this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2024
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Please forgive the length of my post

I'm a tenacious and uninhibited kind of person. Companies hate me. I talk to them like equals - asking questions, expecting answers. They hate me for it. All you have to do is give me a phone number to a real person, that's all you had to do. But instead, I'm doing OSInt trying to find the office number for a random lady in your HR department, because you've made yourself completely inaccessible. "Send us an e-mail with this form" haha fat chance, like anyone will read that. How stupid do you think I am? How much contempt do you have for me? How much disrespect do you have for your customers and end-users that you won't let them hear a human being address their concerns? You don't have a spokesperson? A reception? A PR Guy? Fuck off. Sorry, I guess they're too busy working from 10:00 AM to 2:00 PM remotely from home three days a week, like the rest of you white collar freaks.

So ok, I try searching for office phone numbers. If that doesn't work, being fortunate enough to live in a big city, sometimes my next move is just to show up at their local headquarters. I highly recommend it to everyone, that gets results. They hate that. That shit terrifies them. Nothing terrifies them more than an actual consumer of their product showing up in person. Actual physical accountability. It'd be hilarious if it wasn't so pathetic and sad. You're that atomized, that alienated and scared, that you're terrified of a customer just asking a question to you, in person, face to face. What am I going to do? I am but one woman, one of the people your company needs to keep enriching itself, simply smiling in your office in a well-fitted suit. Why are you so afraid? Is it that all the police and security guards money can buy can't stop me from being tenacious enough to ask a sincere question? That all of your money still can't account for being annoyed by people outside of your control? Seriously, just pathetic. These people live in such constant control of their sensory environment, constantly inundated with racist crime propaganda, the idea of a friendly stranger using their product is literally impossible to them. Imagine being that misanthropic, what losers.

I made a tumblr blog at the end of last year. Was very excited, as someone who has a pathological fear of social media and was looking for a way to build connections and solidarity more. An attempt to be part of society and be less of an exclusively lurking 'digital agoraphobe'. I considered using the new blog as a sort of professional portfolio as well. Immediately, seconds after creating it, I'm marked as explicit. I made no posts, followed nobody, messaged no users. I'm marked explicit. I reach out to tumblr support.

9 months. 9 months later they get back to me. "HMMM UMM WE'RE NOT SURE SWEETIE.... ARE YOU SUREEEE YOUR BLOG ISNT SEXUALLY EXPLICIT?" "Yep" "OK WE'VE UNFLAGGED IT NOW TEEHEE WHOOPSIE!!" "Why did this happen? What did I do to trigger your flagging system? Can you please let me know what I need to do to prevent this happening in the future? I'm trying to build a professional portfolio here, and I can't just have it randomly be inaccessible for 9 months." radio silence Like, it's not that big of a deal. I'm always friendly and cordial whenever I have a chance to actually talk to someone. This is why I'm such a big phone call booster. All this text and e-mail shit is exactly what the elite in charge want, because they can just sit on it forever, never have to respond. "We love to hear feedback from everyone!" and their form just gets sent to an inbox that's never opened. But a Phone call with a human? A face to face interaction? THAT'S fucking accountability that forces them to immediately respond. Look man, I expect to be treated like a bug at this point, to be treated like a cockroach. At the bare minimum, you should be forced to actually tell me to go fuck myself. Especially from tumblr, a website that markets itself as friendly and queer and hip, to randomly be telling it's users (many of whom have serious sexual traumas) that they're flagged for being "Sexually Explicit" for doing nothing. I won't even open the can of worms of them doing that to random SFW selfies of transmen and transwomen, groups of people who are already regularly told their existence is inherently sexually explicit. This is why I avoided all of this social media shit to begin with, why it terrifies me - in addition to the damage 4chan kiwifarms mfs can do if they decide they don't like you. Complete unaccountability, everything you build online can just be instantly undone by cold, uncaring, distant, privileged, elitist freaks. No trial, no reasons given. Literally kafkaesque. And I hate how as a relatively young person, this is damaging my ability to make connections with others.

