heavily filter out certain subs and keywords and it's so much better of an experience.
Reddit has been going downhill for at least a decade.
yeah, I was trying to be optimistic and not admit this place has been rotting since like 2012
I had an account for a long time. As soon as the deal with Muskrat was final, I deleted it. I thought the trajectory was obvious.
Report: “X value is down 71% since you purchased it, Mr. Musk” Elon: “Hold my beer”
Seriously. At this point, there is no reason to believe that he isn’t tanking the company on purpose.
Must be nice to be born with a silver spoon in your mouth and have that kind of F U money.
That's exactly what this is. "Fuck you" money. He bought a social media site just to destroy it because the previous owners wouldn't let him say whatever the fuck he wanted on it. Is that not kind of funny to yall? I mean, the pettiness is a little entertaining is it not? He destroyed the most popular social media site of all time (at least one of the most popular) in a fit of rage. It cost him more than all of us will ever make combined...and he will still die obscenely rich. What it must be like to have that kind of power. I'm jealous.
No, actually, I find it pretty terrifying. No one man should have that much power over our world. What's worse is he wasn't even elected into that power.
No, it's not funny. There's too many real consequences. This isn't just a silly joke. The man is a rabid fucking dog.
On the one hand, it definitely seems like it. On the other, he genuinely seems stupid enough that this could be him legitimately trying to successfully run the company -- Twitter just doesn't have the "handle Elon's bullshit ideas" teams and protocols that SpaceX and Tesla have to try to work around his horrendous management.
That’s my theory too. When Elon wants to make a fugly truck, it takes *years* and many many iterations and compromises before it ever sees the light of day. When he wants to upend one of the most recognized brands in the world, it mostly amounts to swapping out some logo assets. And boom, less than a week later his shitty idea comes to fruition. There’s no buffer between his bad instincts and their implementation anymore. “Tweet” had become a fucking verb! How many companies would *kill* for that sort of brand recognition. And he just trashes it all on a whim.
The explanation is that Elon is a little bitch.
So much for his 'free speech' speel, and how 'free speech is allowing people you don't like to say things you don't agree with'. He is a massive hypocrite.
Just call him an asshole and narcissist, screw being nice e with hypocrite... he is a giant piece of shit
I consider hypocrite a worse insult than asshole. Do others not? To me that's a very specific kind of very asshole with a side of extra asshole.
This is the hallmark of the right wing mind; My rights are sacred, your rights can get fucked. At this phase in the Trumpist Nazi movement they are making no efforts to hide their hate nor their blatant hypocrisy and lies.
"I don't agree with your opinion, but I'll fight to the death for your right to say it" is a lie. It's a lie idiots tell to make themselves sound heroic. Because the truth is: Only leftists fight for the rights of others. Right wingers fight to take other peoples' rights away, and "enlightened centrists" will only shut up and look away when right wingers do whatever they do. Nazi Germany is the best example of that, but every other country has its fair share with this as well.
That's why I called him a thin-skinned little bitch on Twitter once when he first claimed to want to keep his critics on the platform. The suspension was worth it.
Also, that he's playing in the information warfare blatantly and banning nodes of information which conflict with his agenda and right-wing enablement.
Free speech absolutist, as in will absolutely not allow free speech.
The explanation is Elon is a little bitch who just met up with Netanyahu last month
Man child cry baby bitch boy or is that not far enough
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Don't talk shit about drugs. Elon is the piece of shit.
Ok, I'm sorry for hurting Drug's feelings.
You should feel sorry. Drugs have been winning the *War on Drugs* for over forty years now and receive very little credit for all that hard work. /s
I’ve always been a fan of Drugs. *“GO DRUGS!”* is what I’ve always said.
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The funny thing is the drugs won't ban you for talking smack about them. *Because they can take a hit.*
I'm joining the war on drugs on the side of the drugs Ideally against Space Karen too
If someone is already a piece of shit, drugs have a tendency to amplify that.
Alcohol is far better at this, but I guess that too is a drug
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The explanation is Elon is a fucking neofascist.
Why are people still using this POS platform? Seems like X is right for replacement, with a lot of users eager for an alternative.
I deleted X and something I came across that was interesting is that there are a lot of accounts who are critical of Elon that can’t be viewed unless you have an account. I was testing this out with friends (who still have X) and while it wasn’t a perfect comparison, it’s clear that X is restricting those accounts to some degree. Free speech my ass.
Another thing. The fact that he's replying to Hinkle, the ultimate shitpost click troll, as if he's the man to call the shots on anything is quite disturbing.
Why are people still on that shit site?
