Social media controls the world

This neighborhood sounds awesome!

Plus, the neighborhood is littered with yards full of minions and Yodas and all sorts of strange Christmas decorations hardly different than dragons.

Yoda and Dragons!

Approve of this neighborhood, I do.

I <3 this forum

I’ve almost entirely given up on social media at this point. Got rid of Facebook and LinkedIN last year; really only use Tumblr for the art and the atmosphere, but that’s probably going to die soon.

The whole concept of social media has been flushed. YouTube, Instagram and Reddit are good examples of this new generation of social media. It’s basically just become another vehicle for advertising and making money, instead of places to connect with people. It’s no wonder there’s so much shitstorm around social media now, and why alt-right stays around so long on these platforms. If they make money who cares. But if it offends advertisers, then all bets are off.

Haven’t they always been about making money? Look at how large some of these companies are without costing the user anything. They have to be selling something. And nothing is free.

That’s true but when the content is exclusively advertisement, it’s not really a social space anymore. Instead, it encourages people to use social status to make money. I don’t really like what that implies for the future. To me there’s at least four models for making social media platforms work:

Sell User Data - but of course no one likes that

Advertisements - okay, but potentially unethical and can lead to content censorship

Charge Entry Fee - no one likes to pay for anything

Alternative Income - some other income supports the social features, such as selling products and services; it’s fine, but very niche and expensive

A fifth option that I’d like to see more of is crowd funded platforms. Using Patreon or something similar could put the power of the platform into the hands of the community who uses it, regardless of what it’s for. People have shown to be much more open to this kind of thing now. Of course the problem then is someone needs to do it just for the sake of it, which is hard to imagine in 2018.

The Left just wants to replace social media with socialist media. /jk

This Twitter thread and comments sums up the last 2 years of social media pretty succinctly.

Forget gray goo. It won’t be the nanites that spiral out of control and destroy us all, it will be generously buttered noodles, sprinkled with just a quarter cup of parsley for color and freshness, as they are the perfect blank canvas for practically any stew or braise.

I feel like this is what we need right now.

Honestly, what you really need right now is generously buttered noodles, sprinkled with just a quarter cup of parsley for color and freshness, they are the perfect canvas for practically any stew or braise!

The thing that gets me about this buttered noodles thing- how much noodles? He specifies the amount of parsley, and I can guess the amount of butter- use lots and any extra would run off, anyway. But how much noodles in relation to that parsley? It’s really been nagging at me.

You realize that’s just the description, not the actual recipe, yes?

It calls for one pound of egg noodles. There, go and be nagged at no more.

Heh, I didn’t realise there was an actual recipe. That’s a load off my mind.

This now reminds me of the ‘instructions for a toothpick’ from So Long, and Thanks For All The Fish. Unbelievable that such a thing needs to get printed, but such is the world we live in.

Well, if it is the perfect canvas for practically any stew or braise, how can I say no to generously buttered noodles, sprinkled with just a quarter cup of parsley for color and freshness!

If you want to really understand it, you have to go to the source!


I get my news through Google’s aggregate feed. Why isn’t that in the list? I’m smelling some bullshit in those numbers. Where are the numbers for the adults who get their news via their local paper, either in print or online, or through TV news? I am really having a hard time thinking that 1 out of 5 adults gets their news through YouTube.