Hey, you, who's reading this in the future: you can find out who I am today at https://rarf.zone/about/. ๐Ÿ’™


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NireBryce
@NireBryce
Sorry! This post has been unpublished by its original author.

panicattheopticon
@panicattheopticon

the most important "skills" are going to be understanding language, words, intent, pattern recognition. knowing how to speak the new dialect of computer as an analytical tool to keep things precise: the one benefit here?

that helps us with people, too. we assume every post is a prompt ushering forth our critique to prove them wrong. but with ChatGPT we don't get mad because we know we're in pursuit of a productive result - for some reason this goes out the window with people. If I argue fruitlessly with machine learning I'm just yelling at a mirror, if i talk to myself in a mirror to practice a speech or public speaking i gain insights hard to pry from my internal model.

we've dehumanized ourselves and others as we've been conditioned to see interaction as content, as sport instead of a way to mutually build our knowledge and empathy for one another.

i for one, refuse to use verbs & adjectives on life's metaphysical beach I have spawned as a rock to bludgeon and harm with. I will use it as a tool to gather, make friends, and then build our little temple to joy.

co-host is our temple of joy, let's give ourselves patience even as we learn this valuable lesson


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in reply to @NireBryce's post:

put down the gun is another big mood and i am only a little troubled by the number of people (like, honestly, only four who said anything somewhere i got notifications about it) who responded with some variation on "i have never heard of this happening before" to my big post of the day or other people concurring; i try to just let it go but i wonder if they realize that there is a basic assumption at work there of "so youre probably wrong about how it happened" or otherwise making judgement calls about the experiences of others in a way i am trying to explicitly not be about ๐Ÿ˜ž oh well

the curse of knowledge is never being able to explain it well to new people. the curse of being years ahead of your peers (because of perspective in an area most don't have. or many areas.) is never being able to explain it well to pretty much anyone until three years of outside forces escalating things.

I've got no advice there past write everything down, but like, yeah. best I can do is talk to others thinking that deeply about stuff and hope others can get things out of it, but it's a little worrying how I've been online long enough to see the same cycles happen something like five times.

and i get it, a lot of it is out of ignorance, or misunderstanding uses of language, or just plain being new without a good sense of what resources there are. but on Twitter I started to say so little because I have to format it for the rando. and that had an effect on my ideology when it was happening, a hard cap on what level I could even theorize at in my own writing, even if it was to others deep in it.

I know fighting nth order endless septembers is a losing battle but I wish I knew where people are picking this up from, because neurodivergent literalism only explains one part of it (and that... often also changes with time spent reflecting, once people realize, but it's not obvious) and it's not the majority.

yeah, that hard cap... its not that the other parts are gone but they dont get any air. they atrophy. i am actively trying to decide for myself how i want to present my communications to the world these days, because that exact repetition has injured my faculties.

mostly i wish people would just slow down a lot and ask themselves what their goal is when they do things that affect others, but as you say, this itself is a painful lesson i had to learn

maybe I'll post it out of a comment, who knows, but it feels too spicy for that, somehow.

A thing I've learned fighting several culture wars from the front lines, and doing labor organizing, and having interests spanning 10 fields and just as many weirdly bigoted hobby subcultures, is that most of it comes down to the fact that, well, schools prepared people for a world that doesn't exist. Services were abstractions, you don't do the hard thinking, you go there and they do it for you, saving time. Go to the local reference librarian, instead of knowing how to do information retrieval yourself in a way you can think critically about it. Don't stay up to date with current events, because the news won't lie. etc. And everyone who learned more than that, learned because someone else outside of school taught them.

but with the squeeze these last few years? no one has the time to teach anyone anything. Most of my friends learned life skills from wikihow. None of the services exist except to antagonize you anymore, outside the library, if you have one nearby.

mix that with a 90s pedagogical science that assumed these services would just migrate to the internet one day soon, and, well.

