Gen Zer tries to dub Gen X 'the worst generation.' A Millennial hilariously shut them down.

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://www.upworthy.com/gen-x-gen-z-ex1

A Thing I Miss About Old-School Forums Was It Was Harder to Bull Shit People

I don’t miss old-school forums. However, one of the very few norms I do miss about them is that you were required to support your argument with sources.

On present social media, sources don’t matter. Evidence doesn’t matter. It only matters if enough people with a large enough pool of influence say it so frequently that it becomes the norm and the consensus. It has become out of the norm for anyone to ask for sources. They see massive accounts with massive influence on a platform saying it in a trending section, their feeds, their For You pages, etc., and they adopt it. No questions asked. And if there is dissent, they are promptly beaten down, because the consensus is what these authority figures say without evidence. That was not the norm on bulletin board forums. Not at all.

It doesn’t matter if it is Reddit, Bluesky, or Mastodon—scrolling through the trending topics section prompted this—people will write out an opinion they know others will likely disagree with, prima facie, as if it is well supported. As in, it has zero evidence. Then people collectively affirm that unsupported argument until it becomes a consensus. Then, when it drums up engagement, they flesh out the argument as if it is well supported.

While you’re talking to real people on the fediverse and maybe Reddit (albeit it might be a real person who had an LLM draft a response), I know for a fact from software developers that AI agents simulating users on Bluesky are running around, and they are so convincing you cannot tell it is an AI agent. I brought up that point because old-school astroturfing would work by creating a call-and-response dynamic with a person planted in the audience to artificially create a dialogue where a narrative forms and spreads.

You see it all the time on TikTok, where a TikTok influencer responds to a random comment. Now that AI agents are reaching the point where their simulations of people are accurate predictions of people, they can fool human intuition. Hell, Bluesky has an entire section of their documentation dedicated to setting up bots.

https://docs.bsky.app/docs/starter-templates/bots

Here is the starter script to make bots on Bluesky:

This folder contains a starter template for creating a bot on Bluesky. In this example, the bot posts a smiley emoji on an automated schedule once every three hours.

https://github.com/bluesky-social/cookbook/tree/main/ts-bot

And, of course, you create the disease so you can sell the cure. And, of course, after flooding networks with bots, you have bot detectors

Bluesky Bot Detector

Check if an account is likely to be a bot. Our algorithm analyzes multiple factors including posting patterns, profile characteristics, and network behavior. It is still a beta, take the results with a grain of salt…

https://bskycheck.com/botcheck.php

Yeah, the fediverse has automated accounts, too. But they are not LLM agents. Examples of this on Bluesky are Letta AI Social Agent, Bluesky Automation Agent, Telegram to Bluesky Agent, and LLM Bot Framework. It absolutely blows my mind how much anti-AI discourse on Bluesky is actively spread by AI itself, where it collects data from how real people interact with it, spreads it, and internalizes narratives from it. There are two versions: good ones, and bad ones. The bad ones exist so that people make incorrect associations and underestimate their ability to tell what is and isn’t an agent. Since the fediverse and Bluesky are tightly correlated with the same memeplex, it spreads here memetically.

They create the impression of a consensus that is then adopted, such that it becomes the consensus. This would not have been very effective within the culture of old-school bulletin boards, because everyone’s default mode was skepticism—they would ask for corroborative sources, read the sources, and even explain to whoever posted them why it was a bad source.

What prompted this was an arbitrary heuristic about the number of people you should have within a collective, coalition, etc., with zero proof and zero evidence on Mastodon.

I’m not in high school anymore. I am not in college anymore. Because of things like this, I have contempt for your average Internet user and am not interested in creating or running communities, personally. You guys are insufferable as fellow users; I wouldn’t want to be in charge of managing your social interactions. I don’t want to admin an online community in any shape, way, or form—especially for free. I have a husband and a kid—although I don’t have custody of my son; that is a long story. So, no, I don’t miss forums, because as someone approaching 40 (I will be 38 this year), I am in a different space in life.

In case you’re wondering what the hell I am talking about, whenever I address misinformation outside of narrow contexts, I don’t explicitly mention it, because that actually creates a memetic payload. One of my biggest frustrations about people who argue online against misinformation is that they spread it. Think of it like this: when you requote something, quote it in the text, or share screenshots, your response is the wrapper, and we can view the misinformation as the payload. It is like hiding poison in food.

