Unfeeling Sadistic Assholes
interest/niche dependent
Seems a little like this is the future for alternative social media platforms. At least along socio-political lines. Haven't used Bluesky in around a month so I assume nothing has changed in this regard but people there don't fuck around when it comes to blocking conservatives and right wingers. So now interests and niches are split across two different platforms instead of just being on one.
Which is fine as far as I'm concerned because I'd like to be able to discuss comics for example, without hearing about wokeness or DEI or something. But it probably also means that certain niches and interests are going to require a lot more users on the platform than before in order to feel like they have the same amount of activity as they did when it was all on one platform.
I can imagine that news orgs are particularly caught between a rock and a hard place as far as this goes. Disappointing to hear that they've moved back to Twitter though. When I was there, there were a lot of articles doing the rounds describing the exact opposite and saying that news orgs were actually seeing more activity on Bluesky than Twitter. So I wonder what happened there. Maybe these news orgs value outrage and controversy more than whatever they were getting on Bluesky.
Red, white and blue are like the most common country flag colours. USA, UK, Australia, New Zealand, France, Russia, Netherlands, Chile, Cuba, Czechia, Iceland, Laos, Liberia, Luxembourg, North Korea etc. I'm sure you get the point. It seems like most countries aren't particularly creative or daring when it comes to flags. Almost like all the lions and eagles that you see in military or old timey flags and symbols.
Ok so maybe closer to 10 lol. I'm gonna also punt Shattered Pixel Dungeon. Open source, free, no adverts. Great little roguelike to waste time with.
Thanks for the nice conversation, btw.
Likewise. It's always appreciated when you can chat with someone without guards up and needing to counter snark and shit.
I've asked to remove them
I get this bad feeling that they're probably just going to tell you to get lost. I wouldn't be surprised if the moderators of those subs have okayed it. Another common thing I saw creators complaining about was dodgy Reddit moderators. The moderators of those subs aren't their friends or allies from what I can tell. If they're not the usual assortment on Reddit who aren't even part of the community but like power anyway, there's also suspected 'agencies' or other bad actors running some of these subs and making life hard for people.
But I applaud you for doing this. And I would be amazed if it actually worked.
she/her/they/them
Just want to say, seeing this can be helpful and encouraging to people who are questioning and scared of saying or doing the wrong things. At least it was for me. There was a particular person I was following on social media that described herself as a 'transfem enby', who was probably the most instrumental in making me come to terms with myself, who listed all four of these pronouns. And seeing all of those pronouns made me think, "Oh, so the rules aren't so black and white and this isn't actually so scary and intimidating after all. I am valid in how I feel, even if I'm actually fine with any pronouns."
Of course, I've now seen 'any' listed as pronouns many times but when you're not in these circles yet, you're ignorant and go by what you see in media representation etc. Concepts that seem obvious to me now would've been beyond me before.
Yeah, to me personally as a non-American, it looks a lot like issues like Palestine were just the excuse for certain fence sitters to support who they really wanted to support but with justifications and less guilt. In fact, Trump even suggested nuking Palestine in the months leading up to the election and I barely heard a peep about it from the Palestine crowd because they were too busy trying to convince everyone to not vote Democrat.
I think that the main reason Trump won is because his opponent was a woman who also has brown skin. Anything else is just scrambling for excuses and justifications so that they don't have to look in the mirror and be ashamed of what they see. Because anyone that actually has at least half a brain could see from a mile away that one side was bad but the other side was much, much worse.
Hey ICE. You're a bunch of evil, cruel, walking talking pieces of shit and I wouldn't waste my piss on you if you were on fire. Sincerely, someone from a country that actually respects human rights.
They're gonna have to make the great firewall of America if they want to control the narrative so badly because they might not have realised it but 'www' stands for 'world wide web'. And we don't all have to fucking bow down to fascist thought police.
I've never bowed down to Al Qaeda, so why would I bow down to y'all Qaeda?
In the '80s and '90s, everything these people didn't like was 'satanic'. Then that nonsense seemed to disappear for about a decade. Until those people returned with updated terminology that makes them look like 'free speech' warriors to all the kids and not the dogmatic psychos that they are.
So since then we've gone from SJW to woke to now DEI. But it's always been the same fucking people, or types of people, that told me that all the cartoons I watch and music I listen to was 'evil' and 'satanic' when I was a kid.
I actually almost fell for the SJW thing myself back in the day. I was circling that drain. Until I opened my eyes and saw the company that I was in. Since then I've been borderline 'SJW' myself because fuck those people.
One thing at least is that when you search "Reddit alternatives", most articles that I came across seemed to make out like Lemmy is the best option in terms of amount of users and not being advertised explicitly as a "free speech and censorship free platform", which we all know really means "bigots are welcome here." In fact when I was searching Reddit alternatives, it seemed to me that Lemmy is really the only option.
Oof. There goes that theory then lol. And yeah, I did originally get the impression based on my first couple of proper interactions here that it was an older crowd. Although honestly, it's extremely hard to tell over text based communication. I think that often on these anonymous platforms, users just sort of assume that the person they're speaking to is in a similar demographic to them. Because you can't really detect age through a sentence or paragraph unless the person specifically brings up MS-DOS days or something. Our brains do a lot of filling in the gaps for us and that isn't always reliable.
I'd actually be interested to see some sort of census or poll here that can reveal these things. Although I half expect that a lot of users here would be like "Don't do the poll! They're trying to track you and harvest your data for evil! - sent from my iPhone".
If Android did this, there would be like 5 games left.
