cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/23396300
show transcript
nickyflowers posts:
it would be cool if websites let you be an adult on them. the advertisers and payment processors need everything to be Family Friendly though and their definitions of family and friendly are absolutely fucked. but since they’re in charge of the Internet now, no one is allowed to be an adult. tiktokers say things like “unalive” and “seggs” because they know death and sex are too adult for online. online is for idiot babies only now because they’re easier to market to
nickyflowers replies:
oh im sorry you’re a trans adult? super ban. you are super banned for life. you have upset Visa’s feelings. Mastercard is throwing up in the corner. how could you do this to Google Ads?
I blame the rise of nu-puritanism on Google and payment processors. It’s a load of bullshit that people can’t even have negative feelings these days.
Yup.
If I can’t say basic words and facts like, this woman was raped, this man died, etc.
I just don’t use the website in any meaningful way.
When I was a kid in Yahoo chat rooms… I saw things man.
These kids don’t know.
Well the 4chan kids know but these normal kids don’t know.
Yeah, I dont understand either. Why the fuck cant you say suicide? When someone kills themselves, thats suicide, not ‘unalive’.
Whats next, people cant even say ‘unalive’?
Fediverse and DNS sinkholes FTW. Any way I can avoid becoming someone’s money is nice.
The US religious fundamentalists have managed to impose their fucked up values on the world. Calling it “family values” was always a lie.
these people cannot be a part of society. put them on an island with no minerals and let them live in log cabins and fuck their children and do patriarchy all day.
or maybe you think that’s evil and unkind to the children, and they should just be killed and the children freed. whatever.
Relatively easy fix though. Get away from advertiser supported platforms and use community supported ones.
I’ve been saying for years that the advertiser-friendly neo-puritanicalism that was infecting the left was a trojan horse for conservatism, and then here we are.
How was it infecting the left?
Insistence on decorum, general anti-sex sentiments, curtailing of language to adhere to advertiser-friendly standards, to name a few.
I think all of that is true when it comes to mainstream public events, but bath houses are still a thing and queer people are still having a lot of sex. Playing to your audience is just strategic.
kink@pride discourse was the first time I saw that.
C’mon, you don’t have to look very hard to find puritanical, anti-sex ‘leftists’
Yes advertisers like chase and Walmart and visa are truly the most left you can be.
I’m not calling those who craft and insist on this kind of language left, I am calling the people who accept and use it supposedly part of the left (in vague terms).
You are making my point. My point is that conservativism is charlatans and we becomes their stooges when we play according to their terms, including on the field of language.
funnily enough on tiktok you can say “fuckass” but you cant say someone’s intelligence is akin to that of a toaster or that someone is stupid. i have also seen the n word multiple times
Can we say braindead? Because that’s braindead.
You mean brainunalive?
I’ve been so deep into fediverse stuff that I forgot about that. I feel blessed
Have never been on Tiktok. Have no regrets.
I mean it comes up basically every day here where people complain about censorship in a screenshot submitted to some shitpost or meme community.
#blessed
do hashtags even work here?
Hashtags are a Twitter invention and Lemmy is a decentralized reddit clone and reddit doesn’t use hashtags so no.
Kinda (no).
On Lemmy hashtags are just to format a header, as you’ve shown. However, you might see them seemingly randomly because microblog users can post to lemmy and they use them because hashtags work as tags for them.They do work for those of us on mbin
The term “unalive” is so cringey yet dystopian that I don’t know whether to feel embarrassed or concerned when I hear it.
It started out as a fun way to make light of Disney refusing to allow the word “Kill” to show up in the cartoon adaptation of Ultimate Spider-Man, now when I hear it in a youtube true crime video I want to game end myself.
Yeeted right into the search history of life
was that in the comics or cartoon?
Cartoon, Deadpool leaned on the fourth wall to say “Something’s preventing me from saying the k-word, so I guess I’m trying to unalive these people.”
