Gwen

@Gwen

Dumbass in a dumb land

She/Her

I was born in the late Holocene and I've seen some shit

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Gwen @Gwen11/21/2022, 8:18 PM

walking mirage @atomicthumbs

Ryan C. Gordon @icculus11/21/2022, 5:09 PM

There should be a study about how someone with a moderately-large Twitter following can lose their shit about something trivially fixable, and cause damage that echoes forever.

I’ve seen this take dozens of times now by unrelated people with large audiences.

EDIT: I came back and cropped the username and avatar out of this screenshot. I don't know anything about this person, I just screenshotted the millionth tweet with this take that came across my timeline to show this sentiment is spreading, and didn't mean to dunk on them specifically.

walking mirage @atomicthumbs11/21/2022, 6:27 PM

don't forget in the other part of the thread where he goes on about how cohost, the site where (iirc, correct me if I'm wrong) three of the four people on staff are trans, is hostile to trans people because going by a chosen name is "deceptive" (?)

he's also trans; it's just baffling

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in reply to @icculus's post:

Piper Thunstrom @pathunstrom11/21/2022, 5:12 PM

Honestly, this was one of the least annoying takes from that thread. The whole "I'll never trust it because trans people can't use chosen names" tweet a little later is what made me need to close the bird app that day.

Piper Thunstrom @pathunstrom11/21/2022, 5:14 PM

And I mostly mean that in that this take comes up every three to four months for literally every single social network because the license term being discussed is "we want to show the stuff you upload to other people" which is. . . the function of the social network and so largely the same regardless of platform.

in tuft we trust @tit11/21/2022, 5:48 PM

coincidentally it's also a nice filter for people who don't read anything, believe anything they do read & overreact to that. as one does, on twitter

aster @pieartsy11/21/2022, 7:40 PM

exactly my thoughts. I don't want people like that person here

Sredni Vashtar @mandragoras11/21/2022, 6:36 PM

While I understand where he's coming from with some of his issues articulated in later threads—he's gone through a lot of shit and has a very understandably contentious relationship with social media in general—and I do feel that the ToS here could be more clearly worded in places beyond the current boilerplate material so as to avoid these misunderstandings, it feels like a lot of this is more of a way of justifying (again, understandable) personal wariness rather than a particularly strong argument against the platforms he's discussing.

wet beast @Pixl11/21/2022, 6:38 PM

I'd agree if he stopped bringing up the "don't impersonate people because that's legally not good" section and claiming it's hostile towards trans folk

Sredni Vashtar @mandragoras11/21/2022, 6:47 PM

Again, I circle back to what I said before about this feeling like an overreaction rooted in more personal concerns which turns every little potential problem into something big and scary. The guy has a lot of personal security concerns and seems deeply uncomfortable with his online presence having wound up turning into A Brand and having to rely on that Brand monetarily, so I'll cut him that much slack. (I've also followed him casually for a while so I'll admit I'm… "biased" is too strong a word, but I get where he's coming from, basically.)

Plasma Ring @ring11/21/2022, 7:12 PM

I think that's fair. What bothers me about this person's thread and similar comments I've seen is that people are basically accusing the staff of being incompetent at best and scammers who are hostile to trans people at worst, and either don't realize or don't care that they're potentially setting a small group of individuals up to get harassed by their own peers, a thing that has had historically disastrous effects when it snowballs. I can understand "I'm wary of Cohost and I think other people should probably be careful using it for [reasons];" I start to think they're doing something pretty shitty and irresponsible when they're on their second or third capslock-engaged thread about how Cohost definitely wants to steal our art and deadname us.

Editing to add: I wish people would talk to each other? Like, I don't expect every random person with concerns to reach out to every social media site they have concerns about for a Dialogue, but the fact that Cohost is a small site trying to make exactly enough money to be sustainable has absolutely come up in these conversations, and I feel like once someone is invested enough to be doing this they at least owe it to themselves to ask the people running it what's up in good faith.

Sredni Vashtar @mandragoras11/21/2022, 7:17 PM

I agree. Fear and stress can make usually reasonable people behave in really shitty ways, and I don't especially care for how he's responded even if I do sympathise with his reasons for feeling and thinking this way.

