You can still have your dumb username. We just need to make sure you’re not a child or a Russian. Alternatively, we could also just wait for authoritarianism to make social media completely illegal or unusable. That’s our current track.

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Jordan Peterson was making 50k a month on Patreon when he flipped his shit in 2016. His videos were unmonetized. Similarly, creators are very vulnerable to audience capture.

If we get rid of advertising on YouTube they’d adopt a subscription model which would suffer the exact same fate.

I’m telling you, easiest thing is to keep kids out. There’s just no reason for kids to be on Instagram and for foreign agitators to be using social media pretending to be Americans.

Apparently not. Right wing radicalization has all but won worldwide. It’s clear we can’t have nice things. Maybe we can save the smaller platforms? I’m open to other ideas, personally.

There’s a big difference between a sexist defense of Taylor Swift by an ignorant fan (much as men might react to the news that red meat is carcinogenic), and the hyperbolic reactionary paranoia that everything about masculinity is under attack by a woke feminist Marxist mob, which is what Jordan Peterson claims.

Honestly, you kinda said it yourself. The whole “woke” phenomenon doesn’t exist in real life. It’s a purely online reactionary movement. The young men I work with have zero issues; they live their lives in peace. Then they get online and are told by the manosphere and red pill communities that everyone hates men and that being masculine is bad and all kinds of other UNTRUE crap that has nothing to do with reality.

I’m not saying young men aren’t struggling. They are, don’t get me started. I’m saying that the whole game of gender wars is happening exclusively online; it’s mostly imaginary; and it’s toxic as fuck.

Sure, atheism was a big online movement in the 2010 era, but it was co-opted in 2015 by the “intellectual dark web,” from Sam Harris to Joe Rogan and the Weinstein fuckheads. That’s when things really started to get bad.

The atheist movement was already fizzling out after the death of Hitchens a few years earlier, and was then metastasizing into something ugly (as you said, video games, anti woke bullshit), until it was eventually subsumed by reactionaries like Jordan Peterson, who burst onto the scene with his crypto-Christian nonsense. Joe Rogan started to get more and more conspiretarded, and the rest is history.

Anyway, the YouTube alt-right pipeline is a well researched and documented phenomenon and when I have to spend all day arguing with 15 year olds about why Andrew Tate sucks, please take my word for it, they need to be kept off of social media. They’re too stupid and vulnerable.

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Nope. The radicalization is a global phenomenon that started in 2016, coinciding perfectly with the rise of the online manosphere and red-pill movement.

Let’s research the effects of social media on teenagers before making up our minds. As for anonymity on public forums — maybe on unpopular websites, we can keep that up, but for the big ones where everyone congregates, we tried anonymous trolling for 20 years and, as a result, every democracy is dying. We can’t maintain civilization without shared space of public knowledge, and that has been severely degraded by trolls and foreign agitators.

Yes, correct. Congratulations on understanding the basic premise of this discussion.

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Yes, probably. We’d get rid of the 90% of content that’s just Chinese and Russian trolls, for starters. It’ll also lower the temperature of discussions.

Anonymity on social media is how we got here. You can have anonymity elsewhere on the web. Wanna post on instagram comments? You shouldn’t be anonymous.

Amazing news, honestly. First ray of hope for the future of humanity I’ve seen for as long as I can remember. Ideologically, things have been spiraling out of control with the amount right wing and authoritarian misinformation.

Notice how 11 year olds aren’t making bank accounts? It’s actually very easy to enforce age-restricted access online; more to your point, the US just doesn’t do so. Which will be our downfall as a generation raised on YouTube and instagram just hit voting age and overwhelmingly chose Donald Trump.

We can’t fix global warming, let alone anything else, if the trend of alt-right radicalization of an entire generation continues — already a 30 point swing in just a decade, as evidenced by this last election. It’s a global phenomenon. There is simply no reason why a child should be on YouTube or Instagram or TikTok. And btw, it’s extremely easy to enforce, because in Australia they’ll just fine the corporation for every infraction. Camera + ID = problem solved.

I thought maybe you were in China. Damn, looks like you’re just a moron.