Generic Business Oriented Website

Facebook and Twitter will turn your mind to sludge; specific mechanism of action, yet unclear.

Is this place better than all of that?

I argue yes:

Part of what makes most social media b*d is that so much of it is predicated on a default posture of passivity. Algorithmically, information is presented to you with the expectation that you will consume it, irrespective of any response to it. It's a real-time verticalization of newspaper article comment sections: you are not engaging with the content, but engaging with others that are not engaging with the content. Occasionally, the line blurs—the celebrity that retweets you, the hashtag you jumped on early—but fundamentally, it is as stockaded as any other media-to-consumer model. You are the consumer. Consumption is your contribution—and any engagement you have is purely incidental to it. Any relationship is parasocial well-wishing at best, brand loyalty at worst.

This message board has smileys that aren't Unicode emojis. Chad can and will post 73 consecutive threads about how the Jews invented barbecue sauce. When was the last time you changed your avatar? Who was the president? Where did you live? There is a cant, a polari, that in the spirit of all the Great Languages, persist far beyond their immediate purpose. It is, in a peculiar but noncontroversial sense, an intentional community abstracted from those typical loci of communal experience: geography, sanguinity, etc. The reason we are here is because we have been here.

Are we friends? Acquaintances? Does it even matter?

great thread

did you fuck up your sentence containing “cant” - treating it as plural?

this place is dangerous, but not for the same reasons or in the same ways as corporate social media

sincerely,
the guy with 60,000 posts and ZERO instances of this place getting me laid

...you are not engaging with the content, but engaging in pedantic entanglement with the grammar and syntax of content.

this ain't tiktok

last I checked

Toilet Fleet wrote: ↑Wed Feb 17, 2021 1:50 pm Algorithmically, information is presented to you with the expectation that you will consume it, irrespective of any response to it. It's a real-time verticalization of newspaper article comment sections: you are not engaging with the content, but engaging with others that are not engaging with the content. Occasionally, the line blurs—the celebrity that retweets you, the hashtag you jumped on early—but fundamentally, it is as stockaded as any other media-to-consumer model. You are the consumer.

I disagree with this! We are the product!

Your engagement matters a lot - it's the thing which is being monitored. It knows if something makes you happy or angry, and then it makes selections about how to drip-feed those to you, in order to keep you engaged longer! Your attention (time spent) is then sold to advertisers, who will also receive information about who you are, and what aspects of yourself are easily exploited.

This is part of the reason why so many normal people have gone insane in the past ten years; their entire psychological lives have been engineered like the lobby of a casino. THE ALGORITHM takes the content that others have contributed and gives you little tastes, until it figures out who you hate and what THE PROBLEM is, from your perspective. Then it figures out what THE SOLUTIONS are, and gives those to you at a far less generous pace - 9/10 dispair, 1/10 hope.

You just lost your quarter on the slot machine, oh no! You'll have to refinance your house! But remember when you hit the jackpot? That might happen again, keep trying! It's your only hope!

This is legitimately the reason why people like Meatgrease have become convinced of Hitler's divinity; he's scared of black people, and probably feels sexually inaqequate. It's also the reason why so many people have become deeply convinced of absolutely bizarre communist social theory and radical left-wing indentitarianism; whatever it was that they are most scared of has been hotwired directly to the most drastic action they would ever be willing to take to save themselves. People are burning down police stations and invading the capital of their country because they saw scary memes. The mentally ill and socially marginalized are much more vulnerable to this, as are people with poor social relationships (which got worse with covid).

The idea here is that if you see what you want all the time, you won't care; people like to ferret through things, and if they begin to ferret you have their attention for a very long time. You are 'trying' to get to the good part, it's a weird behavioral thing. People who have been deflated are also much much more likely to buy something, so it makes the ads more effective.

I know that's not really what you are getting at with this thread, but it seems like you're thinking about it as a general subject and I just thought I'd offer my perspective.

I guess I think this board is better because it's just a bunch of inert code and everything else is the stuff we made on top of it... so yes, intentional community fits quite well.

I'm trying to understand the other thing you said... like a persistence of elements over time irrespective of outside weather conditions?

