Another one bites the dust: Social Media Edition.
As of today, Facebook and anything else Meta (Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads) is a place giving me “the ick.”
They have pretty much shut down all DEI and basically “Unprotected” anything having to do with LGBTQIA: The ability to quickly report queer attacks, misinformation, or slurs. If I see something horribly wrong about trans or gay people or things attacking me or those I care about… the best I’ll be able to do is probably ask folks to block them and maybe see if I can get a mass report going and raise a big enough stink that an actual human notices.
https://ohai.social/@pictor/113810237547249498
And with that, the enshittification of facebook is complete. One of the most essential services in any online service is good moderation. An epiphany I had on Mastodon was that
Moderation is work. Skilled, paid, compassionate work that you need to pay lots of money for it to be good.
It’s not a mistake that most of the money for social media startups went into paid moderators and lawyers and the first thing that happened in enshittification is replacing moderation with crappy automated systems tuned to ‘What’s least likely to piss off the status quo or get us sued.”
Now because The Zuckernaught is going to challenge the Muskinator for the title of Most Divorced Man on the Internet with the Biggest Trainwreck Midlife Crisis as live-blogged on Joe Rogain, all the hard work of enforcing good behavior around my reserved words and who gets to basically earn attention by trying to make fun of me and mine is no longer going to be done (albeit kinda crappily and unenthusiastically when they were actually trying) by Meta.
And if I’m going to have to do all the legwork to shore up some weak defenses against whatever Internet goblin mob decides to try and lazily harass me and mine, I’m going to at least focus that work on platforms I either own or have really clear-cut right of exit.