Absolutely wild that they looked at what happened at Twitter, identified all the things that triggered the several periods of mass migration to Mastodon (shutting off api access, policy changes, shutting down conversation about alternatives) and decided to speed run it. Next thing is trying to directly monetise people by giving them a red tick or something.
Same exact thing happened with Fark around 2007 with regards to the redesign. “You’ll get over it,” one infamous mod quipped. Except now Fark is a hollow shell of what it used to be. Barely a footnote in internet history.
The efforts to extinguish dissent (over the redesign and tightening of content moderation, eg, boobies, despite showing racy ads with… yep, boobies) went so far as to even using similar words to what had been regular injokes and memes on Fark would get you banned for “spam”, promoting another site, etc… Just because another site popped up called Bannination (dot) com. (Edit: Domain expired, now a blogspam/squat site. Broke domain name to prevent linking)
What then was once limited to Fark and Fark threads extended to edit wars on Wikipedia. Because, at first, there was a subsection on Fark’s wiki page that covered common injokes, terms and filtered substitutions (fuck becomes fark, being banninated/going to bannination, shadowbans, etc) was now claimed to be a haven for ‘people trying to spam Bannination’ as an alternate site to go to. However, only Bannination was the site being objected to, not Digg or Reddit. The whole situation showed me that even Wikipedia would be subject to the corrosive effects of those who think they had power to control a community.
And it’s the same damn shit in the end, hubris and ego leading to this. Doubling down only leads to an accelerated decline.
When any community won’t tolerate telling people about other communities or tries to tell you where you can or cannot go, it’s time to get the fuck out and never look back.
Same exact thing happened with Fark around 2007 with regards to the redesign. “You’ll get over it,” one infamous mod quipped. Except now Fark is a hollow shell of what it used to be. Barely a footnote in internet history.
The efforts to extinguish dissent (over the redesign and tightening of content moderation, eg, boobies, despite showing racy ads with… yep, boobies) went so far as to even using similar words to what had been regular injokes and memes on Fark would get you banned for “spam”, promoting another site, etc… Just because another site popped up called Bannination (dot) com. (Edit: Domain expired, now a blogspam/squat site. Broke domain name to prevent linking)
What then was once limited to Fark and Fark threads extended to edit wars on Wikipedia. Because, at first, there was a subsection on Fark’s wiki page that covered common injokes, terms and filtered substitutions (fuck becomes fark, being banninated/going to bannination, shadowbans, etc) was now claimed to be a haven for ‘people trying to spam Bannination’ as an alternate site to go to. However, only Bannination was the site being objected to, not Digg or Reddit. The whole situation showed me that even Wikipedia would be subject to the corrosive effects of those who think they had power to control a community.
And it’s the same damn shit in the end, hubris and ego leading to this. Doubling down only leads to an accelerated decline.
When any community won’t tolerate telling people about other communities or tries to tell you where you can or cannot go, it’s time to get the fuck out and never look back.
Yeah Genevieve Marie ruined Fark for me. That’s when I went to Reddit. Now I’ve left Reddit for completely different reasons.