> We saw this dynamic metastasize in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, when well-intentioned claims of “silence is violence” (recalling the powerful 1987 ACT-UP “Silence = Death” campaign) spiraled into calling out individuals with even a small following who hadn’t come forward with a timely public statement of solidarity or remorse. Yet public posts were subject to popular scrutiny and judged based on sincerity, originality, and tone. Not surprisingly, many people defaulted to posting a somber plain black square. But this generated criticism of its own by clogging the feed with an informational blackout during a moment when community resource sharing was critically important. Amid a chaotic time, the platform functioned exactly as designed: amplification of emotions, uptick in user interaction, growth in platform engagement and data cultivation. Cha-ching, the platform cashes in.
In other words, any large movement or discussion on "clearnet" spaces gets subverted by the algorithms and profit motive of the platform they live on.
However, where I disagree with the author is considering mainstream "dark forest" platforms like reddit or 4chan to be countercultural. In fact, I'd argue that mainstream social media can never be countercultural. While there may be no "algorithm" controlling the narrative you see on 4chan (or a straightforward and ostensibly fair one on a site like reddit), the content you see (and by extension, the narrative) is shaped by profit motive: From well-compensated marketing teams, to hordes of self-interested proselytizers (see: bitcoin), to propaganda teams looking to influence public opinion, mainstream dark forest sites simply shift the balance of power from the platform itself to the most motivated and well-funded members of the platform
> While there may be no "algorithm" controlling the narrative you see on 4chan (or a straightforward and ostensibly fair one on a site like reddit), the content you see (and by extension, the narrative) is shaped by profit motive: From well-compensated marketing teams, to hordes of self-interested proselytizers (see: bitcoin), to propaganda teams looking to influence public opinion
I've realized I have exactly one outlet free of this left. It's an IRC channel I've been in since the 90s. I thought about it and none of us are there for any reason other than that we have a common interest and like each other. No money involved, no names involved, and it's one of the more supportive and insightful communities I've ever found online. We've sometimes wondered why it's such a different community from the other places, and this article articulates why quite well, I think. We're old-timers holding out in a little pocket of what has been almost fully absorbed by corporate social media. I'm sure there are others. And I'm sure they won't tell you where to find them, either.
I find plenty of these types of communities through Discord, and I think that is part of the equation that's left out here. I don't really like discord much, but the reason I get when I do is to go check in on those friends. Usually these communities are just people that I've met playing games.
I don't know that these would qualify as counter-culture or subculture, but they are free of marketing and advertising, and people are there because we have shared interests. The conversations are organic and not curated for us and we are isolated from anyone else we don't want to be part of that group.
So, my gut tells me that the younger generations are using Discord like people used IRC.
They do use discord like we used IRC, but discord is centralized under one company. So, they will eventually do what companies do and try to find that sweet spot of "how much abuse can our users take" versus "how much money can we extract from our market position" as with all such free services. Discord is a trap, both in the latent monetization sense mentioned, and the sense that all your communications there are gobbled up with little to no privacy guarantee.
Discord is not equivalent. Discord is blatantly in with the current culture, including the prohibitive elements. They remove channels left and right, and monetize every bit that they can. Not a problem I've had on IRC, even on big ones like Rizon.
My son has a group of friends at the Uni, some of them in his same school, some of them in nearby schools, some of them are in the neighbourhood... half of them are from high school, the other half are from Minecraft discord groups.
They have a weekly meeting in a Uni cafeteria and use indistinctly Discord or Instagram as chat. Instagram has replaced WhatsApp as the regular phone chat.
All of them have wider net-only groups of acquitances.
Teens/young adults surely have far more opportunities to make real life friends than working age adults. They are at least required to attend school.
I would say that this is more the lifestyle of adults after being out of education for a few years. They are the group that can ignore all real life interaction if they want, Covid has increased the likelihood of this.
What you're saying is and isn't true. One example of a countercultural movement that's been in the news recently is the DDoSecrets leaks/hacks (they get upset if you aren't clear that they're hackers). They've got a strong Twitter presence that helps them get their message out, but they conduct no "real" business on Twitter.
So a counterculture can use the mainstream platforms, but they choose to do so only as a microphone, not as a gathering place.
Edit: That said, one of the members of a related group just (as in, after I wrote this but before editing was made unavailable) got banned from Twitter, so maybe they can't actually use the platform as a microphone for very long. It looks like the law is getting involved, specifically related to the Verkada hack.