It was funny because it was being used to mock censorship instead of being a form of it
I’m waiting for that word to become so popular it also gets censored, it’d be hilarious
I’ve got a list of backups:
- cooked
- spaced (see The Expanse)
- inhumed (as opposed to exhumed as one might do in removing a corpse from a grave; see Terry Pratchett’s Discworld’s Assassins Guild lingo)
- processed (as one does to food using a food processor)
- isekai’d (for the weaboos)
- truck-kun’d
- terminated (for when the Terminator movies become popular again)
- old yeller’d
- returned to sender (until the postal system collapses)
- X trimester aborted
- Peter Pan’d (as in, thrown off a cliff and expected to fly)
- Mufasa’d (or any notable fictional character whose death was a major plot point)
Worms games have a nice list of expressions for managing kills (or drowning)
i like the term “zeroed” from cyberpunk as in “they got zeroed” (unsure if that is the correct spelling)
Old yeller’d hits different
As a Pratchett fan, I have to say unalive <> inhumed; since “unalive” = dead whereas “inhume” = kill
Most of these have clear other meanings that wouldn’t work being turned into a substituted for killed or died
I wouldn’t worry about that one too much. Death has a ton of euphemisms to soften the concept; “passing away”, “transitioning”, “going home”, etc and so on and whatnot.
My grandpa transitioned, she’s now my grandma
Oooh, a trans-grand-parent!
Sorry for your loss. On the other hand, congrats
Kicked the bucket
Bought the farm
Took their leave
Adjourned to rest
Took the long napWhat are some more?
Punched their ticket Meeting the lord No longer amongst the living Pining for the fjords
wait huh? there’s no way it’s that bad, right?
i luv y’all, fedi frens! ~ <3
Twitter is filled with porn and racism but still has payment processing and ads. 4chan has payment processing. I don’t think this is a universal truth. It’s more like some sites purposefully chose to have strict guidelines for whatever reasons.
“Sorry guys, the ad people don’t like it.” was just an excuse, the real goal was censorship of the web.
If Corporations are allowed to set the rules as to what gets talked about and what can’t be mentioned, it’s easier to flood the net with advertisements for their products.
This was posted on tumblr where trans people being suspended by staff with no good reason is a fairly regular occurrence
George Carlin warned us about this 30 years ago.
I’d link to it but I’m in the middle of a severance theory video.
I think the issue is that these platforms are motivated by advertisers. I can build a Reddit clone in a weekend and have it be ad-free. It’s not expensive to host text + urls - which was how old.reddit.com used to operate. It’s basically a few dollars a month or I could host it out of my house for the cost of electricity (and security). And, without advertisers, I don’t really care what I host so long as it doesn’t directly contributing to harming others.
The main issues are:
- No one wants to join a platform devoid of content
- Once you reach a large enough platform that people want to join, it might require revenue streams to afford the scale
- It’s hard for people to even find platforms (Google will direct you to the top 5: Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok)
The modern infrastructure hasn’t changed. It’s still HTTP and servers. The problem is internet culture. We used to use the internet as an extension of our community. We could share links, forums, etc. in person (bizarre, I know). But now the internet is our entire community. And there is little drive to participate in niche communities. People like to be heard and to engage quickly on the internet which requires a large-ish platform (Lemmy is a good example of this).
No it’s really payment processors.
There have been multiple successful ad-free websites in the past. But they still need revenue to function. Revenue their users happily pay.
But then Visa or PayPal or whoever is handling the transactions starts to pay attention and then all the sudden there’s new rules in place or else they hike fees or just stop processing payments altogether.
And on the Internet, there is no true alternative methods of payment (hint: any viable methods are quickly suppressed by those same payment processors).
So the only way any website gets big is left to the whims of advertisers or payment processors (usually both).
I have no idea why we as a people are somehow fine with private companies having a complete stranglehold on all significant online business. Why we’ve allowed the government to privatize digital transactions, subject to very little rights or protections. It’s allowing private corporations to massively suppress free speech, commerce, and social gatherings in the digital sphere.
Honestly our supposed freedoms are more and more limited these days because they only apply to public spaces, but there’s been a continual erosion of ‘public’. Where is the modern town square? If the only place you can practice your ‘rights’ is almost nowhere, do you really have those rights at all?
