Rusty CorgiOkay Fedi, what's your chronically online hot take? 
Mathias ❄️🐺🐶 
@Rusty There *is* good corporate social media, it's called YouTube, and its algorithm is at least zero sum if not positive on the whole for humanity
(I can explain this)
Leon@mathias My dude, you drop this spice, say that you can elaborate, and then don't.
I'd love to hear these thoughts 👉 👈
@grovecastle Okay, so.
YT has its thorns. Google is lower mid tier evil who currently likes to donate to high tier evil (but all of big tech does, sigh), they've had issues with moderation, their copyright system needs major work, etc. We know that, and we know their algo serves what's popular to logged-out users, which is unfortunately often the same kind of vaguely to very right wing garbo that you'll get on Fuckerbook. It's the nature of rage sells.
But.
Go look at your recommended feed on the home tab of your app or the homepage of the site. Do you see that stuff? Nope. They know if you don't want rightoid trash, and then don't surface it if you don't go watching it, other than weird Shorts stuff *eventually*, but Shorts is just TikTokLite and should be ignored.
Now the good.
The algo serves me music. Not just top 40, not just American, not just in English even. Neat artists I've not heard of yet, musical theory memes, anti-MAGA satire from "dude with a guitar" to "Samuel Saint's productions".
1/?
@grovecastle , twenty Egyptian uncles in a room playing a captivating tune on string instruments and flutes all from memory, a French band with a lead singer who emigrated from Ethiopia covering War Pigs in Amharic, super skillful genre-bending covers... It serves me videos of someone playing a chaotic GTA IV mod from 16 years ago, Black creators doing a deep dive into how white America fell into the rightwing trap when they lost outlets for anger that also spoke the truth about how white supremacy was keeping them down, nerds hitting streaming video speeds with multiplexed 56k modem connections, (real) 1930s shitpost songs...
What's under many of these - not all of them, but things like that silly GTA mod, the War Pigs cover, the Egyptian musicians, is a comment with *thousands* of upvotes that says "legendary algorithm pull". Hundreds of thousands, millions of people like me also got shown these moments of levity or excellent humans making art. They're from all around the world - literally everywhere. 2/?
@grovecastle "Love from Iran". "Cheers from Oklahoma, USA". "Amor desde Mexico". "Huge shouts from BRASIL 🇧🇷🇧🇷🇧🇷" (😂 you know it's always Brazilians) "(Cyrillic text that reads "This is fire! Thank you from St. Petersburg Russia!")". Not only that, but even between nations whose governments and history have kept them at bitter conflict with each other, people come together - commenters from one north African country on a piece by a singer from the other north African nation (I don't recall which, sorry), or "So much love and respect from Pakistan 🇵🇰" all over videos of legendary Indian artists (the whole comment section was such a great display of shared spirit between both countries).
That kind of stuff enriches people. It helps encourage more empathy and respect for your fellow humans, it broadens your artistic horizons, it brings smiles when they're lacking. It even creates spaces cishet men show care and support toward each other they otherwise wouldn't, in something that may seem as silly from the 3/?
@grovecastle outside as "creed one last breath coming from your garage after 3am".
Then let's take what the platform allows. Some people can drop their soul-sucking jobs and just do that full time. Most of the time it's not from ad revenue, but without YT, there couldn't be a Patreon full of supporters. Take Cathode Ray Dude. Gravis (who's a furry if you don't know already) is a charming queer nerd with comfy vibes who makes often-long videos talking about... basically whatever the heck he feels like. Phones in the 80s and 90s! POS systems! Commercial displays! Weird old software! The comments eat it up every time (me included). Every Gravis being himself on the platform, adds up to something that matters. So does the genuine mental health community-makers like How to ADHD, or even some of the massive successes like Marques Brownlee.
That's the good.
end/4
@mathias Alright, you have me convinced. Thank you for this very long and thoughtful response.
In my head, what I was thinking about mostly was the over decade long suppression of LGBTQ+ voices, where people have had to fight with an algorithm clearly biased against them. Stevie Boebi made a really good video about it three months back. Plus, just how easily people's livelihood can get ripped away by corporate greed.
But it's not all bad, there's some genuine niceness there, too.