archnemesis Pedant back again ... re: Liam Payne. I read a ton of stuff on him this week, I've even been back on twitter the last week after a very long sabbatical away, convinced more than ever it is just the worst place to subject a thinking mind to because of the cacophonous amount of bad opinions ... I didn't see a single comment like what you're describing. Algorithms, yada yada. But as i've said before my dude, I think you have sorta curated an online world where you disproportionately see the exact sort of sanctimonious perma-online moral zealots you hate the most. No doubt they exist, maybe even in the sorta numbers that would fill a Cleveland mid-size arena if you scoured the entire earth collecting them. But idk, i don't know how you expect a world of 6 billion people to not produce noxious pockets of deeply disagreeable people. This is a permanent brand of person online, you should probably find a way to ignore their marginality the same way you do cherubic Mormons on the street asking if you'd like to attend church ... Truly curious, have you ever reflected that this may be a frequency bias of yours?
It trended. Thousands of comments. I'm sure you can do a cursory search. I don't know if your feed is exclusively woodworking or 'what's your bodycount TikToks' but I assure you millions of impressions hit on "Liam Payne abuser."
i just searched Liam Payne and you can find liked posts in the tens of thousands saying "Liam Payne's body" implying it's his corpse but it's just a hot photo of him. millions of impressions posts because Chris Cuomo is trending like "Chris Cuomo is so cooked" because one clip of him went around. poll 1,000 people on the street their thoughts on the Chris Cuomo viral clip and you'd probably get 1,000 blank stares. twitter is it's own ecosystem. again, in the current internet there are just fixed genres of people sounding off in their cul de sacs. it's a rotating carousel of ephemera.
Yes. It is. It's all transient and does not last. And yet it shapes millions of minds all day, occasionally including powerful people. And, really, even that is a dodge. Because to shape people the statement has to exist in the first place. So people believe these things, or at least want other people to believe they do, and they contribute to a pool of information, misinformation, disinformation, and opinion. And it amounts to something. And if your take this week is that only a few hundred thousand people shared a viewpoint, so that viewpoint doesn't matter, we can just skip it.
Big leap that "hundreds of thousands of comments" means they all agree with it (could be 10 people saying "fuck you" to every 1 saying it). But to your original post, again you take the fact that this exists in some form to the extreme of "why bother making anything for people?" Would be willing to bet 99% of people who had a reaction to this were deeply affected, consumed it as the sad story of the day, or completely shrugged.
Twitter being a rotating carousel of ephemera is a problem. These people sound off each other to get enough confidence to say the most insane shit. Definitely not a majority by any means, but this disgusting group think is problematic, is it not?
if you got bent out over every subgenre of folks spewing irrational shit on the internet, you'd never have time for anything else. like anything else that sucks or is disagreeable, it's the degree to which you prioritize it as a social threat or how much space it takes up in your head that i take issue with. Pat has clearly chosen his lane of "disgruntled, moralistic social justice types who over-correct for societal wrongs to a sociopathic degree", so if that's just his focus, great, we all need a hobby. but the next step in logic then leaps to "when you’re working for an uncaring, emotionally inert, group of assholes? What’s the payoff?" and again, raw numbers on the internet, fine, sometimes they're big (and again, a video of Chris Cuomo that also got millions of impressions that will have the lasting cultural memory of a gnat) but as a percentage, would the ghost of Liam Payne really find this group to be enough to forego the act of making art for his fans? i'm sure you could find thousands of people on twitter chriping about something like how the depiction of Venom/Eddie Brock in those movies promotes toxic relationships or whatever the fuck. Pat mentioned some stupid Mark Wahlberg twitter moment i forget the details of that, as a heavy media and media analysis consumer, i feel confident i would have gone the rest of my life never having heard. i'd argue the effect of these kind of people on the real world is negligible or largely self-contained to the point of not being a tier 1 or 35 concern (and in most of these cases, you can find just as many people groaning at the self-righteousness of the twitter clowns). i just think this thing generates a certain dopamine rush for people the same way the campus cancel culture stories would, and every portentous "this is a slippery slope, what terrible future will it lead to??" has largely not happened (remember the cafteria bahn mi incident that supposedly was going to lead to the end of white people ever being allowed to open ethnic restaurants?)
