If it wasn’t politically motivated then why is Hexbear blocked when it’s not even a federated instance yet? You know, the only lemmy in existence that enforces visible pronouns by every single username… Hatespeech? Bullshit.

There are certain formats like discord and twitter, that bring out the worst in people. Those platforms bank on angry, non-stop-repyling and “engagement”, because they know it drives up the amount of time people spend on the site.

I’ve raised something like this several times on several platforms. I was a particular proponent of killing the downvote on Hexbear, which had very split opinions on the site when it was implemented but the community now prefers it massively.

One of the issues of social media is that the systems design in a competitive win/loss mindset in people’s engagement(winning getting upvotes and losing getting ratio’d or downvoted or whatever). The person you’re talking to isn’t the person that matters when you’re having an interaction, what matters is the audience reading.

This creates a scenario in where people don’t actually have honest interactions with each other, they are having an interaction to sway the hundreds or perhaps thousands of people reading instead. They are seeking the Likes, Hearts, Upvotes, whatever. And not only that but they are also seeking that the person they disagree with get downvotes or ratio’d, etc.

The systems of social media depersonalise the interaction between 2 people and make it about writing for an audience of people who decide the “winner” and the “loser” instead. This is the driving force of some of the shittiest behaviour out there. We desperately need a different style of gameification that does not produce this outcome and shifts the focus of people’s behaviour to a different mindset.

A moment of silence for many of the fallen comrades that also helped along the way.

I miss Bay’s work, I hope he’s doing well in whatever he decided to put his hand to instead. I don’t think anything else he might be up to will have the kind of impact he was able to have in video format though and we need more at this level.