Plasma Ring @ring11/21/2022, 7:36 PM

I keep coming back to the fact that this used to be how most social websites were run--a handful of people out on the fringe of the internet setting up someplace for people in their subculture or community to hang out, post art, and talk. Some of those sites had massive userbases at their peak. The idea that a site structured like Cohost is different from that by virtue of being Social Media seems like a result of most of the social media we know of being run a certain way--not just VC-backed and advertiser-focused, but insisting on being viewed as some kind of public infrastructure. The way folks are talking about this is like if a group of trans furries tried to set up their own municipal power plant without preparing properly; if people want peer-run sites that are not driven by profit, we probably do have to ease out of this mindset.

@mitzienscene11/21/2022, 6:40 PM

i mean, the cohost staff did have the lawyer redo the terms of service in response to the twitter arguments over it (https://cohost.org/staff/post/323381-cohost-patch-notes-v )

but, frankly, a good-faith response to actual issues doesn't go over well with twitter folks, because, as you said, it's as much about rationalizing individual suspicions of a new website as it is about actual safety/IP/privacy concerns.

Sredni Vashtar @mandragoras11/21/2022, 6:51 PM

To be fair, he does specifically cite the revised ToS later in that thread and in another one. But as you say, it's hard to engage with arguments like this because they're not primarily about what's being directly discussed.

Ryan C. Gordon @icculus11/22/2022, 3:33 AM

To be clear, I don’t know this person and don’t have beef with him, he just happened to be the 17 millionth person to repeat “cohost has a bad TOS” that I happened to screenshot as an example.

ceo of eurogaming @ceo-of-eurogaming11/21/2022, 6:54 PM

imo the funniest part about this is that in the original thread half the things that were called out as red flags were also included verbatim in the OP's social media website's TOC. certainly one of the weirder panics i've seen in recent times, which is saying something.

tarwillow @tarwillow11/21/2022, 6:56 PM

yeah, it's impossible to take that thread as anything other than bad faith when they're a competitor with a very similar TOS

signal eleven @widr11/21/2022, 6:56 PM

this guy's last couple days of posting are just a scatter of occasionally all-caps posts freaking out about how cohost, mastodon, hive, facebook, etc. are all horrible places with evil moderation and policies and no DMCA agent which means that every poster is personally liable (???), all places that he can never move to. more air given to cohost than any other, which is pretty interesting

if your entire online personality is that you're 1) a furry and 2) really scared of websites, what are you doing?

the guy's TL never leaves the register of Loud Queer Awareness. the first two of these are fine but all together i have never found it to bode well

Sredni Vashtar @mandragoras11/21/2022, 7:04 PM

Most of his previous presence on the site, as a follower, was "somewhat grumpy old punk dude farming in the middle of nowhere." (He's also friends with the artist Ursula Vernon.) I think what's set him off is, over time, his following on Twitter has become pretty important to sustaining the farm financially, and now that Twitter's really going to hell, people are telling him to jump ship to smaller sites which he understandably mistrusts, partially for personal security reasons (he has had actual violent stalkers), partly because he's been on the Internet forever and has heard all of the horror stories, and partly because they're just not compatible with how and why he's on social media now to begin with—that last fact being something he's clearly not super pleased with, as he'd rather be farming and shitposting. It's just a bad position to be in, honestly.

Joel Krampus Meador @joelmeador11/21/2022, 7:07 PM

I think you are right, he seems like he is having a bad time, as are many folks who have depended on twitter for sustaining themselves

Sredni Vashtar @mandragoras11/21/2022, 7:14 PM

Yeah, like, I really like this website, but its entire charm is that it is a small, somewhat experimental platform for sharing cool stuff with a handful of people interested in what you might have to say or show. Its strengths and weaknesses are entirely different from Twitter, and it is not designed to build one's livelihood upon, at all, nor is it suited for a massive userbase. I have friends who have how they make a living tied very closely with their Twitter presences, and this situation had been dire for them.

Plasma Ring @ring11/21/2022, 7:56 PM

Digging into some of his recent posts about it the "fuck you, trust is earned" comments are both understandable from someone who has concrete reasons to be concerned about his physical safety and kind of a slice of a larger issue? Which is, the main reason it's not 1999 anymore on the social media front is that at some point the social internet did largely narrow to a small group of corporate-run platforms. People have not changed; there were safety issues on older sites and there were Nazis and people got stalked and abused and fanart did not enjoy the level of official approval it has now. But if we are going to have to end up moving to a larger number of smaller sites again, these are problems we're going to have to tackle at the community level with, frankly, not a lot of money or resources and a need for trust to make up some of that. When people have to depend on each other for stuff instead of an outside entity that's usually how it goes.

