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Notes -
The Beautiful People are in Charge Just Like Everywhere Else.
I don't have anything terribly insightful to say about any of this. It's just another entry in the ongoing process of what I've mentally termed internet gentrification or nerd cultural appropriation. I attempt not to get bent out of shape over these things, lest I tip over into the "ugh, normies..." nerd-hipster trope but this article resonated with me. I miss the pre-Dice CmdrTaco-era of Slashdot (fuck Beta!). I hate influencer culture and every YouTube video telling me to "like and subscribe". There used to be a commenter on SSC whose entire schtick was something like "Everything is a popularity contest and all is lost" and he's starting to make sense to me. Moloch will have his sacrifices.
On the 12 + porn bit, controversial claim: it doesn't actually do that much, she wasn't really injured by it. men were much more violent with women (on average), not less, in pre-modern life, and choking-violent-sex-bad thing seems like a strange male-power-bad/early-feminist thing.
As for 'unpublishable' - no? there are plenty of places that'll "publish" that, including substack, or random subreddits. Reddit still hosts all sorts of weird porn. It's not going in the NYT, but why does that matter?
tiktok actually does have a search function, and you can also browse by hashtags? No idea what that means. Tiktok is designed for the algorithm-driven mode, and it's more effective for most people's use cases, but it isn't even that different from 'searching or watching what you want' - it's still the same content, and most people click on the cat videos or half-naked women either way.
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