FAMILY
FAMILY
FAMILY
FAMILY

I presume nobody else has been to sea ranch... it's an "intentional community" with a bunch of houses that look like this:


it's waaaay past its prime and has sort of a ghost-town vibe to it, but is still very pleasant, aesthetically

made me think - what if there was a suburban neighborhood where every house was a punk house? maybe that's an allegory of this place, its inevitable collapse, and its inexplicable survival

Eight Bit Alien wrote: ↑Wed Feb 17, 2021 5:20 pm
Your engagement matters a lot - it's the thing which is being monitored. It knows if something makes you happy or angry, and then it makes selections about how to drip-feed those to you, in order to keep you engaged longer! Your attention (time spent) is then sold to advertisers, who will also receive information about who you are, and what aspects of yourself are easily exploited.

This is part of the reason why so many normal people have gone insane in the past ten years; their entire psychological lives have been engineered like the lobby of a casino. THE ALGORITHM takes the content that others have contributed and gives you little tastes, until it figures out who you hate and what THE PROBLEM is, from your perspective. Then it figures out what THE SOLUTIONS are, and gives those to you at a far less generous pace - 9/10 dispair, 1/10 hope.

I think what you're saying isn't necessarily incompatible with what I'm saying, jsut that it's a matter of framing the algorithm: engagement can be (and, from a this-is-all-just-a-critique-of-capitalism sense, is optimally for their purposes; can't have any pesky direct action) wholly passive in practice. My "engagement" may be looking at an advertisement for shoes that features 7.3% more tity, and now my feed ramps up the tity quotient to see if it has spillover effect. We may be a product—but only in an intermediary sense. You don't make money in the gold rush mining for gold, you make money selling shovels. We're products to the extent that the widget factory has to pay the psychosis factory to access the widget market.

It's all a consumption model which I agree absolutely poisons us: it hews us into a hellscape of our own choosing. It's the fuckin pleasure paradox in action! At a point, the experience of genuine joy cannot be reliably maintained through other consumer actions, which reduces the perception of pleasure to zero sum: it must be obtained at—and eventually, crucially, through—the expense of others.

so I'm working on this drum fill that is not conceptually very hard but I haven't had a kit to play in fuckin forever and my brain just won't compute. It's just LRRLKK LRLRKK, and for some reason my brain can do LRRLKK over and over again, and LRLRKK over and over again, but the second I try to alternate them, it's like peanut butter got on the wires. Hopefully putting this time on the struggle bus to push more content related to a.) DMT b.) drum sticks and c.) peanut butter.

I’m gonna practice that fill pattern and see how it goes but I’m a pretty dogshit drummer to begin with.

I'll never not be dogshit at drumming, that's what I love about it..........

It is fucking wild that a bunch of us were somehow looped into a metal record label's internet message board at some point between 1999-2004 or so and here we are 20 fucking years later and this weird "community" still exists. I was big on certain social media platforms until the last few months I dumped a bunch and basically I check Twitter and Instagram once in a while but that's it. I think there's a nostalgic excitement to this place, but there's also that whole kind of unspoken sense of humor and language that nobody outside of this bubble would even understand that definitely adds to the allure of why I came back and have been more active lately. If you had told me when I migrated from the Metal Maniacs board that in 20 years I'd still be interacting with some of the same people on an offshoot of this when I'm a 37 year old father of 2 I probably would never have believed it, but I would have been pumped to know that I would end up getting laid at least twice in my life.

I guess another angle is Habit.
Oh wait you said that > The reason we are here is because we have been here.

Community is defined by habit; people that deviate from the habit are outsiders, vagabonds, boulevardiers at best; we are a self-selecting self-actualized ingrouping with very low buy-in

godofdeadlydeath wrote: ↑Thu Feb 18, 2021 9:51 am It is fucking wild that a bunch of us were somehow looped into a metal record label's internet message board at some point between 1999-2004 or so and here we are 20 fucking years later and this weird "community" still exists. I was big on certain social media platforms until the last few months I dumped a bunch and basically I check Twitter and Instagram once in a while but that's it. I think there's a nostalgic excitement to this place, but there's also that whole kind of unspoken sense of humor and language that nobody outside of this bubble would even understand that definitely adds to the allure of why I came back and have been more active lately. If you had told me when I migrated from the Metal Maniacs board that in 20 years I'd still be interacting with some of the same people on an offshoot of this when I'm a 37 year old father of 2 I

I read that as "father of 21".... and thunk....dang....