Sredni Vashtar @mandragoras11/21/2022, 8:12 PM

This and your previous comments are largely how I view the situation myself. Admittedly, I have the luxury of being largely without enemies, although I know people who have them and see their point of view; but by the same token, I feel that we're going to have to make an active effort to cultivate the better environment which we seek going forward, and to some extent, that requires some leaps of faith, or leaps in the absence of faith as the case may be.

Plasma Ring @ring11/21/2022, 9:21 PM

Yeah. If nothing else, I think stepping back and assessing the actual likelihood of harm is really important. I totally get why people are saying a TOS is legally binding so you shouldn't be like "dude trust me" but also you can take five minutes to look at who runs the site and assess 1) the likelihood of them taking anyone to court for trying, 2) the likelihood of them being laughed out of court, and 3) what would happen to the site they are trying to make their source of income if they pulled anything. There's a reasonable level of concern between "people like us would never hurt us!!" and "this is absolutely a team that could successfully legally steamroll anyone using their site and gain enough from that to make it worthwhile."

signal eleven @widr11/21/2022, 8:27 PM

that makes more sense, though it feels like he's (perhaps understandably) kind of lost the plot a little bit as far as what you should hope for in a web community (e.g., you want the few good people, not tens of thousands of bozos) and has kind of spiraled off from "other sites aren't hashed out yet so i personally am not moving yet" into recursive fear that they are all actually more evil than twitter

like there seems to be a powerful urge to draw an immediate, book-slamming conclusion on whether any given website is Good or Bad. but you don't have to decide immediately! nobody is helped when you take the tiny amount of information you sort of have into 6 threads about how the TOS means jae will personally feed you to the cops! at that point you are just actively harming your and everyone else's ability to think clearheadedly about what is and isn't bad and why

so yeah i certainly can have some empathy for him being in a bad position but that doesn't mean i think he's being at all smart about this

Plasma Ring @ring11/21/2022, 9:12 PM

Yeah, this. I have seen a lot of people--both Cohost distrusters and Cohost likers--defaulting to viewing this as a battle royale where at the end a platform will emerge as The Only One based on where the largest population shift happens. It gives it way more of a sense of urgency than it needs. I don't blame people for doing this, because I think it's one of those things where you kind of have to actively be thinking about it not being that; there's a pattern or paradigm or whatever that has held steady for a long time, and it's involved everyone being more or less powerless to choose where we want to go if we actually want to interact with people and/or make a living from Online. But I think there's definitely a difference between doing it unconsciously and having people say, "Hey, it's not like this" and insisting that it is.

That powerlessness, or the expectation of it, leads to shit like this. I do think it's something people need to break themselves of real quick if they don't want to inadvertently hurt someone (again, because people have already been hurt this way). We as an Internet have gotten used to the idea that the only way to stop something bad from happening is to destroy it at the root, because the people running everything we depend on never heed warnings or take immediate action or value our lives above doing whatever they were going to do anyway. Getting us to turn that impulse on each other is a neat trick, because it wipes out whatever we were trying to build.

signal eleven @widr11/21/2022, 10:06 PM

+1. we must abolish power with intentionality

@joXn11/21/2022, 10:57 PM

And cohost even has a DMCA agent!

Jonathan Bailey
CopyByte
3920 General DeGaulle Dr.
New Orleans, LA 70131
Phone: 1-504-356-4555
Email: cohost-dmca@copybyte.com

signal eleven @widr11/21/2022, 11:00 PM

far be it from me to suggest they are posting these rants in well-considered good faith 😑

dead flag blues custom stepmania chart @MxSelfDestruct11/21/2022, 7:16 PM

some people just have swamp water for brains nothing to be done about it

Nibble 🦄@NibbleNueva11/21/2022, 9:23 PM

As much as I agree that the TOS misgivings are kind of overblown/misplaced by people who aren't lawyers, I feel like we should steer away from the twitter-like behavior of singling people out on other platforms for the effect of "nah, we're great over here", regardless of the truthfulness.

IMO, if we want to talk about cohost and how people perceive it, this is much better served by having an actual discussion instead of pointing and laughing at a specific person.

