Uriel238

@Uriel238@lemmy.one

Reddit refugee from the Redditor strike of June 2023.

A compulsive mansplainer, I try to limit my rants and diatribes to takes that appear to be rare, with mixed results.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

"Kbin: covering all the current news and rumours out of Russia about Wagner, a possible coup, etc. Reddit: *crickets* Make of it what you will. 🤷‍♀️" (indieweb.social)

Kbin: covering all the current news and rumours out of Russia about Wagner, a possible coup, etc. Reddit: crickets Make of it what you will. 🤷‍♀️

Uriel238,

This raises one of the problems with company-sponsored media that has been a problem since Pulitzer and Hearst. Your bosses and sponsors will always have opinions about what news is fit to print.

So during the cold war never a bad thing was said about GE (we bring good things to life!) despite how they were pushing our elected officials to buy more nuclear warheads, even when we had plenty. GE bought a lot of commercial time from all three networks and no one wanted to disrupt that cash flow.

This might be a benefit from federated social media, that burying a story becomes impossible requiring only a bit of vigilance from its end users.

Uriel238,

A vault or filing cabinet.🗄 Or, every file can track all the state-changes with every keytype or click and update the permanent file whenever there's a pause in activity.

Uriel238,

Ima say the Titanic claimed a few more lives. In First Class, no less.

Uriel238,

Subnautica is entirely a cautionary tale about the hazards of diving (without even decompression sickness or nitrogen narcosis). I died most by running out of O2 scrounging in wreckage, or underestimating the medium-sized toothy fish. Still. It's dangerous!

Uriel238,

My dad was an astronomer, and as a toddler I thought it was the funniest name for a star. Then the movie came out and I was bugged that they misspelled the name for the promotional posters (but not in the movie itself).

Uriel238, (edited )

Copyright infringement is not a crime [in the United States]. It's grounds for a civil suit, but it looks really bad for Sony entertainment to try to bleed tens of thousands of dollars from a poor family trying to watch a movie they couldn't afford to watch in theaters.

Possessing or viewing CSAM is so severe a crime, you need a lawyer to dispose of it. To not do so is to stay in possession of it, which is a felony. To destroy it is destruction of evidence, which is a felony. Your only recourse is to stuff it in an unmarked box, and ask your lawyer to anonymously hand it over to the local precinct. It is essentially social toxic waste.

ETA [rant] Note that a) Sony (and all the other major studios and publishers and record labels) gladly pirates IP that is not theirs, and also underpays the people that produce their content. And b) Sony freely engages in dark patterns and odious TOSes which is one of the reasons I haven't been able to play Sony games in years. So it is actually more ethical to pirate Sony content (or again, that of any major studio, record label, publishing house or AAA game company) than it is to pay the company and support their ongoing abuse of workers, end consumers and the market.

Also there is one thing you can do to them that is worse than pirating their content, and that is not pirating their content. [/rant]

Edit: Specified that in the United States, copyright is not a crime. It can be a crime in other parts of the world (such as within the EU) and it can be treated as a crime in the US if a company is annoyed enough at you, and has done so to recover / stop the distribution of pre-release content. (A beta iPhone model comes to mind.)

Uriel238,

You're right that I should have specified the US, and will edit my original comment.

It's not a crime in the US that has state-served sentences like fines or imprisonment, rather is a civil infraction. Granted, the media trade organizations like the MPAA and RIAA would very much like to make copyright infringement felonious, but that could easily lead to overenforcement and filling our already impacted prisons even more.

I've heard the European watchdogs are more severe and will go after grandmothers who play radios too loudly regarding public performance regulations.

But we're in an era in which states are passing laws to make persons illegal or strip them of their rights, so we can't rely on the state (any state) to fairly assert how their populations should behave, and Disney has been an IP-maximalist shit since the mid 20th century.

So our respect of legality should only extend to what can and will be enforced. The Sheriff of Nottingham does not deserve our obedience. (Prince John neither)

This feels like a forced reddit detox.