The government should be mandating that ‘digital infrastructure’ (ISPs, data centers, payment processors, etc) are neutral and can’t be utilized to bully others out of business. That their privileged position also comes with extra responsibilities and restrictions so you don’t have the digital equivalent of cutting off water to an abortion clinic because the water utility is pro-life.
Probably ~15 years ago I knew a guy who used to help run a large local forum, one day without warning they got cut off entirely by Google because they decided some of their content wasn’t suitable to run ads against, so that was it the entire site got blocked.
Ended up having to break the site into 2 separate domains, one advertiser friendly, and one they wouldn’t touch.
I agree with most of what you said but I feel like we are talking past each other regarding the whole payment processor piece. How do payment processors impact what ads YouTube plays before a video?
You were saying they were motivated by advertisers. That these websites can exist if only they chose not to use ads.
But hosting a website of any decent size takes money. So to pay for it you need ads OR payments from your users. Either a subscription or donation.
So if the websites, like you suggest, avoid advertisers to get away from advertiser sensibilities, they’re still subject to payment processors. Which have many of the same kind of hang ups.
Patreon has had several crackdowns on content solely because of payment processors getting upset. Patreon doesn’t care. The patreon creators are happy and their fans are happy. Everyone involved in the commerce was happy with the business. But PayPal was unhappy and the fans couldn’t send money to the people they were supporting without that middle man. So a company almost entirely unrelated gets to dictate what can and can’t be hosted on Patreon. And this has happened multiple times on multiple sites.
Primarily right now it happens to NSFW content, but there’s zero protections from PayPal and visa doing the same for LGBT content, content critical of China, etc. They’re a private company so all our rights and protections don’t apply.
Theoretically there’s an alternative. You could always make your own banking system and your own Internet (good old ‘free market’ at work) just so you can pay for your website hosting costs. Since that’s technically an option, then they aren’t legally interfering. It’s just business and they can choose not to do business with you if they want. Just as easy as building your own power grid and water system. (Though even if you did try to make your own, they’d heavily interfere to stop you).
So yes, avoiding ads will free you from their control, but it will also limit you to only the size of website that can be hosted for free. Anything of a size that would need funding is subject to these company’s morality rules. Which also makes these communities small, isolated and easily dismantled if they prove to be a problem.
I mean, obviously this is true and a huge issue, but that’s part of what the Fediverse aims to address. Mainstream social media is fucked and done for.
It should be, and yet almost every single community is still enforcing some kind of stupid decorum or civility “standard” which sounds fine in theory, but almost always leads to a similar (albeit less egregious) thing. You still end up with jackasses who know how to play the civility game and are able to say intentionally antagonistic and awful things within the bound of decorum whose comments are allowed to stand while the decent people who rightly tell them to fuck off are getting moderated for “civility.”
So long as we keep pretending decorum and methodology matters more than intent and we keep insisting on civility over decency, we’re just doing the same damn shit.
Good riddance, I hope one days there’s an alternative to Discord, I don’t really trust it anymore, but I can’t think of a program that does the same thing but better.
Well, I do believe there’s an open source Discord clone that’s self-hostable too. It’s called spacebar.
But does it have a user base?
…Well, some people use it. It can definitely work for your private servers!
Ahh…
Well gives me hope for the future at least
I have heard some people trued matrix, but apparently it’s still kinda bad (or was a few months ago). The problem with switching is also always that most people still use the bad corpo site and you want to chat with your non-techie friends usually.
Trued Matrix?
tried*
As soon as any one instance gets big enough and needs to get funding, the payment processors will crack down on allowed content. Don’t like it? Tough luck in receiving the money people are trying to send you.
Let me preface this by stating clearly that I am not a cryptobro, but this feels like one of the legitimate use cases for bitcoin or other crypto here.
Imo using crypto as an investment or maintaining an active wallet is fool’s errand stuff, but as far as actual transactional use, this feels a viable workaround to depower Visa/MC.
Just… Don’t get big enough, right? Limit user sign-ups. That seems to be the obvious solution to this, no? More instances will pop up. Am I crazy?