I've thought a lot about what you're saying here, and I see no indication that's the case (corrupt/ulterior financial motivations related to their leaks/hacks). I am very curious how the members of DDoSecrets make their money, though (not that it's any of my business), mostly because the Twitter accounts I've been following seem to have a pretty strong disgust response to the idea of making money off of hacking in general.
My bad, I tought you were talking in general. I'm not familiar with DDoSecrets so I cannot say much about their case specifically.
What I can say though is that generally the threat model for attackers slightly more sophisticated than script kiddies suggests that the preparations involve a non negligible amount of time from highly specialized engineers and that somehow, someone has to pay for it.
Highly specialized engineers can be motivated by non monentary ideology just like everyone else.
Besides i think there are plenty of bored teens/uni students who fit between script kiddie and mafia/state actor on the sophistication scale - its a pretty wide step from script kiddie to professional malware writer.
DDoSecrets targeted the most vulnerable voices in society, people banished to Gab for their political beliefs. They literally work for the liberal ruling system.
Indeed. Being able to lose your source of income for posting something that contradicts the mainstream narrative counts as vulnerability in my book. I wanted to post a few examples of potential comments that would very plausibly get one removed from one's job, but that might risk becoming trollbait etc, so I won't give specific examples and just trust that we all have a decent pulse of the kinds of things that you can't say publicly without risk of losing employment or some other punishment.
Indeed, if someone can post their more-or-less unfiltered thoughts on a big social media platform like Facebook, Twitter, etc without ever getting banned, that's a great indication that that person is not part of a "vulnerable" faction, at least in the sense of being part of a counterculture.
So - I guess I'll risk giving one example - if you post a gross exagerration of the risks of SARS-CoV-2 with respect to death or serious illness, or recklessly speculate that recovery from infection does not produce immunity, you're allowed to do that as much as you want. But express the opposite opinion (even if you're literally echoing WHO recommendations such as [far too late] lockdowns being too blunt an instrument or that immunity passports shouldn't be a thing), and you'll be quickly suspended or banned with only a vague reference to "community guidelines".
And then of course you have the irony of platforms like Parler and Gab, which arise in large part due to the phenomenon of deplatforming voices of (primarily) a certain side, and then the mainstream will turn around and criticize these platforms for having a lot of "extremists" or supposed "crazy people", despite the fact that by definition such a platform is going to be populated by those who got booted explicitly or implicitly from the mainstream systems. As a further irony, it's commonly said that "nobody is preventing your ability to speak, you're just not allowed to speak on [insert platform]", and then when you go to that other platform that permits largely unrestricted speech, that platform is yanked from AWS and there's tons of news headlines about how they shouldn't be allowed to platform voice X or faction Y, etc.
So...yeah, the dismissive "how dare you declare these people vulnerable" is very naive and myopic IMO. I think we all know more or less what the current zeitgeist is and roughly what happens when you run afoul of it, and it's not pretty.
I hope I made something close to a coherent point there, I was mostly going stream of consciousness mode :)
Because you decide your political beliefs, and reactions to those decisions inform whether or not you continue to hold them.
Unlike a protected class, which you cannot choose to be a member of. Being of a political party is not a protected class, nor should it be.
The "most vulnerable people in our society" are the people who are discriminated on things they are, not things they do. Gab users are not the most vulnerable, because they choose to be who they're judged for.
It's viscerally insulting to see that point misunderstood, because it belies a fundamental misunderstanding of large portions of how society functions in practice. Because of what you said, and people who believe what you've said, people suffer. That's hard to confront on HN, because you don't expect it.
> you decide your political beliefs, and reactions to those decisions inform whether or not you continue to hold them
That's a really odd take. Throughout history, many of people have been prosecuted for what in retrospect many would agree are correct beliefs (eg: abolitionists, suffragists, believes in evolution, etc.)
Do you not feel sympathy for these people, who according to you could have just avoided all their troubles by changing their beliefs? Do you not understand how incredibly vulnerable AND critically important a minority belief could be?
First protected class is a legal construct that varies by jurisdiction and application. And a whole lot more than then handful enumerated deserve protection.
Veteran, family status and religion are protected classes you can choose to be in.
So you don't believe there's a moral backing for the concept of a protected class? And do you think "political views" fall into that category? Additionally, do you think it's "political views" themselves that are under threat here? Has anyone been banned from any social media platform entirely for speaking about cutting/raising taxes or growing/shrinking government?