I, much like basically everyone here, have been avoiding Reddit when possible, and the content here just doesn't hit the same. My fried dopamine receptors were certainly screaming for stimulation early on but now I feel an urge to touch grass and breathe fresh air. What is this? Am I dying? I still hate the angry lightbulb in...

Uriel238,

I've been on Reddit long enough to get permabanned from favorite subreddits for weird reasons, and kicked off Reddit completely for a whole week (I was permabanned for an alleged bad misinterpretation of a comment, and it took a week for them to review and reverse the ban.) So I've had sore spots.

There are communities I miss, and so far I haven't found equivalent ones here, but my experience here feels a bit like when I was starting Reddit. I'm still learning how to fit in.

Once on Reddit, I was accused of being a tankie (and had to look up what the heck tankies were. I think having mixed opinions regarding specifics of the Soviet Union is controversial) and I was banhammered from a left-wing ideology sub for Atlantism which I still don't fully understand what that means. (Approving of or not being sufficiently critical of NATO activity, maybe?)

So, having been the recipient of injustice by Reddit and its moderators, my attachment to it was already reserved.

Uriel238,

I still don't know. It may have had to do with saying something nice about NATO but I'm not sure. One of the problems I generally have is discussing things descriptively rather than prescriptively (I'm often looking at political situations well beyond my pay grade), usually to say this is a problem. I don't know how we're going to fix it but it's bad and is likely to get worse.

Uriel238,

McDonald's is notorious for suing any food-related company with a name starting with Mc or Mac, for trademark infringement. McDonald's lost to McNally's, a steakhouse in California, but I have to assume they've won enough to persist the policy.

Although in the 2010s it was observed that copyright lawyers on retainer to movie studios and record companies were over-eager to report infringement to media platforms even when it was obviously unintentional and not useful for piracy (e.g. dancing baby videos.) And Disney has a long wretched tradition of suing daycare places for wall murals long before the internet.

So this might be a matter of retained legal teams keeping themselves busy with overvigilence, since overenforcement makes such companies look like abusive dicks who deserve to be pirated (or worse, deserve to be not pirated).

Uriel238,

In a pluralistic society it is as bad as racisim or prejudice against Muslims or misogyny. If your fear of a given group informs a change of a long-term friendship just from that friend coming out, then yeah, it's not only a social dysfunction but informs what job positions you can have that are public-facing or public-serving.

For instance, transphobes shouldn't be doctors, pharmacists or defense attorneys if their transphobia.migh affect their regard to clients.

Maybe in a police state where citizens are expected to adhere to an extreme level of conformity then being transphobic might not cause additional harm, but no one would want to live in such a society.

Uriel238,

Anyone who is a Republican at this point is actively supporting the white power / Christian nationalist movement and the fascist takeover. That is to say, they're in support of the purification movement and genocide whether or not they personally believe in the culture war or are a fiscal conservative loyalist.

43 years of failed fiscal conservative policy only served to accelerate the Republican party toward fascism and the Trump takeover of the GOP during the 2015-2016 primary. So it essentially was fascism all along.

Uriel238,

As heinous as their child predation and corruption of office have been, war profiteering, bonded labor exploitation, global pollution, suppression of harm assessment science and pushing deadly addictive pharmaceuticals all put their immorality at an exponentially higher scale.

Uriel238,

To Republicans it's about loyalty over principle. Everyone who is part of the movement gets the benefit of doubt while anyone else is an enemy.

Of course this hasn't stopped infighting within the Republican party, so they're now factioning and fighting among themselves as well, each sect claiming to be the true base of the Republican party.

Uriel238,

The US Libertarian Party is really rather removed from libertarian parties of other natures or typical libertarian ideology. As far as I can tell the major difference between being US Libertarian or Republican is that Libertarians actively do not care if they're hated. Notoriously, Penn Gillette divorced himself from libertarianism because the Libertarian Party got too obnoxious for him.

Typically, Republicans trying to distance themselves from Republicanism pretend to be conservative independents. Bill O'Reilly has asserted such as has others on the FOX News cast. (Tucker Carlson, maybe? I wonder if it's a FOX News editorial guidelines to assert party neutrality, even as they were giving Trump softball interviews or letting him rant on the phone for 60+ minutes at a time.)

