Do Not Read This Article! An Exploration of the Streisand Effect and Other Phenomena
#StreisandEffect #PsychologicalPhenomena #Psychology #PsyEffects #ReversePsychology #CuriosityKilledTheCat #DontLookAtThis #DunningKruger #MandelaEffect #Phenomena
Users Are Too Dependent on Centralized Techno-Fascist Corporate Structure to Ever Leave Discord
I’m watching people scatter into countless real-time chat alternatives to Discord after Discord started pulling the age-verification and age-gating card.
It’s very frustrating because people are entirely missing the point of a community and how social networks work. Real-time platforms and social media networks only work well when a large number of people share the same space at the same time. If everyone creates separate servers or competing apps, the result is fragmentation that makes it unviable.
One reason why Bluesky became so successful is the invitation and starter-pack move. It essentially allowed people to move collectively as cliques. Bluesky used invitations and starter packs to move groups of friends together. This kept communities intact. Moving as cliques preserves network structure, whereas random scattering does not. People aren’t do not seem to intend to move as cliques or subgraphs of networks off of Discord. And the whole reason people were on Discord was to host their communities, so an alternative becomes pointless if your community doesn’t remain intact.
Instead of an active, strongly connected, possibly distributed network, you get dozens of small pockets. I am referring to a potential distributed network rather than a single centralized platform, because Matrix is an example of a decentralized chat protocol. Not all alternatives have to be centralized like Discord. Technically, many older chat protocols, such as XMPP and IRC, are examples of federated real-time synchronous messaging. They allowed communication between users on different, independently operated servers. Federation means that multiple servers can interconnect so that users from separate networks can exchange messages with one another seamlessly.
Decentralized alternatives would not be a problem if people moved to the same distributed network as cohesive groups. However, what I am seeing is that people move in disconnected and stochastic ways to entirely separate distributed networks, so communities are not kept intact. For example, when people move to XMPP servers or Matrix servers, it bifurcates and disconnects social networks. Notice I said XMPP or Matrix, which logically means people are on Matrix but not XMPP, or they are on XMPP but not Matrix. That implies a person would need to be on both Matrix and XMPP to speak to their original community from Discord if it split down the middle. To synchronize conversations in chats, there would need to be a bridge. It’s a pretty complicated solution.
The likely outcome is that people will remain on the dominant platform because of its scale and structure. The deeper irony is that while people may want independence from corporate platforms, they often struggle to organize effectively without the centralized structure those platforms provide. They’ve become so dependent on corporate structures to support their communities that they have no clue how to organize their own social networks in a sustainable way.
I’ve always been an internet nerd, but most of my social life has been offline. I view my interactions with the social app layer of the internet as a game, so losing that domain of the Internet is not devastating to me.
I’ll give you an example. This is a WordPress site. You hear this insincere nostalgia from Millennials and Gen X for a simulacrum that never was, especially concerning forums. Check this out: when you go into the plugin installation section of WordPress, this is on the second row you see:
That means any WordPress site has the capability to host a forum. They’re nostalgic for a setup where you can use a simple install script on any hosting service to install WordPress. After that, you can then just add a plugin to turn it into a forum. Hell, they can do this on WordPress.com if they don’t want to self-host.
You can make a forum, but no one will use it because they’d rather use a centralized platform like Reddit. Users have become so dependent on corporations to structure and organize communities that they can’t do it themselves. It’s sort of like the cognitive debt that accrues when people outsource their thinking to AI.
The issue is not that forums are hard to host or create; rather, the issue is that people have become so dependent on centralized corporate structures that they can’t maintain or organize their own communities, which is why everyone ends up on Reddit or Discord. A reason I keep hearing for why people don’t want to leave Discord is that it’s hard to recreate the community structure that Discord’s features provide. They claim that they want independence from corporate platforms, but rely on the centralized structure those platforms provide to function socially.
People say they want decentralized freedom, but in practice they depend on centralized platforms to maintain social cohesion. Stochastically scattering to the digital winds of the noosphere destroys the very communities they’re trying to preserve.
So my memory of the Fruit of the Loom logo *clearly* is a color illustration of a bunch of fruit spilling out of a cornucopia.
It was this way as far back as I have been alive (1970s).
While the "new" logo (or "real" logo or whatever) also looks "right" to me, it has the feel of a new design, as brands often do update time, shedding old artifacts to appear more modern.
But that cornucopia is clear as looking in my memory.
Graphic designers have reconstructed the mythical logo, and it looks EXACTLY the way it does in my mind. The color pallet, the scale, the style, 100% the way I remember it.
I remember this on ads, packages, and labels. A very prominent logo in the American landscape.
That never existed.
I watched a video that detailed the search, and compared it with other Mandela brands. It showed how easily those other logos and brand names could easily have been mashed up with other brands or logos, or been memory-crossed based on elements we would expect. Those feel confusing to me, even ones that once felt very firmly real. The explanations for how I might have misremembered feel plausible.
But the cornucopia escapes explanation. To me, it still feels very present and right.
No one knows why so many people insert the exact same style and color of cornucopia into a logo that never had one.
/🧵
You know, most of the Mandela Effects that I've experienced, I can buy the erroneous memory explanation. After seeing it both ways enough, I start to feel fuzzy on which one I remember.
But the Fruit of the Loom logo? That one, that one stands strong. I cannot erase the logo that feels real in my memory. Nor does any explanation make sense for where the false logo comes from. There's been a vast search for an seasonal or old version of the false logo, which has turned up nothing. The current logo is what it has always been, in this reality, and nothing seems to account for the differences in memory.
I've been intentionally vague about the difference, in case you're not familiar with this one.
I'll ask you to think of the Fruit of the Loom logo. How does it airs in your mind?
The next post I'll tell you how I and many others remember it.
🧵
j43147 :pentagram:
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