Honestly doubt it. Bezos' sex scandal involved cheating on his wife with a single age appropriate woman, whom he is currently in an exclusive relationship with.

That's generally what happens when you win the popular vote.

That man is going to get an extremely brutal lesson in the difference between absolute and relative values.

Jesus Christ it's like the SNL Pongo skit in real life.

My original comment was about how that Twitter and Reddit were toxic long before they were "ruined", and that Bluesky/Mastadon/Lemmy will probably run into the same problem even without any corporate interference.

You are a child because you just saw Elon's name and had a complete conniption, and have repeatedly attempted to make the entire conversation about him as opposed to the nature of social media.

You also have the tone of a teenager who is arguing against someone obligated to listen, be polite, and attempt to get you to grow up even in the most minor of ways. You have this "fuck you I'm right" level of vitriol is designed to either piss people off or shock people into backing down. You have this prose that alternates between oddly formal and shit you'd see in a discord chat rooms. Anyone who doesn't already emphatically agree with you is just going to tune you out.

As I have stated earlier, Twitter was toxic before Elon. Reddit was arguably more toxic before it went corporate. I dont think any of these fediverse sites solve the fundamental problems that made these sites so toxic.

So, this is a lot.

I guess I'll start with you calling Elon Musk "Muskrat". This is like a middle school level insult. It makes your already immature argument seem even more immature. I'm straight up not sure if I'm arguing with a literal child at this point.

Two, Twitter was better before Musk bought it, but it wasn't in any way good. A million different toxic trends either started or blew up on Twitter. The 2010s was filled with a million different dumbass pearl clutching moments that started with a bunch of terminally online Twitter users making a mountain out of a molehill. It was basically just a constant stream of outrage and sanctimonious nonsense.

That's not to mention there was plenty of hate speech and attempts to undermine democracy, because the moderation team only really enforced the rules when it came to conservative talking points. You had NYTimes reporters tweeting out how white people should all kill themselves without consequences, while Twitter went around banning people for clowning on laid off journalists by telling them to "learn to code". Donald Trump was banned, but the Supreme Leader of Iran was welcome with open arms.

Even then, Twitter played a huge role in the formation of the alt right because they were always at least six months too late when it came to banning anyone. The culture war doesn't get off the ground if Twitter just blacklists a bunch of straight up Russian propaganda websites and banhammers Milo. They also were extremely late to the party when it came to banning those ISIS recruitment videos, which is even more inexcusable.

I reject the idea that reddit was ever really that good. It was better in some ways, but a lot of the most toxic reddit moments happened before it went corporate. Off the top of my head:

• The softcore child porn
• The stalker pictures of women
• The time they had a huge thread where they all collectively gained sympathy to rapists
• The "seduction" subreddits that basically attempted to convince naive young men that "seduction" meant putting women into a situation where they consented due to extreme social pressures.
• The time they identified the wrong person as the Boston bomber

The non toxic content was extremely hit or miss. You'd get more in depth discussion, but it would be between a ton of extremely myopic pseudo intellectual posts. Basically half of reddit was something like:

• Religion bad, but only Christianity
• I am euphoric because my atheism and intelligence enlightens me
• Republicans bad
• I have literal superpowers now that I stopped masturbating
• Some half true historical fact that gets repeated a million different times because it fits everyone's worldview
• Keanu Reeves
• Rage comics
• DAE hate sportsball ???

Finally, a huge portion of the reason reddit went downhill was the unpaid mods. They were often unwell individuals who used their position to push progressive politics. There was a good five years where basically every sub over a certain size was essentially a progressive politics sub, because they were all modded by the same people who saw the users as a captive audience.

Social media just isn't a good place for unique content or discourse. That's not gonna change no matter who the owner is.

Well it's more like

1. Use a device that is similar to a PlayStation controller to command a drone to rush into enemies
2. Keep that drone alive long enough for it to crash into enemy armor and explode
3. Call your enemies a racial slur
4. Post the entire thing to a sketchy streaming service set to techno music.

So yeah there's actually a non-zero amount of commonality there.

There's probably a base level of competence someone who grew up in modern society has without training that the North Koreans don't have.

Like even if a convict has never operated a drone, there's probably a good amount of them that have played FPS games. That experience can be used as a launching board into proper training.