What made me leave Facebook was discovering Reddit. What made me leave Reddit was getting banned lol. What made me leave Twitter (or never actually ever bother much with it) is that it seems more like a big popularity contest than 'social' platform to me. Besides, if it was really social, there wouldn't be a character limit that benefits marketing speak and hashtags more than constructive conversation.
Never saw the point of places like Instagram that are based on being able to upload photos. Big deal, you can upload photos anywhere. And the only time I use YouTube is when I'm in the mood for music videos. I have less than zero interest in watching people's crappy home videos, it's like reality TV but even more boring and brain rotting. And I've got better things to spend my time watching. Oh, and I tried TikTok but noped out very quickly. I see absolutely no value in being spoonfed content by some shady algorithm as opposed to choosing and curating your own content.
Personally, I do not care if the platform that I'm on uses my data to advertise to me. I fell in with the 'privacy' crowd like a decade ago and did my time shaking my fists at big brother but I just don't care anymore. None of this is new. As long as the people on the platform are the kind of people that I could get along with, I'm fine. And quite capable of using an ad blocker if I so desire. I couldn't care less if Reddit used my posts in the Xena or She-Ra subreddits to advertise romance fantasy novels to me. There's more important things to focus on.
Even if it's futile, I probably still won't be able to keep my mouth shut about it lol. I do enough keeping my mouth shut in the real world, in a country where you have to assume that everyone you meet has conservative views until proven otherwise. So I'm not going to do that to myself online as well. It just feels wrong to me to not at least try when there's an injustice going on because the easiest way for nothing to change is for no one to even try and change things.
And you're right, things are at least better for amateur workers now than they were before. So that is progress. Although from what I've gathered, OnlyFans isn't completely immune to dodgy shit either. I've come across a couple of stories involving practically human trafficking situations where women are forced into this by pimps and other pieces of shit. So you never really know what's going on behind the scenes when the camera switches off and the put on smile goes away.
Which is why it's also just more ethical to get this content from the content creators themselves rather than random 3rd party websites that lift content from elsewhere. At least if you're getting it from the source, you can have some sense of whether it passes the vibe check or not.
Also, just want to add because I just thought of it. Places that set up bots that lift amateur content from around the web aren't checking for vibes or doing their homework. So they're the kinds of places that would be peddling pictures of abuse or trafficking victims, or even underage people, without even knowing it. Or caring.
The whole thing just gives me the creeps. I'm fine with people stealing from Brazzers or whatever because those workers have already been paid and you're stealing from the suits that get rich off them. But amateur stuff just has too many variables and ethical concerns for me to be comfortable with people treating it the same way as Brazzers.
Omg, I can just imagine and I'm glad that I wasn't here. Probably wouldn't have been able to keep my mouth shut and would probably be banned from a bunch of places by now. Especially world communities, I get the impression those moderators would've been very busy making sure no men's feelings were hurt.
It makes me think that there's a lot more teens and early 20 somethings on this platform than I thought. Because on Reddit, the majority of the "man or bear" stuff that I saw was through screenshots in feminist subs. And I got the impression that the people who were freaking out the most about it were teenagers and grown men that can't think for themselves who treat the words of people like Rogan as gospel. And I don't see too many Rogan fans around here.
Honestly, now that I think about it, that would make sense and explain a couple of little annoyances I've had here on this platform.
Fuck ICE. What the fuck are they going to do, deport from my country that isn't the USA? This makes me feel like I start saying "fuck ICE" on the regular, just to give them more work to do with this thought police shit.
Yeah they're basically on any platform that will accommodate them. When they're not filming anything, the bulk of their work is marketing. Their advertising material on Reddit (and other places) is what leads to money in their bank accounts. Their advertising material on Reddit being taken and posted here leads to no money in their bank accounts.
I think that apart from people just generally not caring how they get the content they want, people also just have zero respect for these workers. They don't see them as fellow human beings trying to live. Or as deserving of credit or respect as other types of content creators such as artists, musicians and talentless jackasses that complain about the woke agenda on YouTube. They're just something to bust a nut to for these people but not real.
I'm not sure that I can really blame people's attitudes towards it though. We've all been kinda trained by endless scrolling porn sites to expect it all to be easy and free. And I can't say that I wouldn't have also been dismissing this as not a big deal if I hadn't taken the time to get to know what these people are all about on a different level. I probably would've still been under the assumption that they're raking in endless cash and living easy.
So yeah. It's probably futile trying to change people's attitudes towards it. And it's probably a problem that will never go away and is just part of the game.
I've honestly been considering that line of work myself for the last couple of years because I'm reaching the point of last resorts. So I've spent the last couple of years lurking in the spaces where creators discuss the business so that I can learn from them. And also because I like to enlighten myself with what people from completely different walks of life are doing and saying.
And maybe that's why I'm currently looking at them as human beings that are trying to make a living and not objects that everyone is entitled to for free.
I think a lot of people think that these creators are raking in thousands of dollars a day because of one or two success stories in the media years ago when OnlyFans was new. But these guys work fucking hard and often go through months where they're battling to put food on the table. So personally, I think it's pretty fucking shitty that a bot is taking all of their promo work and posting it here where people will never even look at their links.
And yeah, no one has disagreed here directly to me but I've seen what people are saying about it in other places here on Lemmy.
You're never going to overcome the moral stain of instead voting for someone who also supports genocide, and works to take people's human rights away, and wants to destroy everything from the public education system to humanitarian causes, and wants to drill for oil everywhere and fill the skies with smoke, and and and and.