When you argue against misinformation and you don’t abstract it to quarantine the harmful memetic aspects, your rebuttal is a wrapper. A person who is susceptible to the memetic contagion will disregard your argument—the wrapper—and consume the misinformation.

I do not miss forums; however, I do miss cultural norms where people actually cared about facts. Influence is a form of power, and when you seek power where someone else loses, that is called domination. I miss when people cared about genuine collaboration instead of dominating and abusing each other.

I am keeping tabs on the tech discourse here concerning features people want. There’s an intersection and a convergence between Bluesky’s transparency report and what people are screaming about here: harassment. It is sort of like how people were giving Bluesky a hard time about user moderation tools being used to block Nazis instead of suspending them. The issue is that it was indicative of a culture tolerant of Nazis. The fact that the tools existed indicated the issue.

People want tools to handle harassment on the fediverse; however, that implies a hostile global forum culture. That’s the problem. The social layer of the Internet is connected to hostile, antisocial memeplexes.

That’s also a reason why I wouldn’t ever run a community now. Hostility is endemic to Internet cultures.

The major issue I have with how most content online is written, whether on blog posts or social media, is that it is written in a persuasive, not expository, rhetorical style. If your intention is to inform, you use exposition.

However, they’re not trying to inform you; rather, they are framing and presenting it in a way to influence you. Most content is not written in a way where you are presented with data that you interpret, evaluate, and use to come to your own conclusions; rather, it is presented and framed in a particular way they want you to interpret it.

If I feel pressure to go in one direction or the other, I will stop reading. They don’t understand that you can objectively describe knowledge without framing it normatively. It comes across as, “Don’t believe your lying eyes and don’t trust your own thoughts, experiences, values, beliefs, and reactions — trust us instead.” I added this section while literally trying to read a blog post about protocols linked from the fediverse. The entire thing was couched persuasively. It was not a technical description of evaluation; rather, it was a persuasive post implicitly filled with normative prescriptions.

I am Not Migrating Back To IRC

So, with this whole Discord surveillance age verification situation, I am seeing lots of talk on every social media platform, including Discord ironically, about moving back to IRC. I am not going back to IRC. Though, I do not really have a valid interest in it, because I use Discord just to monitor occult cults and extremist groups, lol. So, it is not like I would be really displaced, anyway. I would just need to figure out a new exploit or hack.

I’m a Computational Biologist, so I am half in Biology and half in software engineering. I tend to look at technology and evolution as analogous to one another. Software, dynamical systems, and evolution are analogous. Evolution functions like a survivorship process. Lineages that leave more descendants become more represented over time where drift, mutation, recombination, and migration all perturb the system. It’s a stochastic dynamical system.

Speciation is a change under isolation. Once gene flow is cut off, divergence accumulates. Eventually, compatibility breaks, creating a divergence. A fork. You can think of it in a version control system like this: you stop merging upstream commits. You accumulate independent changes, and at some point the codebases are no longer interchangeable.

With evolution, even when traits resemble ancestral forms, they arise through new mutations in the current system. It’s a forward, not backward, branch. So from an evolutionary and software engineering perspective, progress happens by forking and optimizing what exists. That means you will not get progress by trying to migrate everyone back to legacy infrastructure.

I’m not migrating to IRC because it is not progress or evolution. It is technologically regressive. Regressive attitudes are why we are essentially in a weird, industrial, cyberpunk version of the 1930s right now. Hoping old-school forums make a comeback and that everyone migrates back to IRC is a technological and societal regression. It’s the same nostalgia-driven impulse that MAGA rides on. It’s not evolutionary or progressive. It’s regressive and backward. So that triggers all the alarm bells in my head, because this is sort of how we got here. Donald Trump rode in on a regressive platform of nostalgia and populism. Roughly 10–12% of Bernie Sanders supporters in 2016 voted for Donald Trump under that wave.

Trump’s 2016 rise was driven significantly by populist themes such as critiques of establishment politics, nationalism, economic resentment, and appeals to voters dissatisfied with the status quo in both parties. Anyone paying attention in 2026 should see the cycle repeating itself. This weird form of technological regression is a techno-populist version of it. America never learns is lesson, does it?

Currently, I am on Matrix, albeit I use it more or less for bridge and puppeteer bot purposes. To me, it’s like going back to using muskets when everyone else is using AK-47s. The solution is not to make more regressive pieces of technology. They are least effective when you are essentially in a guerrilla, stochastic war with your own fascist government.

Who else despises #Discord?