I'm not going to go to tumblr's offices and demand answers or anything, I don't give enough of a fuck about this, it just makes me sad and tired. Me making this post is the extent to which I care, and even this feels like too much work in regards to this. God damn, why the fuck does the SFW/NSFW distinction have to dominate the entire internet?! Most people are adults! Why are we intellectually and artistically kneecapping the repository of all human knowledge so some toddling pants-shitters can "safely" watch skibidi toilet 47?! It's not even safe, kids are still getting groomed online! All of this shit, holding back culture and sexuality and drugs, all of that for the supposed safety of the children, and they still get groomed online. It doesn't even work! Most of us grew up with the internet in some capacity, whomst amongst us didn't check the "Over 18" box when we were underage? We should have entire generations of people who already know from firsthand experience this shit doesn't work! The SFW/NSFW dichotomy allows people to marginalize subjects they don't want to face or talk about into "NSFW" where they become filthy untouchable pariahs. The idea of making certain ideas or people or subjects "not safe" is going to fuck with people, even on a subconscious level.

Social Media, the internet, websites in general, it's like they have active hate and contempt for their end users, because as someone who is supposedly their prime target demo, they have made their services too frustrating, patronizing, and difficult for me to use. I was an IT SysAdmin for many years for fuck's sake, how can they design something so hostile even I don't feel comfortable using it?!

anyways, my sincere thanks comrade for reading this far and for letting me vent this somewhere. I know it's kind of a cringe rant, but at least I know on hexbear the posters are (mostly) actual real people with flesh and blood.

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

When I was young, I spent a lot of time on a practically pre-historic version of Second Life called Active Worlds, where you could build things and it had a basic scripting language and model format. I made friends there (because I couldn't in real life) and they were cool, one of them got me into programming. That turned into an obsession for me, and a career. I wrote scripts, bots, built my own clones of the app ... I was like 14, lol. I wonder where those friends are today.

Lately, I've been watching videos about VRChat and Resonite, and Resonite especially looks really similar, but ... I don't want to go online. I don't want to put my creations on to someone else's computer, or risk being a subject of the 4chan kiwifarms mob just for existing, or think about how much data collection is happening behind the scenes of these "free" products, or how it can be taken away any time with no accountability. So, I have very little interest anymore.

I quit social media years ago. Even when I had a Reddit account, I didn't post, because of the "site culture" there. I work for a big tech company. Last time someone showed up in person (with a resume), they locked the elevator so that no one could walk in anymore without a key fob. I want to write good code that's not at all like what you're having to deal with, but I get blocked by "business concerns." My next struggle is going to be trying to implement the WCAG 2.1 standards in our apps without destroying my carefully maintained relationships with our designers (read: contrast removers and font shrinkers). But, I spend most of my day trying to figure out what to do with myself because the people above me either don't have any idea what my team should be doing, or they're not saying, or they're getting ready to get rid of the entire tech department. I'm just glad we secretly banned generative AI from use, because while it can't replace us and the complexity of our work, it sure can make me laid off.

I'm one of those white collar, work-from-home types that you mentioned (although I work more than 3 days a week, I'm posting now while watching my work computer and wondering when I'm going to be unblocked on a supposedly critical migration for a project I'm not responsible for). I'm so grateful to be able to work from home. When I get frustrated with lack of clarity, I can keep it in until the end of the meeting and let it out and no one knows. I don't have to get COVID every month from commuting to an office, nor do I have to deal with sensory issues like sounds/sights/smells of roads/transit. I can use a weighted blanket without needing to explain to anyone (or carry the damn thing in a backpack) and if I pick my face too hard (I'm working on this one) I can just turn off my camera. And, when no one tells me how to use my time ... I can watch YouTube videos. I can pace and complain at my partner about new bullshit "security" requirements or stupid requests or being asked to fill out critical reports and decide timelines at 4pm on a Friday ("oh, I'd give you more notice, but the CTO just told me this was required..."). I wouldn't have a job if it weren't like this, but it wasn't always like this; I used to be an office every-dayer, but luckily I had my back to a wall, a big desk, and a privacy barrier to help me focus, and I was only responsible for writing code, instead of managing.

I'm probably autistic, and I have been a computer toucher my whole life; it's been my #1 passion. It makes me feel alive to build a PC, or to fiddle with some new technology, or to get something that "shouldn't" be done working, and the doubters give me strength (next project: VR on Linux). But when I think about the world we have today on the Internet, compared to the world from when I was a tiny egg and what I expected the future to be like, I want to cry. We all know how it got like this, but that doesn't make me feel better.

Hexbear is a light in the darkness for me. I didn't post seriously ever on Facebook, or YouTube, or Google+, or Reddit, or even MySpace, but I'll post here, because I feel like you all understand me.

edit: lol, how poetic, this is my 1-year anniversary on the bear site