It was to wipe the news cycle. It worked. Do you remember what it was? Does anyone?

The internet had always been full of those gun boner guys fantasizing about taking up arms against threats to freedom. Younger me had no clue they were the tyranny themselves.

Videos anywhere from 10 to 60 minutes at an anxiety inducing attention disorder riddled pace. Yet all the information can usually be boiled down to a 5 to 10 minute read. It makes no sense. But actually it does because these “infuencers” are modern day infomercial salesmen. The point is to keep you watching so eventually you’ll be persuaded to purchase product. Unfortunately I think probably anyone under maybe 25-30 has no clue wtf an infomercial is so the analogy is lost on those who could use it the most.

This happened in the earlier years of Android. Developers were FOSS until people helped them get the app to a polished state. Then close it and charge money. Make a big push to promote the paid app.

My family mellowed out a lot after the parents of the baby boomers died. The boomer generation gets a lot of flak online but for us it was the prior generations who were problematic.

There’s no going back anyways. I’ve tried making new accounts. It’s impossible to post anywhere.

The account vetting filters block me everywhere. Can’t post unless I’m a vetted poster. Can’t become vetted because I can’t post to begin with. I can’t be bothered to seek out and karma farm on random subreddits that aren’t a mess of filters.

I don’t think it’s really uncomfortable to say but whatever.

There used to be a digital social contract that we were all stewarding a global information database. That was before the era of “inflluencers” and information arbitrage. In other words people deriving monetized content from other content. Why would anyone want to do the leg work for some random jerk to take all for personal gain.

The whole proposition is a negative spiral. The paradigm changed from stewardship to something shit. This scroll zombie thing or whatever. We have the few users who are the “creators”. Everyone else are consuming whatever is fed to them. It has discouraged people from thinking for themselves and maybe even adding something to the pot.

One thing I’ve noticed the git repo snipers. People will camp on forks looking at your work. If you don’t submit to upstream then someone else will copy your patch(es) and make a pull request.

Also more generally things I do that I don’t publish to posts/blogs is liable to be sniped. So might as well keep it to myself unless I’m will to go the full mile making a big show of ownership.