Nepenthe

It’s really a mix of both. More heavily the way the site has been for years because people love drama more than anything else. If you want the sweet serotonin of karma, you’ve gotta be simultaneously the funniest, meanest, and most jaded person in the room, and everyone is jockeying for that position.

It just breeds assholes by design. I’ve noticed my own behavior has changed, too, since leaving that place, although partially that’s because I just didn’t want to be like that anymore.

But it really has been noticeably affected since the protests. I was originally trying to stay for one single sub I was in, because they were the kindest, calmest community I’d met since back when forums were a thing.

Just the best group, for reasons none of us really understood and some of us kept trying to find psychological commonalities to explain. Truly 98% of them were people I’d chill with irl and I still know a few on discord. And also here. If you’re reading this, hello!

But the migration away was enough to completely alter the atmosphere imo. A lot of the more conscientious users left for other pastures, leaving behind those that were more neutral or even openly hostile about the protests.

There began to be fights and insults thrown where before this, any aggression had been unusual. The posts took a turn that reflected that feeling and I really stopped bothering with the place after a few months. I’m still a bit sad about it and there are things that I miss, but there just wasn’t enough to hold me anymore. It seemed to increasingly echo every other part of the site.

For the moment, this place is quieter but better. We still get dumb shit every now and then, but it’s not to the same degree and hopefully never will be. As above, I blame the demographic. We’ve grouped all the people with stubborn morals into a little room and it turns out they have things in common. I do miss a couple people I used to see everywhere all the time when kbin first ramped up, but we run in different circles and they’ve gotten lost in the crowd.

And yes, btw, I am also going to name you one of my favorite users to see around. You seem as kind as you are prolific.

Age of Attraction

Uuuunfortunately, that turned out to be an easily-accessible post that was barely chopped up probably for brevity more than anything else. Wasn’t one of their students, it was some 8yr old at their apartment complex.

Dunno if you’re from there or defensively made assumptions, but the MAP community was gonna come out fairly quick regardless and go over just as well.

Exactly. I’ve only ever pirated things I couldn’t afford, and even then I kept a running list of the good ones in the hopes that one day I could pay them legitimately. When I can afford to buy them fairly, I don’t pirate.

I was a thief when I was starving and I’m a damn thief now.

The go-to counterpoint being that people come to social media to socialize with other humans. The moment another “human” hits me with “As an AI…” or are otherwise unmasked for any reason is the exact moment I lose a little bit of faith in the platform.

It’s not enough faith to make me stop using it the first time or even the fifth, so long as the promise of almost always interacting with another person is dangled in front of me. But that little bit can’t be regained and eventually it’s going to hit zero and I will leave.

I already have chatbots if I want to talk to myself. Talking to the cat makes me feel less lonely than chatbots do, and given the choice between the fedi forever remaining niche or retaining the bot “activity” of reddit…I’d just move to tildes.

The only halfway good argument is the use of a breaking news bot, but I’ve found I tend to get tired of those very fast for the same reason. They just make me sad and irritated, and I end up blocking them. If the news is interesting enough, I expect humans will spam it.

If they could be programmed to only post when user interaction falls…maybe, in theory, but that feels more insidious to me than anything else. The idea of a company pumping their numbers will never make me like them, and if bots are already posting stuff, why do I have to interact in order to get content? They’re already doing it. 🤷‍♂️

If I’m lurking enough to trigger the theoretical user activity bot, I’d also be fine lurking while “other users” (the bots) give me things to look at, and they’ll never go dormant.

Moving one over here was fairly hard for this reason. I admittedly should be keeping it up still, but where realizing I had nine whole subscribers made me really happy (there are tens of us!), realizing nobody was ever going to make a move of any sort even to comment and that I was going to continue carrying this entire community by myself has made me very discouraged.

I know most people are content to lurk while they look for something that’s interesting enough to post/interact with. I do that too. But come on, guys. Don’t do me like this. Nobody goes online to sit and talk to themselves.

Doesn’t make them good or necessary just because they’re common. When I see bots, I tend to block them pretty fast regardless of contribution, and my experience has been pretty damn nice here in very large part because the bot users are (to my knowledge) mostly or entirely dormant.

Nobody wants to interact with a known bot, or post where that’s the main contributor. The bot is never going to engage with them, and it somehow feels worse than posting into the void.