millie

Honestly, a good portion of them probably are the alt right. For some reason leftists on Lemmy have been taken in by this idea that everyone they talk to who purports to be a leftist must be taken at their word in good faith, even if everything they say literally sounds like a right-wing parody of leftism.

The fact that this vulnerability exists necessitates that we assume it's being used.

Why did the economist walk straight past a $1000 bill sitting in the middle of the sidewalk? Because if it had been there someone would have already picked it up.

It would be absolutely absurd to assume that no conservatives are cosplaying as leftists spouting exactly the stuff they accuse leftists of spouting and doing everything they can to disrupt any form of leftist solidarity. It's a $1000 bill sitting in the middle of the sidewalk that we can literally watch them picking up if we're not too willfully naive to acknowledge that it's happening.

Would you leave a secure server open with the password to the root account literally on the front page? No? Then why is anyone leaving this vulnerability wide open and pretending it isn't?

I literally could not care less if you disapprove of my response to literally anything.

Okay, but the difference here is pretty stark. YTMND pages were made from people's individual creativity with no monetary incentive. Nobody was profiting from them, they weren't being shown via some mysterious algorithm that creators spent all their time trying to appease. They weren't presented in a format that encouraged constant joyless consumption. They weren't advertisements or corporate messaging or coopted by fascists. There were no YTMND trad wives or manosphere influencers.

It was literally just people making silly, often irreverent pages to make people laugh. It wasn't something with the end goal of addicting people to scrolling their way to oblivion for countless hours as the world fell apart around them, and it didn't literally diminish their cognitive capabilities.

I'm not saying everything on TikTok or other short-form video platforms is bad, but they're fundamentally different platforms. It isn't a generational thing. Amazingly, I was alive for YTMND and am also alive for short form videos. It's not something any generation has an exclusive claim to.

I too find myself at times scrolling through YouTube shorts finding little of value. I too notice that I'm staring at an AI voice telling an engagement-bait story that probably didn't happen while watching unrelated satisfaction-bait arts and crafts videos with no purpose because that's what people have figured out will keep us staring long enough to get through their video.

I try to ask myself if I'm actually enjoying this and disengage the moment I realize I'm not, but I also close the damn thing just to realize I have it back open again a couple hours later.

That's the difference. That's why it's sinister. It's why social media in general is sinister, even Lemmy. Because even after you close the window half the time you just open it right back up again. That's the loop.

I don't remember that being the case back in the days of YTMND and Newgrounds and all those old sites. I'd look at some stuff and then move on and look at some other stuff. Not close the window and then go right back to looking. And nobody was fighting to keep my eyes locked into their shit as long as possible. If anything, there was a ton of weird countercultural stuff that didn't care at all if I looked at it, or even actively worked to make itself unpalatable.

Not as engagement bait, but as anti-art. As crazy surrealist or dadaist nonsense. As experiment and unfettered expression.

These two things are not the same.

God knows what disease contracted from a couch Vance is walking around with.

I think it's just jabbing at our early assumptions about dinosaurs seemingly lacking much in the way of bulk. We used to interpret them as these ultra-skinny weirdly mummified looking things rather than the plumper creatures many of them probably were.

The idea is that aliens find skeletons of animals we're more familiar with and come to the same kind of wildly mistaken conclusions about them that we might have if we'd found rabbit skeletons without having first hand experience of modern rabbits.

Honestly, this is what blocking is for. Sure, it's useful for toxic or obnoxious people, but it's also useful for people who make a mess of your feed consistently.

Once I sat in a field listening to Victor Wooten and whistling along with him. On a fence nearby was I think a brushed shouldered blackbird? Brushed shouldered something. It started singing with me and doing a little dance. Eventually it even started syncopating its part. Like, you could see it waiting for the timing to be just right for each note. On key and everything. Went on for about half an hour.

Birds are cool.

Tompato!!!

Potamto!!!

If humans went extinct.. um...

Um.

UUMMMM.......!!!!!

Massachusetts has much more dude than this.

Hitler, he only had one ball

Goring, had two but very small

Himmler had something sim'lar

And poor old Goebbels had no balls at all

I dunno. I can't see more than two of those names in succession without this popping into my head.

Trump is aging like a Nazi opening the Ark of the Covenant.