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 youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)
An update to my post about facebook from yesterday; turns out itās much worse:
https://transparency.meta.com/policies/community-standards/hateful-conduct/
You can see the full diff from last version if you click āJan 8, 2025ā and yeah itās a doozy.
Like many here on awful.systems I have a pretty thick skin, but reading the above put me in a really weird mood all day. I couldnāt really concentrate on work. Itās hard to believe that they published this with a straight face, and harder to believe that the media isnāt dunking on them for it.
On the bright side the policy technically lets you go around calling people insane for being straight or cisgender* if anyone is still on there and wants to get banned from that platform in a blaze of glory.
* or indeed simply having a gender and Iām not sure fascists know how to use words right.
It is very disturbing and scary.
Theyāre explicitly carving out an exception to target sexual/gender minorities. And I wonder, given how they are often among the first groups being targeted, and then other groups follow, how long until they add more exceptions? How long until Meta modifies the rules further to e.g. explicitly allow racism too?
Meta/Facebook has never been a good company. But the path they have actively chosen now is so much more evil than before.
Iāve been around the internet a long time, and even back then when throwing slurs at each other and āmaking funā of marginalized groups was, if not accepted, at least tolerated because it was considered some poor attempt at humor, I donāt remember ever seeing a rule or passage in any netiquette stating it that explicitly.
It was always āwe donāt censor speech but donāt be an assholeā with a giant asterisk about what both censoring and being an asshole meant, but I donāt think Iāve ever seen even the worst places say, āwe explicitly allow hate speech, go aheadā.
Holy fucking shitballs.
See this is why I try to do my reading here at night, because now when I feel sad and angry for the rest of the day itās gonna be like 5 hours tops.
same here. the thing is, I think a lot of us are on awful.systems because weāve seen far too much of how fascism operates and spreads online. this is an antifascist place; itās so core to the mission that we donāt publish it as a policy (because a policy can be argued against and twisted and the fash kids love doing that), we just demonstrate it in a way that canāt be ignored. so seeing the first or second (I donāt keep track of these things) most popular social media platform publish a policy whose only purpose is to be used as a weapon against marginalized people, for it to be written in a matter-of-fact āthis is just how it isā way, and for essentially nobody outside of the fediverse to push back on it in any real way ā that is shocking.
as usual, Nina said it more coherently than I did
Im sure we all noticed that this is also exactly one of those things which was allowed in the Rationalist places. And one of the reasons that it took them forever to get rid of slurinnameO on the ssc subreddit (E: He now moved to twitter where he has a terrifying 200k followers (cremieuxrecueil if you want to block the shithead)).