Meanwhile the North Koreans might have absolutely zero experience with video games and smartphones, and extremely limited experience with computers in general. There's so much you'd have to teach them before you can even start drone training.

I reject the idea that things like Mastadon, Bluesky, Lemmy, etc will ever actually be good things.

Elon turned Twitter alt right, but it was a shithole for years before he bought it. Twitter started being a bot infested outrage farm echo chamber with questionable moderation practices in like 2014.

Reddit was in some ways better before it went corporate, but in a lot of ways it was much worse. Like all things considered I'd rather be on a website that has a shitty mobile app and mods that sell access to corporations than a website where there are communities dedicated to softcore child porn and teenagers getting death threats over jackdaws.

Even if the fediverse fulfills its promise of not going down the corporate rabbit hole, they are still going to end up being a collection of inherently toxic echo chambers.

Yeah the free stuff is probably something that has been reported in multiple places, with a bit of added context.

Meanwhile the paid stuff are all either glorified progressive opinion pieces or in-depth analysis written by someone wholly and completely unqualified to perform said analysis.

I don't know when you think the verge was ever good though. Even during its best years it was putting out shit like that build a PC video.

The funniest part of this is the "battle lines" being drawn on differing perspectives.

Usually it's a culture war thing. Liberals say X, conservatives say Y. Vice versa also happens. Big sweeping statements are made over relatively minor events.

This time the best indicator of what someone thinks of this is how establishment they are. NPR and Fox News are both reporting this as a tragedy. Meanwhile basically every single culture war influencer under the sun is just like "yeah talk shit get hit LMAO".

In real life, I have friends who aren't celebrating this. Again the demarcation isn't political, but philosophical. My friends who are inclined to follow the rules no matter what disapprove, and everyone else finds it sort of morbidly funny. Even then the disapproval is sort of a milequost "even if he had it coming, extrajudicial killing isn't okay".

Why do I even bother, honestly.

I'd argue that forced diversity is primarily because so many higher ups don't give a fuck about gaming or making good content.

The suits just want money, and for some reason corporate thought that weighing in on social and political issues was a huge money maker in the 2020s. The journalists just want to promote their own political agenda and get ragebait clicks. The project director is someone with a corporate background but a progressive flair that makes them seem "hip" to the suits.

Meanwhile the people who give a shit, regardless of their identity, don't have a voice in the room.

I'm sure there are plenty of minorities that are super pissed about what happened to bioware, but the only way you'd hear from them is by looking at sales figures because they don't have a bully pulpit.

I generally agree with you, with some caveats.

I think that most IPs have subtext, and a lot of time this is in the form of a deeper political message. I think it would be silly to say progressivism in IPs is always a bad thing. That's part of the reason I mentioned Arcane and Spiderverse by name.

The problem comes from the fact that IPs are supposed to be entertainment first, messaging second. A lot of creators make a lazy and mediocre product, and somewhere in there is a ham-fisted political message. Some creators also seem to be making IPs bad on purpose as a fuck you to their target audience, which is an absolutely baffling choice.

There's also the concept of nuance that's sort of been lost. A lot of the creators will write something in some super reductive black/white way that's basically guaranteed to turn off everyone who doesn't already emphatically agree with them. This is a huge departure from a lot of older movies. For example Forrest Gump is a Republican movie, but doesn't just portray republicans as automatically good or liberals as automatically bad. The end result is that there are a lot of liberals who love Forrest Gump.

The part that I strongly disagree on is that you seem to be blaming the corporations. I think ultimately a lot of the problem here is at the fault of the creators. There have been a lot of high profile cases where studios don't interfere, give the creators a massive budget, and have their backs when controversy hits. The creators will still end up making mediocre culture war content. Todd Philips was allowed to do whatever he wanted in Joker 2. It turns out what Todd Philips wanted was for the Joker to be permanently defeated by the power of prison rape. There's no studio head in the world who would have told him to do that.

I mean immigration existed, but it wasn't nearly as common as today. A lot of these IPs just plop a minority in an area where their presence would turn heads, have everyone act super casual about it because they are too lazy for a backstory, and then call everyone a bigot who points out this is sort of silly. On the flip side, there are people who will call creators bigots for not including minorities in some quasi historical setting, even if their presence was rare.