I have no idea how to solve it. But everything, everywhere, is an educational issue at heart.

Right down to education being defunded so hard that kids don't trust their teachers, and trust their evangelical pastor and the youtubers ranting about those trans people, to fill in the gaps instead.

it is a hard thing to talk about, not only but perhaps particularly because a lot of the people who were abused, neglected, and misled by schooling take it very personally when you suggest they may have unexplored trauma there. even among people who otherwise accept that it was bad. which is, as i feel you know at this point, a somewhat normal maladaptive response to unexamined trauma. education and caring, imo. a lot of people are currently too traumatized by some things to actually learn anything about them, because trauma brain gives you psychic ibs

it's also why people who didn't do good in school thrive online and those who did seek to subjugate and conform it to their expectations, becoming unwittingly pawns of the wealthy. ChatGPT is scaring everyone because to them it represents a world where twitter, Google, etc, all the cutesy 'safe' ways of using the net collapse. it will consolidate the wealthy and force many of those in the comfortable middle to a world where they are finally forced to acknowledge how fake their world was and be stuck with us poor's. to the wealthy it's a new chance to pseudo feudalize the digital landscape and force us to be tithed to little shitty content crops to pay peonage to our local 50/100k cloutlords

mostly because they're shares and replies to me and not like, the zeitgeist. i hope.

but i write a way that seems to attract people assuming I'm coming from a place of ignorance and not far too much experience.

definitely had a lot of the rose-tinted glasses about this place fade away for me after one of my posts got weaponized for a completely different agenda through some reshares. It was particularly embarrassing because that went on to get reshares and comments and discussion and so my name was just attached against my will to dogma I have no tie to. It was kind of a sad reminder that while the design of this place can incentivize better discussions and discourage shootouts, a lot of classic internet behaviors are still hard to escape from.

far and away the worst thing about how this plays out on this site, in my view, is that if this shit happens and you say 'fuck this' and delete your post, there's still a [deleted] with your avatar/name next to it in the thread, so now whatever misinterpretation of your words someone came up with (that's now being used as a springboard for people to say rotten shit in the comments) is now the only record anyone has of what your post said before you deleted it

imo: hiding comments is good.

hiding shares... spicy. but I'd love some way of being able to clarify shares to their audience and not mine that isn't just comments no one reads. or alternatively, just replaces my post with a huge reddit down arrow and my audience can participate to make it even bigger

the downvote thing is a joke but it sucks how everything with a "share to my audience and not the person its from" gets used this way, at no real reputation hit, and the only platform rethinking it in terms of consent of the targeted is... the people bringing mastodon kicking and screaming into supporting quote-shares.

and I'm not blaming staff because it's emergent behavior, I just... wish people knew better than to just be like that. or connected people being alienated by the behavior with why their social group largely thinks like them but simultaneously eats each other for mild transgressions, and how that's related.

because wew is it at the heart of so many cycles of trauma and so many cycles of dominance and so many cycles of false expertise

yeah, i think a better degree of control over how your posts get shared would go a long way - i drafted up a feature request about this that i should get around to posting on assc forum.

to the point of the example i gave earlier though, i'd be happy if post deletions actually wiped the author from the thread as well. dunno if that's doing anything of value the way it is now, but it kinda sucks that people can't just bail entirely

but the adversarial case is that you're pointing out someone doing something heinous, and it just disappears once the accusation goes up. Maybe it's fine if it deletes the initial post, but... yeah. I wish I did not have to think of the adversarial case.

my ideal would be a setting for 'if we haven't interacted back-and-forth ever, I need to approve your share' but that's got it's own perverse incentives, even though it's, in abstract, just enabling moderated-only replies in a forum thread.

because of the aspect of sharing-to-draw-attention-to-when-necessary. And maybe that needs to die, but there's no better way to do it, and without other ways to do it, people just do screenshots instead, which you have even less control over.

maybe the way through really is just to do the 'slashdot hotlinked an image from your site' remedy and just change the original post to goatse

someone once shared and replied to a post i made here once with a long rant about how they disagreed, which didn't bother me, but what did bother me is that they started by saying my post "reeked of bait" and positioned it as if i was trolling them specifically, which like, alright chief

and like, I've gained followers from this post. I shouldn't, it should just be how things are. because without room for ambiguity, there is no society. just individuals with different enough world views there will always be something to be Actionable about.

no one's getting promo for being good at nitpicking.