archnemesis Pedant back again ... re: Liam Payne. I read a ton of stuff on him this week, I've even been back on twitter the last week after a very long sabbatical away, convinced more than ever it is just the worst place to subject a thinking mind to because of the cacophonous amount of bad opinions ... I didn't see a single comment like what you're describing. Algorithms, yada yada. But as i've said before my dude, I think you have sorta curated an online world where you disproportionately see the exact sort of sanctimonious perma-online moral zealots you hate the most. No doubt they exist, maybe even in the sorta numbers that would fill a Cleveland mid-size arena if you scoured the entire earth collecting them. But idk, i don't know how you expect a world of 6 billion people to not produce noxious pockets of deeply disagreeable people. This is a permanent brand of person online, you should probably find a way to ignore their marginality the same way you do cherubic Mormons on the street asking if you'd like to attend church ... Truly curious, have you ever reflected that this may be a frequency bias of yours?
It trended. Thousands of comments. I'm sure you can do a cursory search. I don't know if your feed is exclusively woodworking or 'what's your bodycount TikToks' but I assure you millions of impressions hit on "Liam Payne abuser."
i just searched Liam Payne and you can find liked posts in the tens of thousands saying "Liam Payne's body" implying it's his corpse but it's just a hot photo of him. millions of impressions posts because Chris Cuomo is trending like "Chris Cuomo is so cooked" because one clip of him went around. poll 1,000 people on the street their thoughts on the Chris Cuomo viral clip and you'd probably get 1,000 blank stares. twitter is it's own ecosystem. again, in the current internet there are just fixed genres of people sounding off in their cul de sacs. it's a rotating carousel of ephemera.
Yes. It is. It's all transient and does not last. And yet it shapes millions of minds all day, occasionally including powerful people. And, really, even that is a dodge. Because to shape people the statement has to exist in the first place. So people believe these things, or at least want other people to believe they do, and they contribute to a pool of information, misinformation, disinformation, and opinion. And it amounts to something. And if your take this week is that only a few hundred thousand people shared a viewpoint, so that viewpoint doesn't matter, we can just skip it.
Big leap that "hundreds of thousands of comments" means they all agree with it (could be 10 people saying "fuck you" to every 1 saying it). But to your original post, again you take the fact that this exists in some form to the extreme of "why bother making anything for people?" Would be willing to bet 99% of people who had a reaction to this were deeply affected, consumed it as the sad story of the day, or completely shrugged.
Twitter being a rotating carousel of ephemera is a problem. These people sound off each other to get enough confidence to say the most insane shit. Definitely not a majority by any means, but this disgusting group think is problematic, is it not?
if you got bent out over every subgenre of folks spewing irrational shit on the internet, you'd never have time for anything else. like anything else that sucks or is disagreeable, it's the degree to which you prioritize it as a social threat or how much space it takes up in your head that i take issue with. Pat has clearly chosen his lane of "disgruntled, moralistic social justice types who over-correct for societal wrongs to a sociopathic degree", so if that's just his focus, great, we all need a hobby. but the next step in logic then leaps to "when you’re working for an uncaring, emotionally inert, group of assholes? What’s the payoff?" and again, raw numbers on the internet, fine, sometimes they're big (and again, a video of Chris Cuomo that also got millions of impressions that will have the lasting cultural memory of a gnat) but as a percentage, would the ghost of Liam Payne really find this group to be enough to forego the act of making art for his fans? i'm sure you could find thousands of people on twitter chriping about something like how the depiction of Venom/Eddie Brock in those movies promotes toxic relationships or whatever the fuck. Pat mentioned some stupid Mark Wahlberg twitter moment i forget the details of that, as a heavy media and media analysis consumer, i feel confident i would have gone the rest of my life never having heard. i'd argue the effect of these kind of people on the real world is negligible or largely self-contained to the point of not being a tier 1 or 35 concern (and in most of these cases, you can find just as many people groaning at the self-righteousness of the twitter clowns). i just think this thing generates a certain dopamine rush for people the same way the campus cancel culture stories would, and every portentous "this is a slippery slope, what terrible future will it lead to??" has largely not happened (remember the cafteria bahn mi incident that supposedly was going to lead to the end of white people ever being allowed to open ethnic restaurants?)