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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We lost track of what money was supposed to be for… a representation of the resources and services in circulation. In which it was supposed to facilitate trade by creating tokens to facilitate transactions without the requirement of trust in the absence of a good, like when a farmer would need a tool from a blacksmith but the goods that the farmer has are only available when harvested in which the tool that the blacksmith has is required to retrieve them. In the presence of trust, the blacksmith was going to still trade and expect the goods when time was due. In the absence of trust, like in relation to a stranger, this trade wouldn’t go forward. Money as a representational token solved this sort of common issue. And this became a necessity when tribes went above the Dunbar’s number.

Cut to now…

What the hell is an economy even supposed to represent anymore? It is certainly not a representation of the resources and services in circulation, that’s for sure. 6 out of 9 planetary boundaries already breached all to ensure the survival of this abstraction. Some even call it Moloch as a reference to the pagan god which required human sacrifice. I thinks it’s worse, as it requires the sacrifice of everything, not just humans. But it is certainly a clever nod to something that was only real because people believed it to be.

Back to your project. A FOSS Barter Facilitator. There’s nothing I don’t like about this. Just make sure the protocols remain open to federation of future FOSS Barter Facilitators and you have a slice of Utopia to challenge the dystopian hell we’re in.

You have something here that can alleviate people’s lives in times of great need. Resource collapse is imminent now. If that is not at least partially avoided, that makes the collapse of the global economic system inevitable. What happens after that is a fool’s errand to even attempt to guess. We only know it’s not gonna be peaceful and nice given the stupidity in human nature. Scarcity always leads to the forming of new predation systems. That is how predation was formed in Nature. The incapacity for self-regulation led to animals to reproduce and consume more than the regenerative availability of their setting allowed, leading them to predate on each other. This is how violence emerged in Nature and still does to this day. When we lose track of self regulation we return to the scavenger’s rule of the wild.

But this helps in giving people access to trade without the requirement of capital tokens. Huge spikes in inflation, unemployment and mass migrations are only going to increase in volume and in rate as resources continue to collapse worldwide. We’re in a feedback loop and war and A.I. will only accelerate the velocity of it.

Or, you know, we could have more ideas like yours and reduce resource intake, increase individual resiliency and in doing so, lessening the panic in the common struggles.

So…

I’m certainly saving this post and link and share it with anyone who is inclined to listen.

I’m not a coder, so I thank you for such a wonderful contribution to the world.