Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
Last week's thread
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
The bad guys have definitely learned a new sort of trick. Haven't wrapped my head around it yet, but it is bad, innit?
According to some reports the dems simply stayed home and he even lost votes compared to 2020
The thing that's most baffling to me is how the difference in ground game had zero impact. We were pounding the pavement, doors got fuckin knocked. The GOP did less than zero, firing their entire staff responsible for in-person outreach and gave 100 million to PACs run by grifters who put it directly into their own pockets.
Unless we've missed a trick, retail politics as it has existed is dead.
It was twitter. Elon Musk joins Trump's team. What happens? Harris' chances begin to drop.
Trump did lose support, but there was probably enough propaganda on Twitter to make enough people go "both sides" and just sit out the election.
and of course, Twitter and Facebook style influence campaigns work just as well or even better elsewhere, in communities that haven’t hardened themselves against that type of bullshit
2/3 of regular users don't use adblock, cambridge analytica may be disbanded as a company, but the approach they made still is a thing
Cambridge Analytica even came back from the dead, so that's still around.
(At least, I think? I'm not really sure what the surviving companies are like or what they were doing without Facebook's API)
this is the bad place
IDK, do you really think twitter still has that much cultural relevance? ugh
I'm sure it played a part, though.
facebook is still big somehow and i see no reason why shrimp jesus irradiated brains of boomer population would be not susceptible to it like it was still 2016
Ten years ago, I naively thought that people might grow a sort of mental callus against online bullshit. Big L for me! Turns out that there's no such thing as magical self-assembling media literacy.
Given that Trump lost votes compared to 2020, I think it's past the peak of its relevance. Not many new people are entering the self-referential echo chamber. It's one of the main vectors for crypto and meme stock scams, as well as the main vector for Musk himself. When all those promises are broken once again, fatigue will start to set in among the bluechecks. It may linger, but it will be a spent force by the end of the decade. Keep up social pressure to get people to leave.