sanity_is_maddening

I stopped using YouTube a while back.

There’s still content creators and people in there still trying to do good work, most of these (although not all) are on Nebula, in case people wish to support them and ditch youtube altogether.

But YouTube as a platform has become unusable for me. And it was not recent.

And I don’t want to use second party clients anymore either. Chasing which one isn’t blocked now is a hassle that is just not worth it for me any longer. The culture that exists in there is not something that I want to bother myself with this much for anymore.

Throughout the last decade after Google purchasing the platform in 2010 (if I’m not mistaken?), I saw YouTube become the first epicenter of everything that is the most horrible online. Gamergate started on YouTube (and was maximised and driven by its embedded algorithms after the Google purchase) before moving on to reddit, 9Gag, instagram and virtually any other platform. And now it’s just rampant common ground in culture, with “SJW” becoming “Woke”, and “Anti-SJW” becoming “Anti-Woke”.

And the masses took the silly pill.

Clickbait articles are the least of the problems that YouTube has for a very long time.

Misinformation unchecked and even blatant lies allowed freely to circulate for years and years now. Just check how many flat earth channels are spewing nonsense freely over there for so long now. And that is just one example. Just one.

Rage and disgust rewarded by the algorithm, resulted in deranged forms of behaviour and rage inducing statements to become common ground in the pursuit of monetization.

Then there’s ads there are openly scams for the gullible to fall for. Yes, I know Meta allows these as well, but I stopped using anything Meta even before stopping youtube. Yes, even WhatsApp. The Cambridge Analytica scandal should’ve made everyone quit in rage and never look back. But hey, I guess I was mostly alone in that. And look at where that got us now. Not just the U.S. but the whole world.

And then there’s AI…

If people need a case study for how the once considered silly “Dead Internet Theory” is becoming true, take youtube. Plenty of AI generated content as a non-stop sludge, reacted by brigade bots, scam bots and sex bots, all rising in the algorithm through faux viewership. The human is becoming incidental in their current model.

Now, everytime I end up on youtube through some website sharing a link to a video there, I can tell you that the feeling for me is one of entering a loud space of derangement, a most horrifying circus, displaying mental illness and sociapathy as their acts.

But to be honest, ever since I moved to the fediverse exclusively in the last couple of years, that’s how I feel about every major platform now. But youtube still does feel worse in many ways to me.

And I hope nobody here takes this as judgement for their usage of these platforms. Youtube alone took hours of my week before this. Reddit too. I know how absorbing it all is. But now, on the outside, I also know how draining it was.

But if your focus is truly just on “clickbait”, know that predates youtube and even the internet in the form of sensationalist headlines. Tv made it worse. Then the internet exploded it in scale. And Social Media consolidated that as the only viable option through the algorithmic incentive for it.

Just check News Headlines from reputable sources from each decade and you’ll see the issue glaringly worsening throughout time.

Good luck on your project and I also hope you’ll share it on the fediverse.

Cheers.

Yeah, Bazzite has the best word in town for a gaming distro.

Rendered speechless I am, as I weep at the sight of such sublime prose.

A delight worthy of a true bard!

Bravo!

Did ye mention the cursed option?? It is wretched and thou shalt not name it to others here!

“Amazon”! “Google”! “Apple”! “Microsoft”! These art with the devil and shalt be pledged to be forsaken! Forbidden words here, ye see? And thou shalt forsaketh these!

Linux, by the one Torvald is the bid! We shalt fork it or foster thine many bastard children to a better morrow.

And all sources shalt be seen!

And all protocols shalt be open!

To all who shalt join the bid of a morrow of freedom!

Wow. You’ve been busy exploring these corners. That’s great.

I think for the most part the .ml problem these days is a bit blown out of proportion. I’ve just been here for a couple of years so the worst that I heard of predates my time. Because a lot of the people registered there are not Tankies and openly condemn those views. But… I still don’t follow more than one or two communities from there because the mods were indeed a lot of the times part of that famously problematic side of it.

But hey, if it isn’t too much to ask, could you explain to me what the hell happened with Hexbear? I read some complaints but from my interactions with it, I never noticed anything that I could point out?

Like .world has a lot of those 1 day old accounts, the quick registrations for trolling and harassment that they take too long to squash. And lately it has been nonstop.

But Hexbear, I’m completely clueless of what happened…

Yeah, a lot of people are “scared off” by all that talk about instances. If people knew that it didn’t matter in terms of functionality and everyday use it would be a lot easier, perhaps.

Maybe it’s a matter of us trying to distinguish between “infrastructure” and the use of that same said "infrastructure "?

Although, saying what instance one signs to doesn’t matter would be lying. But saying it won’t make much difference in terms of where one can go is true. Well, unless it is a problematic instance and the others defederate from it. See? This is why it ends up being complicated to explain when people don’t know how it is supposed to function.

I think the important thing would be to educate people on federation and the nature of open protocols. And why it is a better shift from the current paradigm. A lot less corrupted with less perverse incentives. A return to the original promise of the internet, to be more fair.

I’ve been here for a while, and now I’m on piefed.social after the shutdown of lemm.ee. I can say the entirety of this space we’re on is growing. Slowly, but it is.