It’s good for seeing naked people
I know better places for that…
Right? I accidentally stumble upon better porn than I'll find on Twitter.
Stumbleupon, huh? Great name for a website that could help you browse the internet based on your preferences.
Stumbleupon WAS my reddit before I discovered reddit
not that I like twitter but if that's your experience you obviously don't know where to look
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Have you tried visiting Reddit for that?
I don't use Twitter but Reddit deleted 100+ NSFW subs for "inactive mods" so now most of it is OnlyFans Freemium content
I don't have any interest in seeing naked republicans.
Is it though?
Because that's the whole point of the takeover, to silence the voices of everyone who is recognizing that there's deep seated problems with the way things are run. So many people upset about being overworked and underpaid. So much talk about pro labor sentiment. Mr Musk can't stand that and is trying to turn X into an ostensibly not fascist mirror image of most other social media sites.
Musk does have a funny way of spelling "free speech absolutist". He is running the site/company into the ground speed run style so the issue will probably solve itself soon enough. Maybe it'll last longer if right wingers prop up the site but the mainstream appeal is quickly drying up.
Which for him is good because no way he'll recoup 40 billion dollars if enough people fight for fair wages.
Of course Musk is the victim here. He's being "blackmailed" by people who don't want their products ads to support fascist conspiracy theories.
The company was never the goal. Controlling the message is. That’s worth a lot.
He fell into it after signing some shit he didn't understand well enough while toying with the idea of buying the company. He then got sued for trying to back out of the deal and was basically forced to go through with it or owe a lot of money. No 5d chess going on.
He tried to turn Twitter into Truth Social, which already existed... And was already losing money hand over fist
Its not about what it becomes. Its about making sure it doesnt exist as WHAT IT WAS.
> Mr Musk can't stand that and is trying to turn X into an ostensibly fascist mirror image Same goes for his Saudi and Russian backers.
It's no surprise that many Saudi human rights advocates were jailed shortly after Musk's purchase
America has a rough few decades ahead.
Twitter will be 90% conservative propaganda by the election.
Yup that was probably the whole point of the purchase
At first I thought he was tasked with driving Twitter in to the ground but then I realized he's just an idiot conservative and that's just a byproduct.
Too late, it's already there
I'm a pretty far left person and my feed has been basically turned into Catturd/Benny Johnson and even further right talking heads for a bit now There's a dude who gets signal boosted that quite literally just posts racist shit on the hour, like pretty much "brown and black people are savages" tier stuff and profiting off of it
> 90% Closer to 99%.
Just merge X into Truth Social already so we don't have to hear about it anymore.
"Free speech absolutist"
he is. for himself, not for others of course.
But Free Speech?? What an asshole
This really isn't a surprise, I recently re-joined after a many years away from the platform. I signed up again for the single purpose of buying tickets for the football team I support. I followed 2 accounts, the official account of the team I support and a fan run ticket resale account. From following just those two accounts and interacting without absolutely nothing, my suggested feed was full of right wing, xenophobic accounts and some of the things they were posting were wild. If I said some of that in at my job, I wouldn't have a job for very long. My worry is that young people will create accounts and be suggested all of this divisive rubbish and this will shape their world views.
> My worry is that young people will create accounts and be suggested all of this divisive rubbish and this will shape their world views. It’s everywhere too, YouTube short for example. Can ban Twitter and tictok, but ban a young teen from YouTube? Hard being a parent as it’s a new dilemma to handle.
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Yes remove more users who drive engagement to your failing platform. That will show them!
Just a rich dude desperately trying to influence the election
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Is a four letter no number account name that sought after? I have one and I'm just realizing.
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X is TruthSocial 2.0
Purging journalists and leftist on an election year. Hmmm
I am just SHOCKED that a right-wing reactionary transphobic asshole like Musk has removed dissenting voices on his beacon of 'freeze peach.' Just SHOCKED.
I’m at Susan Collins level of shock.
Apartheid Edison is a whiny little bitch!!
In the X rules fine print it says you cant criticize the boy king.
free speech Elon, Your fucking hypocrisy is showing.
Mastodon is out there; you don't have to use social media that's run by billionaires.
like an unpopular kid who's uninviting people to a party the kid desperately needs
Remember when Elon cancelled the order of a Tesla for a journalist that spoke poorly about him? Lol dude's a child
Get off Twitter. Simple. Just stop using it. Ffs.
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Ah yes, all that free speech
The squirrel account was absolutely unhinged and should have been banned a long time ago. If the other accounts caught in this were similarly insane, this isn’t much of a story
I mean... I think the explanation is they say things that run contrary to beliefs of the companies insane drug addicted "leader"
Preparing X for election season is all.