It’s curious, but in my mind these types of mathematical or logical visualizations are the sheep I count, trying to sense the deeper flow and patterns where the emergent oddities even out.
That’s when I know I will soon fall fast asleep, when my mind starts getting abstract.
Look at it from the other side.
They were there when their subreddit was starting very, very small. Over time, with great effort and as a labor of love, their community grew to numbers they never dared to imagine possible, a successful buzzing community that gave them great frustrations and thrills, anxiety and joy. In a very real sense, this is their baby, they have been through thick and thin together. To hand this over to some indifferent, greedy and abusive asshole… the thought is too much to bear.
These people are suffering. They have a sense of belonging to a community that is being held hostage. To accept they were tricked and are being exploited is a horrifying thing to do.
Absolutely. I quit Facebook about a dozen years ago, Reddit was there to take its’ place.
Then my final visit to Reddit was on June 11th I think it was, the moment the first protest started I quit Apollo for the very last time.
Somewhere around this time, probably earlier, I did the same with Twitter.
This time, it was Kbin/Lemmy that were there, the only viable options, still tiny and awkward, the sudden influx still only a fraction of what Reddit has, yet it flooded the system like a bucket of water falling on top of a fly.
And yet here I am, and so are you, and many others. The variety and portions of content are still much smaller than Reddit, but this place has something that Reddit also had: a quality community, apparent from these discussions, or go look at the art in ArtPorn or TrafitionalArt, or sure, absolutely why not - the shitpostings.
This place pushes that intellectual button for me. And now I also give myself time to do the NYT Crossword and watch physics/cosmology videos on YouTube.
Looks to me like some of the boys at Fermilab came up with an experiment to keep Schrodinger’s cat inside the box but visible the whole time.
Did you know that at Fermilab if you’re a boy, you get to play around with cool collapsable wave functions, and if you’re a girl, you get to play around with groovy flavor-changing neutrinos.
Does religion play into this?
In “middle America”, it’s the church that has usually lured well-meaning women into believing they are under siege, in peril like never before in the history of mankind. Same thing happened to my mother starting in the 70s with snake oil salesmen like Jerry Falwell, Jim Swagart, Jim Bakker and Pat Robertson.
The non-stop message is that they are always under attack, it’s always the end of days, the antichrist is always already among us, The Rapture™️ is just around the corner, and they are the chosen ones… living in constant fear of the fairytale boogeyman and calling it a privilege, their minds have been shackled and atrophied by a state of perpetual red alert that Satan is everywhere, that their loved ones will spend an eternity in hell.
EDIT: tweaked a sentence for clarity
And how do they exploit them?
By keeping them at a hysterical fever pitch, 24/7.
Amplifying ignorance, weaponizing mental illness.
That is the right wing and republicans, with every profane breath.
What about DJ Qualls in “The Core”?
While being interrogated in his introduction sequence, he casually folds an aluminum chewing gum wrapper, puts it to his lips and kinda whistles with it for a second, while holding a cell phone in front of his mouth. After this little public display of phreaking, he hands the cell phone over to the hero and says “Here… now you can call anywhere free for life with it”.
We’ll make it broken!
He’s got that ol’ New York City Metropolitan Area Transit Authority Blues again, momma!