I do! 🤬

I'm a #Millennial! We've had a PERFECTLY adequate means of interaction, back then - we called it #IRC!

Also, Discord conducts #FalseAdvertising! NO, it's NOT a SERVER! It's a SERVICE!

Discord doesn't spin up a dedicated "server"! They do some kinda database magic, and "ALLOCATE" resources on their #CLOUD #INFRASTRUCTURE!

I despise #Marketing #Bullshit! 🤬 💩

The Virulent Infection of BlueSky by Extremely Online, Brain-Rotten Zombies from X Continues

So, it appears a new migration from Twitter to Bluesky is underway. It appears to be some of the most virulent former 4chan users possible. Yep, I got off Bluesky just in time, lol. I’ve been keeping tabs on a particularly virulent and toxic subgraph on Twitter for years. It pretty much stayed off Bluesky because they couldn’t act like abusive dumpster fires there. Welp, looks like they’re becoming more active on Bluesky. It’s not looking good over there.

That they are on the move says something. It’s sort of like how the US is suddenly a place that is hospitable to measles. It was all but eradicated here.

My husband likes to say that you can tell where not to be by where I am looking from somewhere else. I like fires. So if I am observing your platform or community from a distance, you probably don’t want to be there.

Edit:

I had originally posted the above on a now-defunct federated blog. It got blasted to Mastodon. Someone replied and asked what I think is causing this. I debated actually answering, then decided that I’ve had enough of the dumpster fire that is social media. I decided not to wade through social media tech discourse into what will mostly likely be an Internet argument with a complete stranger. I am a techie dragon, and I engage with things to learn how they work so I can tinker with them. I only engaged with tech discourse to get my hands on how the tech works. There’s nothing in it for me to be part of larger conversations. Arguing with random strangers on social media is not an epistemically useful format. I do think I should answer, though. Just on my blog.

I treat social media like I do an addictive substance. I do not believe in abstinence, but I do believe in harm-reduction paradigms, so when I see everyone overdosing on social media, I pull back and shut down a lot of accounts. The Fediverse instance where the first part of this blog post was posted has been taken down, moved to this blog, and this section appended to it.

I often use the word weeb pejoratively. Here, I am using it categorically. There really isn’t an “official” name outside of otaku or weeb culture. I am at the fringes and intersections of it as a furry. My husband is a millennial weeb. With that being said—

The migration is in large part because Bluesky is capturing the otaku/weeb niche of X. X hosted networks that were ecosystems of “anime fans.” These included anime and manga artists, doujin and hentai artists, VTuber fans, NSFW illustrators, fandom shitposters, niche fetish communities, and other chronically and extremely online content creators and influencers. That culture relied heavily on timelines, informal networks, and discovery through reposts, replies, and algorithmic amplification.

Elon Musk pretty much destabilized X’s ecosystems and social networks from multiple directions at once. Algorithm changes made reach inconsistent. Moderation created anxiety and uncertainty about what would get suppressed or unintentionally “viral”. Bots, engagement farming, and blue-check reply spam actively poisoned fandom conversations.

Bluesky is the memetic and cultural progeny of early imageboard cultures. I conducted a phylogenetic analysis of the memetics, which you can check out here:

Bluesky is a competitor of X for otaku and fandom communities. Bluesky has a lot of the aspects of old Twitter dynamics around which fandom culture evolved. Recently, Bluesky introduced something big in those communities: going live. Since X is no longer habitable for weebs, they are moving to Bluesky.

For example, the AT protocol already has PinkSea:

https://pinksea.art

And, of course, there is WAFRN:

https://app.wafrn.net

I cope and deal with issues via personal, private sublimation and not so much exhibitionism of my art or consumption of art. So, while I do make comic books and do a shit ton of weeby art, it’s for the purpose of sublimation, so I’m not too interested in being a part of a community. That’s a large reason I am not active in those spaces. I’m quite cynical, in general, so I am suspicious of any community — and I mean any community, at all. Honestly, I am mildly contemptuous of mass participation or any sense of belonging. So, my art stays private, because it is created for me – and just me.

35 #NostalgicPosts calling to those who feel caught in between being Gen X and Millennial: https://zorz.it/swfPY

#ShanilouPerera #GenX #Millennial #XennialKid #CuspGenerations #memes #funny #NostalgicMemes

#NowPlaying
Don't Stay In School
Boyinaband

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xe6nLVXEC0

#music #mukke #mood #politics #society #education #teaching #criticism #technology #tech #YouTube #classics #millennial #millennials