• 0 Posts
  • 49 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 13th, 2023

help-circle
  • One thing to note is that there are a lot of bad American beers in small and mid-sized cities. Basically what happened is that in the 2010s it became trendy to go to a brewery with a food truck and just hang out. As a result a ton of “breweries” opened that were more or less selling the experience, with a handful of low effort trendy selections to serve as a hook.

    That doesn’t mean there aren’t good beers though. America is the land of people who do their own thing, often regardless of social norms and established conventions. There’s a lot of great beers across a broad range of categories, it just takes a bit of digging.

    As a sidenote a lot of these D tier breweries are closing and/or rebranding. Changing consumer sentiment means merely being a craft brewery is no longer a hook, while rising real estate costs make the entire endeavor more expensive. The breweries in shitty locations tend to close. The ones in good locations tend to massively reduce their own output, while offering a variety of local alcohol and expanded food options.







  • My original comment was about how that Twitter and Reddit were toxic long before they were “ruined”, and that Bluesky/Mastadon/Lemmy will probably run into the same problem even without any corporate interference.

    You are a child because you just saw Elon’s name and had a complete conniption, and have repeatedly attempted to make the entire conversation about him as opposed to the nature of social media.

    You also have the tone of a teenager who is arguing against someone obligated to listen, be polite, and attempt to get you to grow up even in the most minor of ways. You have this “fuck you I’m right” level of vitriol is designed to either piss people off or shock people into backing down. You have this prose that alternates between oddly formal and shit you’d see in a discord chat rooms. Anyone who doesn’t already emphatically agree with you is just going to tune you out.

    As I have stated earlier, Twitter was toxic before Elon. Reddit was arguably more toxic before it went corporate. I dont think any of these fediverse sites solve the fundamental problems that made these sites so toxic.


  • So, this is a lot.

    I guess I’ll start with you calling Elon Musk “Muskrat”. This is like a middle school level insult. It makes your already immature argument seem even more immature. I’m straight up not sure if I’m arguing with a literal child at this point.

    Two, Twitter was better before Musk bought it, but it wasn’t in any way good. A million different toxic trends either started or blew up on Twitter. The 2010s was filled with a million different dumbass pearl clutching moments that started with a bunch of terminally online Twitter users making a mountain out of a molehill. It was basically just a constant stream of outrage and sanctimonious nonsense.

    That’s not to mention there was plenty of hate speech and attempts to undermine democracy, because the moderation team only really enforced the rules when it came to conservative talking points. You had NYTimes reporters tweeting out how white people should all kill themselves without consequences, while Twitter went around banning people for clowning on laid off journalists by telling them to “learn to code”. Donald Trump was banned, but the Supreme Leader of Iran was welcome with open arms.

    Even then, Twitter played a huge role in the formation of the alt right because they were always at least six months too late when it came to banning anyone. The culture war doesn’t get off the ground if Twitter just blacklists a bunch of straight up Russian propaganda websites and banhammers Milo. They also were extremely late to the party when it came to banning those ISIS recruitment videos, which is even more inexcusable.

    I reject the idea that reddit was ever really that good. It was better in some ways, but a lot of the most toxic reddit moments happened before it went corporate. Off the top of my head:

    • The softcore child porn
    • The stalker pictures of women
    • The time they had a huge thread where they all collectively gained sympathy to rapists
    • The “seduction” subreddits that basically attempted to convince naive young men that “seduction” meant putting women into a situation where they consented due to extreme social pressures.
    • The time they identified the wrong person as the Boston bomber

    The non toxic content was extremely hit or miss. You’d get more in depth discussion, but it would be between a ton of extremely myopic pseudo intellectual posts. Basically half of reddit was something like:

    • Religion bad, but only Christianity
    • I am euphoric because my atheism and intelligence enlightens me
    • Republicans bad
    • I have literal superpowers now that I stopped masturbating
    • Some half true historical fact that gets repeated a million different times because it fits everyone’s worldview
    • Keanu Reeves
    • Rage comics
    • DAE hate sportsball ???

    Finally, a huge portion of the reason reddit went downhill was the unpaid mods. They were often unwell individuals who used their position to push progressive politics. There was a good five years where basically every sub over a certain size was essentially a progressive politics sub, because they were all modded by the same people who saw the users as a captive audience.

    Social media just isn’t a good place for unique content or discourse. That’s not gonna change no matter who the owner is.


  • I reject the idea that things like Mastadon, Bluesky, Lemmy, etc will ever actually be good things.

    Elon turned Twitter alt right, but it was a shithole for years before he bought it. Twitter started being a bot infested outrage farm echo chamber with questionable moderation practices in like 2014.

    Reddit was in some ways better before it went corporate, but in a lot of ways it was much worse. Like all things considered I’d rather be on a website that has a shitty mobile app and mods that sell access to corporations than a website where there are communities dedicated to softcore child porn and teenagers getting death threats over jackdaws.

    Even if the fediverse fulfills its promise of not going down the corporate rabbit hole, they are still going to end up being a collection of inherently toxic echo chambers.







  • Look honestly I don’t think this is that dystopian.

    Smoke detectors existed in bathrooms forever. The main use in high school seems to be catching particularly dumb teenagers smoking cigarettes in the bathroom. When I was in high school they were tuned to be super sensitive to the point where water vapor could set one off. I remember one time where the entire school had to stand out in the rain after a fire alarm went off, in what was later determined to be just two teenagers smoking in the bathroom.

    Teachers also have been trying to catch students smoking for like 50 years. Back in the 20th, there were assistant principals that basically roamed the halls looking for whiffs of cigarette smoke. Part of the reason memes about hanging out under the bleachers started is because it was the best place to smoke on account of being outside, out of the way, and old school gym teachers just not giving a fuck.

    This dudes app just seems like a modern update on very old concepts. Instead of teenagers smoking cigarettes, they are vaping. Instead of a smoke detector, you have something designed specifically for vapes. Instead of some super anal assistant principal on patrol, you have some super anal assistant principal sprinting across the school. Who knows, maybe this is the thing that forces teenagers to touch grass because I’m willing to there aren’t vape detectors under the bleachers and gym teachers still don’t give a fuck.