Edit: I hope I'm not coming off as trying to police things. It's just that I saw so much of posting just to dunk on someone on twitter and I'm hoping it doesn't leak over here.

I also like some of the discussion in the comment threads above. I feel like we should lead in with more things like that, basically. Focus more on the actual issue at hand rather than a specific person (unless this specific person is somehow dangerous and we should all be aware or something).

signal eleven @widr11/21/2022, 9:52 PM

agree. i don't want to single out anyone to be bullied, that's gross and counterproductive. but i also think there is real value in observing individuals' attitudes and statements as case studies of Why People Do Something. i've gotten a much clearer picture of what's going on with this particular individual here, and i still think it's bad and unfortunate that they're doing this but at least now i have an idea how they got here

Sredni Vashtar @mandragoras11/21/2022, 10:23 PM

Agreed. This is part of why I focused on contextualising Shep's concerns here. While I do feel that some of his particular assertions have been unfair and inaccurate, I understand where he's coming from and don't think all of his criticisms are entirely off the mark, and I really hope that we can avoid dogpiling or self-congratulation as bad habits here.

Plasma Ring @ring11/21/2022, 10:47 PM

Yeah, absolutely.

Remi Erin Autor the remeranAuthor @remeranAuthor11/21/2022, 11:18 PM

Wait, we can edit comments? Rad.

Ryan C. Gordon @icculus11/22/2022, 3:50 AM

Yeah, when this suddenly had a ton of replies, I thought “I should have cropped the name out,” because I didn’t want to dunk on this person, who I don’t know at all, and just point that the TOS thing keeps popping up.

I didn’t know I had this many people watching, this was a fuck up on my part even if they weren’t, and I won’t do it again like this.

Ryan C. Gordon @icculus11/22/2022, 3:51 AM

Also, there’s policing and there’s pointing out something totally reasonable…this was not policing, and I appreciated that you said it.

[deleted]11/21/2022, 9:58 PM

signal eleven @widr11/21/2022, 10:05 PM

different person

Doomy Ternal @docblock11/22/2022, 7:03 AM

Not Ryan, but the guy in the screenshot. In any case, gonna delete so I don’t spread misinfo.

signal eleven @widr11/22/2022, 7:46 AM

right yes that's what i meant too, the screenshotted person here is yet another. there are a whole handful of people crawling around spalling off fresh Takes about how horrible cohost is

Kate the Great @KateTheGreat11/22/2022, 12:36 AM

Honestly its kind of annoying to have to explain to people that the panic people had about the TOS is unwarranted so often because of people doing this. Its just spreading misinformation for an extremely common part of any TOS

Rigel @rigel11/22/2022, 6:50 AM

I just want to say that I'm very glad to have this thread. I'd heard a little bit here and there about The Whole TOS Thing, and the discussion here has added to my understanding of what folks are on about.

in reply to @atomicthumbs's post:

emily flowers @bunp11/21/2022, 6:31 PM

why even censor the name of the website!!! 😤
wahhh
im glad people like this arent using the website, they would bring bad vibes

walking mirage @atomicthumbs11/21/2022, 7:01 PM

unfortunately this leads credulous people to quote the accusations ad infinitum, spreading the bullshit far and wide

broccoli rob 🥦@turnip-tops11/21/2022, 7:03 PM

it’s always nice when someone you know from a weird niche context (like, for example, intentionally misreading points of agreement for a political organization they just joined and then throwing a big shitfit Online about them) shows up again. anyway, yeah I’m sure these concerns about the TOS are being made in good faith

walking mirage @atomicthumbs11/21/2022, 7:09 PM

he blocked me ages ago, with our most recent interaction having been friendly, and at this point i'm glad

scranton reality wanker @sphrog11/21/2022, 7:32 PM

neosheep's one of the uglier examples of "victim of online harassment develops a taste for it himself." he and his clique have been picking random posters to dogpile & bully even before he became a Big Numbers Account. wielding the language of social justice like a flail, unconcerned for collateral damage. forcing small freelance artists to close up shop & go offline because he dug up some old inoffensive opinion he disagreed with or merely disliked their aesthetic. he's probably mad at Cohost because it lacks the kinds of search tools he uses to attack people on twitter.

walking mirage @atomicthumbs11/21/2022, 7:36 PM

what the fuck