Uriel238,

Whenever we can

So far, Republicans are happy enough to stress-test the mutual loyalty doctrine with obnoxious officials embarrassing the integrity of their office, pushing / voting for odious bills that are poorly written and that overreach, or saying the incitement-to-violence and bigotry / exclusionist rhetoric out loud.

To clarify, there are no good, public-serving Republican subdivisions today: GOP and conservative values since the 1960s have pushed for policy that has led us to where we are now, where precarity (when not poverty) is so pervasive that Mussolini-wannabes and purge politics (culture wars) are popular. Every conservative alive who's been voting either to cut social safety nets, cut taxes or elect officials to do so have bought tickets to ride this train. (Not to mention stock in the proverbial railroad company). The never-Trumpers and OG fiscal conservative Republicans are essentially members who wish there was still more altitude from which to plummet, and the impact point wasn't so close.

So, it's more that no-one wants to take responsibility for the consequences of their own voting histories, now that the train is rocketing forward at high speed, so they're blaming each other.

But yeah, whether we meme this up to wedge the factions further apart, or find additional controversies with which to divide republicans, or even encourage factions to splinter and submit their own rival candidates to elect instead of Trump / DeSantis, we are doing good work to give US democracy (lower case) time to sort itself out.

Anyone else think that spez might be the fall guy for the board?

As more and more articles and interviews come out about spez and how he's inspired by how Musk running Twitter, I genuinely can't believe he's this stupid. Anyone else think that we could see a repeat of what happened with Ellen Pao when all the gate subreddits were banned? All of these quotes from Spez are coming out, and the...

Uriel238,

Well Musk absolutely was this stupid. We has content moderation experts lay out in specific detail how not to fuck Twitter up. And he totally fucked Twitter up in the way we were warned would happen.

I think these guys are just so far removed from us normies as to have no context how or why their companies

Uriel238,

In my case I found some pretty great communities, also a bunch of news curation subs that kept me up to date regarding certain national developments. I don't need this to be exactly like Reddit (and will probably prefer the general social clime). But I am definitely looking to replace some of what I'm losing by leaving Reddit.

Uriel238,

This raises the possibility of trying more creative actions of account sabotage.

How permanent are edits to posts or comments? If I took the text of each comment, ran it through a drunken pirate dialect filter and replaced the old text with the new via edit, could they revert that?

Is there a way to search through my content and replace every instance of a word or phrase (say, law enforcement) with [REDACTED]? lather, rinse, repeat every day until any comment of substance is unintelligible?

As on Isla Nublar, nature finds a way.

Did the reddit hivemind do a 180 or are the people left behind just the people who don't care.

Prior to the protest reddit was in full support of the protest. Most polls on subs supported a shutdown. Now, seemingly every community cant understand why the protest was needed and they're calling it a mod power trip. There is a 3rd possibility. This is an unfounded conspiracy but reddit themselves could be manipulating...

Uriel238,

I've only been on Reddit since 2020ish, but was already losing patience with moderation problems and known social engineering exploits, one of which was used to permaban me. It took a week for Reddit to decide it was in error.

I was involved with some good communities, bit not enough to commit.

Also those communities are still locked. So it's not a hard choice while I transition.

Also I like the notion of a federated net community especially as the commercial social networks enshittify themselves to irrelevance.

Also Reddit corporate is trying deception and scabbing to mitigate the effects of the strike. Do to Hell with that.

I'm here for the foreseeable future.

Uriel238,

If we just left it at that, I'd agree. Reddit had a handful of right-wing media watch subs that would track and report when someone said someting egregious, legally gray or in light with the fascist movement identity (e.g. mythical history to justify legitimacy.) That can not only be used to expose their mask-off faces to the public, but in instances where incitement or threats turn into action, it can be reported to investigators to help track down key players.

So, much the way backpage was helping law enforcement track human traffickers (who did business on backpage) we have the option of leaving them be, but to exploit their intra-sect candor.

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