The Male Hysteric

I get home from vacation and many larger subs of Reddit have gone dark, and all I hear about is how people can't search for normal how-tos because Reddit was the big repository for actual questions answered, especially now that Yahoo Answers is gone and almost all hobby forums are gone, disappeared into either Reddit, Discord, or otherwise.

Along with Twitter’s collapse in the last 6 months or so and ChatGPT clogging up SEO with garbage, all of this seems really... bad? Like it was bad enough before with the video takeover (especially because of my disability) but that was somewhat slow-moving and ongoing since about 2016. This is all happening in the matter of months. I know the reddit blackout is temporary but this all seems to bode ill generally with the reveal on how fragile this all is.

I would love it if forums came back, but I don't love that we will probably have to become much more desperate to make the jump back to them. Also a lot of things that made forums go round was free image hosting which is mostly gone outside of social media and let's be real everyone is on mobile devices which makes image upload extremely finnicky outside of apps specialized for it... and this isn't even getting into video.

All through this collapse I'm just watching and helpless. I mean maybe I could look into starting a forum, but what would it be about? I don't trust in my moderating abilities anyway...

I just. Don't like this. Don't like this at all.

I am not really sure how to gather my thoughts right now but I feel like there is something evil out there, some kind of thing that is putting the "doom" in doomscrolling, so to speak, even moreso than we have already seen. And I am not sure where it is coming from or what to do with this feeling.

It might be useful to read this article I saw recently on the Atlantic about Facebook, Google, Youtube, and to a lesser extent Twitter as being doomsday devices. It's interesting to read on its own but there's more to it than just normal depression on the state of social media being social media. There was also the recent SolarWinds hack, and more and more around here it seems like major newsstations are having strange interruptions in their programming, like images freezing or technical difficulties, and I've had some major errors with ecommerce systems recently.

I guess when I put it like that, it seems kind of silly, like disparate computerized events falling into a pattern for no reason. I mean, earlier this year we were having major internet outage issues and I was starting to think that something greater was wrong with the local grid but it turned out we just had a failing modem. It's easy to think something greater is afoot when there has been greater things afoot recently, I think, and I may be suffering from some nostalgia, from when the web was smaller and it was a little easier to curate your own feed and not have a mysterious all-knowing algorithm do it for you without your explicit knowledge.

And I guess I'm posting this all here because I really miss LiveJournal.