Genderfucked schizoqueer autistic plural plushie eevee mystics


one of those annoying vegans your unexamined ethical system warned you about


Seer of Blood (Wyatt) and Witch of Void (fractal)


not a person, ฮ˜ฮ”, tma

this user likes the homestuck epilogues

name-color: #ff007b


๐ŸŽค psychosisposting ๐ŸŽค
cohost.org/feedbackmicrophone

DiscoDeerDiary
@DiscoDeerDiary

An unfinished thought I had is that modern digital tech is designed to make our lives easier by making it less and less effort to actuate its functions, harvesting the power of involuntary clicks and machine learning algorithms to get closer and closer to the ideal of a device controlled by thought alone. This actually ends up making life harder for the user because it leads to people developing systems of morality that assign grave moral importance to thinking the right thoughts and not thinking the wrong thoughts. "Don't feed the algorithm" can be potent ocd fuel. Likewise, you may be able to reduce the severity of your ocd symptoms by moving away from algorithmic tech experiences toward ones that require more deliberate effort to operate.


DiscoDeerDiary
@DiscoDeerDiary

Realizing the full extent that I was suffering from moral ocd was one of the things that drove me from Twitter to Tumblr and from Tumblr to Cohost


DiscoDeerDiary
@DiscoDeerDiary

Back when I was on Twitter I had some pretty major moral ocd about liking problematic pieces of media. Now it's not that the criticisms of those pieces were unfair or baseless, it's that they were nearly always accompanied by DO NOT ENGAGE WITH IT DO NOT ENGAGE WITH FANART OF IT EVEN IF YOU ARE NOT SPENDING MONEY YOU ARE STILL SUPPORTING THE CREATOR. And the people saying these things were kind of correct: the more you talk about a media property, the more times the algorithm tallies it up, the more likely the algorithm is to loudly announce that this is what everyone is talking about. What's worse, if you have deeply conflicted nuanced feelings about a media property, and you express those feelings in a ten-tweet thread, you've just created ten times more publicity for the property than if you merely said "I love it".

The grand irony, and the cruel twist of moral ocd, is that this pressure to not engage with problematic media actually led to me engaging with it more. The distress from being told I was a bad person for looking at bad things led to an obsessive focus on those things, with my brain popping up thoughts of them at random hours of the day, enticing me to look at them when I had a free moment, or post about them on my private Twitter account. This would often lead to a flood of shame, which in turn would make the thoughts come back harder and more insistent. Sometimes the shame would be replaced with anger at being judged, or the thrill of the forbidden, but in all cases it just cemented my vice as something to have strong feelings about.

Once I got off Twitter the cycle cooled down. Free of their baggage of shame, the pieces of media started to lessen in emotional resonance. I began to engage with them exactly as much as I wanted to, but no more. My mind began freeing up space to fill with other thoughts, other interests, and those began to define my sense of self more than the pieces of forbidden media I would consume from time to time.

So basically I experienced the whole "porn addiction" phenomenon, except with YouTube playthroughs of Five Nights At Freddy's: Security Breach, and it took me at least a year to realize how baloney bonkers that was.


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in reply to @DiscoDeerDiary's post:

god I love that cohost doesn't make likes and follows public

I mean I don't think anyone who'd unfriend me over a Problematic Follow is any big loss out of my life

but that is obviously a sentence someone only comes up with when they're trying to cope with anxiety, and it would be nice to simply not have so much anxiety about such things

the thing is, it's genuinely useful to know when someone is following, like, a terf. the problem is that existing in that environment creates a state of hypervigilance where people treat disagreements and conflicts that aren't about like literally wanting a group of people dead the same way.

That's one of the reasons I like being on hereโ€“a site that will just flat out ban TERFs and white nationalists raises the floor of bad faith. (I wish we would ban self-described "antis" too so I guess we'll just have to keep making pervert posts as rent lowering gunshots.)