"People will immediately escalate to open conflict if they decide I'm wrong" has been my most enduring fear about interacting online since I started doing it, and not without reason; I think Twitter etc. exacerbated it, but I've been thinking about how some of the worst and least productive social media behavior used to be things I'd see one or two people doing on smaller community sites. And very often no one would stop them--it'd just be like, "Hey, welcome to our hobby forum! We're generally pretty chill but if you ask the wrong question or state anything with confidence, the acknowledged foremost expert who is online most of the day may jumpscare you with the most scathing, contemptuous reply you've ever gotten in your life. Don't worry; it's actually for your own good and you'll quickly learn never to question them. Also they're a mod because we're all terrified of them."

And like, the way that obviously works is they get to be right by making the stakes of challenging them too high to be worth it for most people, because one of the Weird Hacks you can very easily do on a situation that's cooperative by default is to introduce conflict where there shouldn't be any. There seems to be a spot someone can hit (if they're willing to) where, if they're not clearly wrong and can speak with enough confidence, they can flip out unreasonably at a target to humiliate them and the rest of the group will individually do the math and decide that:

  1. There must have been a reason they reacted so strongly, because most people wouldn't do that unless they felt justified.

  2. They will learn from the target's mistake to avoid being humiliated themselves.

In a small group, one person who can speak with equal confidence and experience saying, "Hey, that was uncalled for" can break this down or at least facilitate pushback. But if no one does, everyone sees the whole group apparently approving of this behavior and seeing nothing wrong with it.

My hypothesis is that since social media has such a high volume of casual interactions with strangers--most of whom are spectating--it taught people who wouldn't otherwise start shit to do it as a preemptive move. The goal is not to influence the other person; it's to get higher visible support from spectators, which will determine who is right and who is humiliated. And it perpetuates because there are enough people who do this as a matter of course--either with no real community to stick to or with a large spectator audience--that it starts to feel like offense is just a necessary element of assertiveness to avoid getting sideswiped.

All of this is to say that I think people can unlearn that as they get used to smaller, more stable groups again, but we're still left with 1) people having gotten used to disagreement needing a (supported) winner and a (disgraced) loser, and 2) small communities still being vulnerable to this dynamic the way they were before social media. I'm not sure what steps need to be taken, but I wouldn't be surprised to find other "what do you expect, it's the internet" behaviors that adapted to social media rather than originating there and can easily re-adapt outside of it if allowed to.

twitter, at it's start, showed you every message someone you followed sent, not just ones that weren't a reply.

Then in 2010, maybe 2008, they made it so that only people who follow you and the person you are @-ing can see your conversations. This did a lot to make twitter more readable, cool people less discoverable, give more people more privacy... and make it impossible to see when someone you know is joining a dogpile on someone you don't follow.

I think about that about once a month.

oh wow, that was before my time on Twitter and I had no idea it wasn't always like that. that really makes me think of all the times I've seen someone make a tweet that coincidentally looked like a reference to a current controversy and then get jumped on by people who couldn't believe that everyone's timeline hadn't been filled with dozens of individual tweets and isolated threads about it.

Half of me wants to say this is overthinking it but the other half says "damn we really are here because we're tired of how rude people are on the internet"

I still see a lot of people with that overly combative twitter-brain on here. It helps that no one can see who you follow so you can just unfollow, mute, or block as you want. It's good.