Obspogon

I think it starts becoming "doing discourse" when it becomes totally self-referential and people start losing the plot. Like when people wind up with bizarre positions on things "as a way to push back on" some equally-bizarre thing they heard online, you've been sucked into Discourse.

i think people who have been subject to or influenced by the violent incentives of algorithmic platforms to turn basically any conversation into a way to humiliate other people for self aggrandizement in front of a crowd, become overly wary of expressing anything on social media, and overly wary of that environment reproducing itself even sans the incentives or the mechanisms that led things to being that way.

like, im not immune to this either. a lot of times i myself will hesitate to say anything, even on here (i have not yet developed the personal conception of this place as any more positive than anywhere else), because i think "oh some nebulous person who sees this will try to get a cheap attack on me off of it, so i better not be too genuine". on cohost both because i dont have that many followers and because a computer isnt randomly showing my posts to strangers, this is unlikely to happen, and i SHOULD just be able to post whatever opinion i want, but the gaze is hard to shake off.

that said, trying to turn that into community organized self-silence is ridiculous. it has to be understood why "discourse" in this way actually happened to begin with, and that those incentives and mechanisms, and thereby the culture they created, can't actually exist here in the same way. even if actively reproduced, without the robot that promotes your posts to strangers you'd just be yelling in your own corner easily ignored.