Social media is the neighborhood bar, virtualized, with infinite seats at the bar, but no beer nuts (or beer). Truly one of the saddest places in the world -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJW19nlzb3Q
Anyone can pull up a seat to the bar and many people do. Inmate conversations are drowned out by shouting matches over politics, sports, or whatever has raised passions that day. And there's constant yells of "What the #@$@ are you looking at?" coming from random patron to another. And hundreds of bar promotions for any and everything under the sun.
Doubt members of the countercultural are going to want to hang out at the largest Buffalo Wild Wings...
It is, but to be clear I think the point there was not about public figures per se but about everyday people. Everyday (albeit obviously left-leaning) people would post the black squares out of a sense of obligation, and then the responses would be split between praising them for standing up for "black lives", versus half the people criticizing the poster of the black square for making a silly symbolic gesture. (I view it as the latter - a stupid symbolic gesture - BUT the context of the whole "silence is violence" meme is why these NPCs were in a double-bind: damned if you do, damned if you don't)
>n fact, I'd argue that mainstream social media can never be countercultural.
I would say that is pretty much true by definition.
Online countercultural elements are open source software and other collaborative platforms like Bandcamp and similar sites where people are trading tracks and what they have created.
Torrenting is still countercultural.
What the counterculture has in common now is that while the individualism is still present in the creation of music/software and the political/social choice to collaborate, the collective action of collaboration is the focus of attention, not individual fashion and identity. That kind of individualism has been sold back to us ad nauseum and its apotheosis is Instagram.
> From well-compensated marketing teams, to hordes of self-interested proselytizers (see: bitcoin), to propaganda teams looking to influence public opinion, mainstream dark forest sites simply shift the balance of power from the platform itself to the most motivated and well-funded members of the platform
This is making the perfect the enemy of the good.
Also, voting systems take care of a lot of this, because naked propaganda spam gets downvoted by the users.
Voting systems often amplify propaganda spam. Every day r/science has multiple posts upvoted to the top with titles exaggerating findings, and/or linking to shoddy studies.
Upvote/Downvote is very susceptible to headlines that exploit confirmation bias, and bot activity.
> This is making the perfect the enemy of the good.
To be fair, I'm not saying that we should all ditch Reddit and only congregate on obscure message boards with maximum user limits; I'm simply saying that a place like a default subreddit should never be considered counter-cultural.
> Also, voting systems take care of a lot of this, because naked propaganda spam gets downvoted by the users.
Strong disagree. Naked propaganda is downvoted, sure, but good propaganda is never naked. Add enough eyeballs and increasingly sophisticated and coordinated actors will find a way to get their message to the top.
>> From well-compensated marketing teams, to hordes of self-interested proselytizers (see: bitcoin), to propaganda teams looking to influence public opinion, mainstream dark forest sites simply shift the balance of power from the platform itself to the most motivated and well-funded members of the platform
> Also, voting systems take care of a lot of this, because naked propaganda spam gets downvoted by the users.
I disagree: crowdsourced moderation can only really take care of the most obvious crap, so it doesn't really take care of this problem.
Right, crowdsourced moderation works for badly done spam, poorly coded bots, etc. It does nothing for pseudo-science, "self-interested proselytizers" or PR teams. I think there's a mentality that if we just "crowdsource" something, somehow the work just goes away. It's a little like hand-waiving "the cloud" or "serverless" -- just because it's not your problem doesn't mean it disappears. It's still work that still needs to be done by somebody
On top of that, moderation of anything sufficiently popular isn't easy -- e.g., dealing with trolls or PR teams targeting a forum can get extremely complicated sussing out who is who and figuring out where to draw the line -- and like many things is inherently subjective, which means it's the last thing you'll want to hand-waive, but is instead integral to whatever is being built.
> I think there's a mentality that if we just "crowdsource" something, somehow the work just goes away. It's a little like hand-waiving "the cloud" or "serverless" -- just because it's not your problem doesn't mean it disappears.
Yeah, and this has been proven time and time again over at least the past 20 years. Crowdsourced moderation is also usually founded on the fallacy that people who are popular contributors will also be effective moderators, which isn't true.
Though certain crowdsourced features, like flagging, can definitely be moderation force-multipliers.
Social media sites with voting systems have a lot of bots. And they almost always are about expressing individual identity in the context of a unique combination of consumer choices, which is no longer countercultural, if it ever even was.
