I remember when Reddit announced it would begin charging commercial developers for access to its API, and in response, thousands of subreddits went dark in protest. I think it lasted for a couple of weeks. The CEO threatened the Reddit mods that he would replace them if they didn’t reopen the subs, so nearly every mod reopened and everything went back to normal. The CEO won easily without offering anything, and he was right when he said that ‘this too shall pass.’ Those third-party apps offered accessibility features for disabled people that Reddit still hasn’t implemented today. Now Reddit is getting even worse. How come there wasn’t a protest like that when they made even worse decisions?
Everywhere online is getting this way for me. I realized that it’s intentional. The fascist take over of Twitter was a real tipping point. The fascist realized that anti-fascists congregated and connected online, so they started a full out assault on any place that has anything other than hardcore fascist ideology.
Also, the introduction of LLMs has enabled them to really slather on the insanity while making it more difficult to filter or ban.