Like pretend someone was making a movie in present day central Africa. Everyone is central African. Except one dude who is pure blooded Navajo. No explanation is ever given, and the only people who seem to even notice his race is the villain.

While it's perfectly possible for someone of Navajo descent to find themselves in central Africa, it's not really that likely. Audiences would want an explanation, and would consider it unrealistic if absolutely nobody commented on it except some over the top villain.

There's also an aspect of gaslighting going on here. Over the past decade historians have made a lot of claims about racial compositions of historical groups that were later exposed to be largely inaccurate. While historical inaccuracies are always a thing, it's pretty convenient that all these inaccurate claims fit into the narrative pushed by American progressive identity politics.

I mean Trump's economic policies are a philosophical rejection of trickle down economics. He campaigned on a platform of leveraging trade protectionism and immigration reform to produce higher blue collar salaries. He's doing so in a way that is giving both Wall Street and economic experts conniptions, because they'll end up biggest losers. Trump has even explicitly called out NAFTA and one of the reasons he won 2016 was his rejection of the TPP.

That is honestly the kind of policy I'd be opening to supporting in a vacuum. A lot of it is oddly similar to Bernie's economic plans circa 2014. The problem is Trump is an openly corrupt billionaire, friends with other slightly less openly corrupt billionaires, may/may not be a Russian asset, and probably is in the early stages of dementia. There's absolutely no way he delivers.

To be fair I'm sure if it was stylish to insert overt conservative themes into IPs those would be also too.

I don't think progressivism is the problem. I think the problem is mediocre creators either deciding to turn an expensive IP into their own political soapbox, and executives giving it the green light because they either are completely disconnected to what makes a good product or thinks the culture war will allow them to pretend that bad products are good.

Woke isn't being progressive. It's being progressive to an extent beyond any sort of logic, virtue signaling constantly, and then calling anyone who disagrees with you morally or intellectually inferior.

In entertainment, that often results in some really annoying elements that I think we can all acknowledge are a thing after almost a decade of this:

• There is a minority protagonist. Said protagonist is disproportionately a straight coded conventionally attractive white women in their 20s.
• The only flaw the protagonist will have is not being confident enough
• There is then a minority side character. Said character will disproportionately be a black woman obviously less attractive than the protagonist, or a upper middle class gay fuckboi.
• If there is not one of these two things, a minority side character will be shoehorned in somewhere. The character will feel visibly out of place, and no explanation will be given. For example, they'll do some random black character in a fantasy setting that's clearly based off Scotland in the 1200s.
• Important character goes on a monologue that feels like a political PSA
• The IP's understanding of progressive politics and social justice is roughly equivalent to Tumblr circa 2013.
• Absolutely terrible writing. Even if you swapped all the "woke" elements for generic entertainment elements, the IP would still be terrible.
• Likewise, the IP itself is often put together in an extremely lazy and mediocre way. If said "woke" content was not there, it would be universally panned for its low quality.
• Amazing reviews. All aspects of the IP get 10/10 from the "professional" critics. All the reviews are similar enough that the critics either collaborated or read off the press release.
• The critics care more about the social justice aspect than the game itself.
• You get the sense both the creators and the critics of the IP not only don't consume this type of IP in their spare time, but actively resent people who do.
• Constant fucking gaslighting. Anyone who doesn't like this ultimately mediocre IP is either morally and intellectually inferior. This usually comes in the form of accusations of being a bigot, a Nazi, or a Trump supporter.
• Bigots, Nazis, and Trump supporters will then try to recruit people who are pissed about the gaslighting.
• At some point the IP itself fades into the background, and it just becomes yet another culture war battleground.

I think there's a reason Star Wars gets more shit for being woke than Spiderverse, or that Arcane hasn't become a culture war battleground in the same way She-Hulk did. The reason being those shows are actually good, and most people are happy to watch good shows.

Honestly I have a lot of sympathy for these people.

It's one thing to invest in some moonshot crypto. It's another to invest in something claiming to be FDIC insured. There's also not a good way of verifying that information to the extent the victims would have needed to know something was amiss.

It seems like the FDIC was asleep at the wheel, and didn't really know or give a shit that someone was leveraging them to mislead consumers. Instead of actually fixing the problem, they just washed their hands of it.

You can call Trump the devil all you want, but the system was broken long before he came on the scene.

Du