> because naked propaganda spam gets downvoted by the users
This is simply not true, although I suppose it depends on the definition of naked. Here's some random examples - although like anything, whether it qualifies as propaganda depends on one's beliefs:
- When the previous US president wanted to pull out of Syria, or at least scale down the activities there, a bunch of headlines to the effect of "[President's name] abandons the kurds, leaving them to die" were written, and went straight to the top of Reddit. (This is a classic war propaganda technique where there's always an excuse as to why you can't end a certain war, while failing to account for the negative effects of continuing wars, or the facts that many of these "problems" only exist because of previous foreign policy blunders and doubling down on those blunders simply doesn't help)
- Without going down the COVID rabbithole too much, there would routinely be articles that either (a) spread Chinese-state-originated propaganda videos of stuff like "man randomly collapses in the middle of the street", (b) articles that would credulously take China's metrics at face values, (c) scientific publications that immediately denied the possibility of non-naturalistic origins of the virus, (d) articles intended to shame those who don't believe in masking as an intervention, etc
- (This is a fun one since many won't agree) Many articles raced to the top which made just completely wrong statements about the portfolios of firms like Melvin Capital and basically depicted the WSB gamestop fiasco as a classic david vs goliath narrative, instead of the reality which was for a brief period of time it was a real short squeeze and then almost immediately became a classic bubble/pump and dump scenario that had no connection to fundamental asset valuation. (To be clear, in a short squeeze stock prices can easily be pushed past the "intrinsic value", but so long as there's still a squeeze it is not irrational to buy the asset. However, once it's no longer actually a short squeeze and is now just a normal bull-run / bubble, an article selling the david v goliath narrative is now propaganda)
- Here's a headline that's #2 on /r/politics, which I just visited to find the first headline that counts as propaganda in my book: "Conservatives Are Furious Biden Delivered a Non-Insane Presidential Speech" (regardless of what you feel about the speech or conservatives, it should be trivially obvious that they are not furious about a "non-insane" speech)
- Any of the dozens of articles about the "Capitol Hill Insurrection" which grossly exaggerated what occurred as an attempted coup instead of the reality which was a bunch of (largely deluded) self-styled patriots who changed and prayed and took stupid selfies inside the capitol building (note: me saying that it was grossly exaggerated is not the same as saying that there was no wrongdoing, etc)
---
I do think it is true though that "articles which are clearly propaganda to the average user" i.e. one thats go against the status quo of a cite will be downvoted. But propaganda in the other direction won't because they will never think of it as propaganda
The GameStop thing was some trying to emulate the shitty behaviour of hedge funds and succeeding. The authorities had to intervene to stop these people. Even Robinhood had to disable trading for these people, otherwise who knows how long it could have gone on. The authorities are mum when the hedge funds do it.
'Changed, prayed, took stupid selfies' - let's not hide what they did. They had weapons. If an angry crowd with weapons come to my workplace and ransacked the place, making everyone flee for their lives, I would want them all to serve prison time. It's a no-brainer.
> (regardless of what you feel about the speech or conservatives, it should be trivially obvious that they are not furious about a "non-insane" speech)
I guess it could be implying that being furious about insane speeches is normal, and "non-insane" is what makes it news? Just for devil's advocate sake.
> We saw this dynamic metastasize in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, when well-intentioned claims of “silence is violence” (recalling the powerful 1987 ACT-UP “Silence = Death” campaign) spiraled into calling out individuals with even a small following who hadn’t come forward with a timely public statement of solidarity or remorse. Yet public posts were subject to popular scrutiny and judged based on sincerity, originality, and tone. Not surprisingly, many people defaulted to posting a somber plain black square. But this generated criticism of its own by clogging the feed with an informational blackout during a moment when community resource sharing was critically important. Amid a chaotic time, the platform functioned exactly as designed: amplification of emotions, uptick in user interaction, growth in platform engagement and data cultivation. Cha-ching, the platform cashes in.
In other words, any large movement or discussion on "clearnet" spaces gets subverted by the algorithms and profit motive of the platform they live on.
However, where I disagree with the author is considering mainstream "dark forest" platforms like reddit or 4chan to be countercultural. In fact, I'd argue that mainstream social media can never be countercultural. While there may be no "algorithm" controlling the narrative you see on 4chan (or a straightforward and ostensibly fair one on a site like reddit), the content you see (and by extension, the narrative) is shaped by profit motive: From well-compensated marketing teams, to hordes of self-interested proselytizers (see: bitcoin), to propaganda teams looking to influence public opinion, mainstream dark forest sites simply shift the balance of power from the platform itself to the most motivated and well-funded members of the platform