I usually mention and explain the Fediverse and the many already existent platforms to anyone who starts complaining about the current state of social media. And explain why it would be better for the world for us all to move into a decentralised network than a corporate owned infrastructure.

As for Lemmy, most people were never on reddit. In my social experience, very few people ever used it. But the ones that used and use reddit, absolutely lemmy came into the conversation. And older tech nerds become immediately interested. As they should.

Oh, thank you for the heads up. I got excited at the prospect of restoring it. I like to restore stuff when I can. Usually is more wood related items. Sad to hear this, but thank you for informing me though.

Maybe I’ll just have it like it is. I’ll call it a “sepia vintage” look as a cool spin to pretend I’m not jealous that others got better and more durable plastic for the same price as me.

Cheers and thanks again.

Wow. This has to be one of the most phenomenal hacks that someone has presented me in a long time.

I had no idea of this.

Thank you very much.

No. No smokers. And the console was stored in the original box in a closet. Not in the corner collecting dust. So it must be the plastic it was used somehow. Sad. I always really liked the Dreamcast look. And it is still one of my favorite controllers after so many years.

I saw someone mentioning “kew” in another comment thread the other day.

Here’s a link:

https://github.com/ravachol/kew

I haven’t tried it yet so I don’t have feedback of my own. But on the surface seems pretty great as an indexation of one’s digital music library.

Is anyone else’s Dreamcast yellow now?

I bought it in the year it was released and it was used quite a bit (euphemism) back then. But I dug it from the closet it was stored in and now is yellow. Remote control and all. All the consoles stored along with it still look the same. All the older ones looking the same as they always were, but Dreamcast decided to have that “we’re fucking old” moment with me. Haven’t tried turned it on out of fear of mortality being the next reminder it has in store for me.

This all sounds like the beginning of a horror flick.

Paranoia and jokes aside, if you feel like there are red flags or that you’re just feeling uncomfortable, don’t go. There’s nothing weird about being the only girl or the only guy in a group, it’s the people themselves and their character that should be under judgement, not the ratios.

About not having internet. I’m too old to answer this question with a straight tone. But I’ll try…

I can go weeks without internet. Without electricity, I would find inconvenient but still doable. Take in the scenery to begin with. Don’t keep snapping photos at every chance. Scotland is gorgeous. Take it all in. Then books, playing instruments, biking, playing cards and games in general, and learn how to identify fauna and flora and you’ll never run out of wonders to contemplate.

Another advice, one with a paternal tone if you allow me… Asking strangers online if you should go on a trip that has a lot of strangers to the point that makes you go ask the strangers online… that is worrying. It’s one of the ailments of the new generations. Having this subservience to the abstraction of the internet as some form of counseling is a huge mistake. The internet is full of terrible people and terrible advice. You should treat the internet as cautiously as you treated the idea of going on this trip with strangers.

Having said that, I hope you consider the judgement of your parents and the people closest to you for this purpose more than anyone in here or anyone on the internet in general.

And if nobody finds anything wrong… then I hope you have a wonderful trip.

This is a nice little gem of a video.

The “Fully Functional” is something that the most level headed adults that I know, men or otherwise, would refute on the spot. I don’t think I know anyone who feels like a fully functional person. Or an adult for that matter. As that is an elusive concept to begin with. Although, that doesn’t mean one can’t find ways to mature.

I’m 40. And the thing that I’ll say is that kids and younger people have it harder these days. The world is in a state of unprecedented cacophony, in which the previous existential threats that loomed over the previous generations are all stacking up to form a massive sense of unease.

Whichever adult, men, woman or other, that claims they have it all figured in the face of increasing calamity is lying. Possibly to themselves first.

The men who feel the way(s) that you mentioned, are not wrong in feeling the way they do. They can only be wrong in how they act in response to it. Because from time to time, we’re all bound to feel like that at one point or another. And unfortunately in some circumstances and contexts that might be more persistent than others.

The great failure of our time is not that men, young or not, are failing more, but that we are all failing more. Because we are all failing each other. Some more than others, obviously. But even so, we’re failing to reach one another at some point in a growing secluded world.

You can eat your greens. Go to the gym. Earn income that allows you comfort. Find a partner. And even have a child…

And still feel all the things that these “men” do.

The point of maturity is to not make others pay for what burdens you.

And the only escape out of that isolated space is not the “self-improvement” route that the fraudulent will try to coach others. As that is just maintenance.

The way out of loneliness is in service of others. Which has always been the the case and will always be.

Trying to find a way out of loneliness by trying to find a romantic partner to “fix that” is just offloading the burdening responsibility to another person. And regardless of sex or sexual orientation that will always lead to a toxic dependency and a relationship that never ends well.

I’m a 40 year old dude. I have a home. I get to do what I’m passionate about. I have a partner that I live with and I love her. But if anyone comes knocking for advice, I tell them that if they’re looking for easy answers, they’re looking for lies to comfort them out of what they already know to be true… That life is complicated and none of us really know what we’re doing while we’re roaming this earth.

But it sure is a whole lot easier when we’re kind to one another. And that is about the only certainty we’re gonna get before we die.

Everything else is noise.

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