During the early days of Elon purchasing Twitter Elon went to Moscow, the Twitter purchase was also heavily financed by both the Saudi Royal investment fund and Qatar, who are low key Russian allies, then there’s the Superbowl discussion Musk has with Rupert Murdoch, then all of Elon’s Trump humping, all of this points to something much bigger behind Musk’s Twitter purchase, I’m just glad it seems like it’s mostly failing.
Now take all of that and think about Spez’s actions against Reddit’s communities, his refusal to go harder on the MAGAs and the Nazis, the site’s over zealous censorship, their protection of Right wing users. Then there’s Facebook, where the Vice President of Public policy, Joel Kaplan, is a GOP operative and a protege of Roger Stone himself, which brings Facebook’s constant pushback against censoring disinformation and propaganda into perspective, as well as their partnership with Cambridge Analytica, and then there’s the Ruzzian connections, both through investment and data harvesting.
Cory Doctorow points to the “Enshittification” of the Internet, but what if it’s a coordinated effort for the fascifictation of the Internet instead?
this is why we need to push alternatives to corporate websites. there was never a need for them, they just got big and it kinda just happened. they’re shit and it’s time we ditched them.
The nice thing about Lemmy is that there’s no corporate stench lurking in the corner. It makes way more of a difference than I remembered. This feels like the old Usenet days.
no corporate stench lurking in the corner
For now…
exactly. fuck big busniess, we can just do everything they provided for us ourselves, and arguably better. I mean, think about it on a technical level, what does lemmy or kbin lack, feature wise, that reddit has?
Yet…
I know it’s a bit harder to do on a decentralized network, but it’s not impossible, plus we’re discovering all kinds of new flaws with the Fediverse at large since the population boom, hopefully things will get ironed out eventually and hopefully we keep things as they were intended, but there’s always some shit head out there that thinks one of two things, how can I break this? And how can I capitalize off of this? It took more than ten years for Reddit to get as bad as it is, where will Lemmy and the rest of the Fediverse be in ten years?
the problem that capitalism is slowly realizing is that it’s hard to make money off of the computer revolution, precisely because it saves labor. aside from the people doing hardware manufacture, it’s hard to turn an actual profit even after stretching. running a web forum or anything like it is especially hard, given how it’s hard to be a neutral and useful service while also being able to sell ads.
Agreed - it takes constant vigilance to keep the corporate vultures at bay. Hopefully we will get more than just a decade out of it here.
Remember when reddit only banned a violent or pedo community after it gets pressured by news orgs?
I’ve been convinced for a while that Elon and Spez are tanking their sites on purpose. They may be assholes but they aren’t stupid.
Spez dickrides the fuck out of Elon, as far as they’re concerned they’re not tanking their sites, their cleaning out the “liberal brain rot” and the easily controlled userbase will stay while the others will move on or stay but actively fight until ultimately also leaving or worse, assimilation.
It all boils down to narcissists/fascists in power don’t want to be challenged, they just want obedience and acceptance, they want echo chambers.
“liberal brain rot”
I haven’t heard it called that before, but it seems to be directly related to the phenomenon of “brain drain” from the same locations, both digital and physical.
I agree, it’s no coincidence these things are happening at the same time. I further wonder if the Fediverse is a bit of a wrench in their media control plans and thus the what look like might be DDOS attacks against lemmy.world and others.
Agreed, the DDOS attacks are suspicious. Then again, you know your site is doing well when the shitty people show up trying to exploit or kill it.
If it was a single action on a single company then I might agree. Elon’s done some stuff, Twitter being only the latest, that shows a trend of…well maybe not stupidity, but it does seem to be flailing around of a rich person without a clue. He seems more of a wealthy tool than one of the higher ups making the plan.
I suspect it’s related to higher interest rates and greater need from their investors to start turning a healthy profit now. they’re desperate and making rash moves in an attempt to bring in money and cut costs
Probably a little bit of both, really.
Word has it that Jack Smith slid into Don’s DMs
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He is not a smart man.
I love the odd angle photos so we can see just how weird these people look.
Same. Steve Bannon always looks like he just came off a 3-day bender.
There no angle where he doesn’t look like he just got done with a rough night in Reno.
I had briefly forgotten the name of the zombie. Does anyone greeting him always open with, “dude, you okay?”
Bannon’s nose is the brightest object in this photo, easy
Three tons of shit in a two-ton truck right there.
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