Or is it just doomed to the vapidity of sterile commercialization?
It feels like everything is serious these days… and ‘humor’ is only of the commercial variety. Joke communities and circlejerk communities are considered ‘hate groups’ now. Mods will ban you for sarcastic comments on ‘serious’ topics, and even on non serious ones, and everything is politicized either by trolls, bots, or whackjobs.
It’s boring when you can’t joke anymore. I miss my internet communities of 5-10 years ago when you could joke around, and even people of different beliefs and persuasions could laugh at themselves.
Now everything is so deadly serious. It’s a complete bummer. And any sort of ‘edge’ or sarcasm or sardonic remarks are ban-worthy.
I guess it’s just poe’s law run amok? I feel like mods could tell the difference 10 years ago and the non-jokey psychos were just ignored.
Am seriously considering founding a not-for-profit to provide an ad free / spam free / bot free basic community. Would cost a dollar or two a month. Chief differences to the lemmy would be one account per person via proof of identity signup (I think this would improve behaviour and discourage spam), a single authority to tackle voting abuse and other things useful to be not federated.
Aside from that revenue would cover technical staff costs + hosting and the rest could go to some good cause. There’s be no ads. No data selling. Not conflict of interest over how the platform evolves. Would be open source. Adults only.
Id keep it as basic as possible to try and capture the spirit of 90s fora. Am not even sure I’d allow inline images or vid.
Thoughts?
God I’d kill for a place with no trolls, politics, shit posts, where your allowed to disagree and have spirited discussions on topics but mods would step in before it becomes an argument.
I feel like everywhere you go online nowadays there’s a `well ackwchullly’ type in the corner. I’d love a place people can get together share ideas and joke around.
Long story short, if you build it they will come.
good luck there. especially with determining what is or isn’t politics in the first place
amen. i feel like there used to be a barrier. now people get up in my face for drinking a diet coke, because it’s a ‘political act’ because trump drinks diet coke, so therefore i must support trump.
It’s insanity.
Something Awful charged :10bux: for membership and was a pillar of good moderation. It works.
They were amazing pioneers of shitposting and circlejerking but some people considered them something of a hate group for their callouts of specific subcultures. I’m suggesting that aspect of things that OP is describing isn’t exactly new.
But yeah, agreed, the swift, stark ban policy was very effective in creating a “civil” society there - idiots showed up to fuck around, bam hope they’ve got 10 more bucks if they want to try again under a different account.