Category: Rants Page 1 of 2

There is very few things, bordering upon zero, that would make me want to rejoin any social media account.

What joy I might ever get from them I get from just doing a little random browsing. And the way reddit is going, they will have blocked that as soon as they can figure out how to block it AND still sell the data on the side.¹

Can’t turn your users into blood for the blood gods without pretending to care about the children, or some shit.

BUT, one thing that might inspire me make at least a “DumbStuff1849” style account is the ability to auto-block everyone who has marked their profile hidden. All posts. All comments. Hell, even all the upvotes and engagement. Let me see the “non-hidden-profile-reddit” stats only.

I’m not going to post anything so they can see my profile all they want. I don’t care. Or I can make a half dozen alts. Like the old days.

I like user privacy. I largely demand user privacy. This feels like something else. At least in practice.

A lot of the weirdest stuff comes out of those accounts. People generating 100k+ karma per month and you see their post and it’s just something racist, nationalist, sexist, or…just kind of this odd milquetoast “Yeah, things are shit, what about it?!” thing that reddit does so well.

You might know what I mean, where you complain about anything or brag about anything or just feel joy or hate or anything about anything and there are strings of comments about how it doesn’t matter, it all sucks, and you know what…you are a piece of shit for having feelings on it. The default state of reddit being nowadays, it seems.

The more obvious that sort of thing is, the more likely it will be a hidden profile. 200k karma. 3 months old. Moderator of two low-quality subs that often smash through to the front page despite posting nothing that isn’t some general “aren’t things stupid now” kind of vaguepost. AND WHY? Why do the bots care? I can at least get why the [REDACTED] guys pretending to be American-hating European teens might want to stay hidden so folks don’t realize they are not from a dozen different countries at the same time.

Then you add in the those that hide their posts and to mark the profile “mature” so you have to be signed in, having 18+ posts allowed, and then just see you can’t actually see anything.

Look, I know. You have reasons to want to hide your profile. That’s fine. I’m not judging you.

You do you, boo.

To clarify, I mean the way a lot of social media sites are actively trying to stop people from being able to even browse for any length of time without having an account. For reasons. ↩︎

And another one…

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-10-05

In Internet, Rants

Current Musical Mood: Mrs. Green Apple’s POPS [LGT: YT Music].

UPDATE (2026-Oct-06)

Since I posted this, Renegade Studios has responded and offered folks who felt caught off-guard a chance for a refund. Also, quite a few folks who had a more positive response have joined the thread and pointed out some things I talked about here: the shipping was transparent, etc.

Again, my primary complaint is the timeline (I knew it was coming, had planned roughly accordingly, and was still caught a bit off-guard by the timing).

I’ll leave the discussion about if people could have saved money for certain tiers by waiting and ordering later. Probably. Almost definitely. I don’t think I could have saved money since I was all-in. Still, there will be some.

Original Post

I talked about, not that long ago, withdrawing from crowdfunding. It’s been brewing. And, in the immortal words of DJ Khaled: there’s been another one.

Now, before I continue, I do want to say that I do not actually hold Renegade Studios culpable for [most of] this. In fact, without burying the lede, here is an extremely relevant screenshot of a pair of graphics still up on the Backerkit page that, as far as I know, has not been altered from the time period when I backed it:

Shipping is relatively high and relatively variable. And it tells you that taxes (VAT) will be applied at a later date. This was honest, upfront, and for shipping broadly accurate.

Here is where I do hold Renegade Studios more culpable: I got an email this weekend that said, “We have just now added the total of shipping and VAT to your pledge and you’ll be charged Sunday/Monday,” and if you glance across the Belgium line you can get an idea that we are talking about at least double digits. +VAT. Because there was a glitch that caused the prices to not show up until around 48 hours ago and shipping was charged, for me, around 8 hours ago.

The minimum time to prep should have been one week.

The screenshots at the top of the page show some of the responses to this. Thread is up to 285 messages. Some are repeats. Some are in support. Most are complaints.

Folks were finding out they were going to be charged on Monday (message actually said Sunday but my bank was waiting until Monday) for an amount that we found out on Saturday (or Friday, depending on time zones).

That is a problem. Even if RS was very upfront about what it was — and shipping was technically cheaper than above (maybe around 10-15% cheaper, give or take).

And for people in the US it almost sounds like they could have pre-ordered it from Amazon, gotten a fair number of the items at roughly the same price, and saved on shipping at least if they weren’t going all in. Even the Renegade Studios website might give free shipping over certain amounts.

I’ll let others do the math.

THIS IS ALL TO SAY that it just gets added to the stack of the many ways I’ve seen confusion, dismay, and issues crop up even with otherwise open and honest companies handling crowdfunding when said crowdfunding could have been pre-orders through existing storefronts.

It’s not on them, but I miss the days when crowdfunding felt a bit more energetic rather than expected.

Choices…

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-09-30

In Rants, Speculations

modified from *Photo by Liosha Shyp on Unsplash*

Jason K. Pargin does a daily vlog where he reacts to things, seemingly mostly from reddit, and it can be a fun watch to hear him discuss stuff. A couple of weeks ago he covered one of those classic Engagement Bait Would-You-Rathers:

In case you have no interest in clicking that link or for some reason cannot, the choice is… WOULD YOU RATHER

Get $2 million USD (tax free) instantly OR
Go back to 10-years-of-age with your current knowledge and have to relive your life?

Pargin argues, as I would almost immediately, that you want to take the money and not look back.

In the comments, though, several people bring up some of the classic reasons why someone might want to live their life again:

…you have nothing you really care to hold on to…

…you lost someone important and want to see them again…

…there’s some deep trauma somewhere…

…you have lost so many important things that re-rolling the dice just makes sense because you might get another shot.

And even reading those I would say that unless you are talking about a single, specific trauma that you could truly impact by redoing something…most of the reasons don’t necessarily strike me as actually compelling.

This is based on a few assumptions by myself:

Since you are retaining all your memories, you are taking the lived trauma with you even if you “fix” it.
There is absolute NO reason to assume everyone around you would make the same choices. In other words, if you assume everyone will be beholden to your will while you fuddle in the wonderland of your own past mistakes, you are being far too self-centered and that’s me being polite.
- e.g., your ex-wife you want to try again with might not even be there at the same bar and might have hooked up with her high school sweetheart.
- Even something like your favorite park to stare into the distance as you hate yourself might not be built in this new timeline.
Children, jobs, and everything that requires a monumental amount of chance and random luck to make work well are all just gone as something like a continuation of above but a very important one.
If you have a lifetime of regrets and poor decisions, going back to “fix them” probably won’t work out in your favor any more so than just moving forward. You will still have to endure everything that led to those mistakes in the first place except now you are in the funhouse mirror version of them all.
And…finally, depending on a lot of factors, your life at 10-years-old is a fairly powerless one even with future knowledge.

You know what, no, fuck it. I’ll one up my second point. If you are going back in time and rewriting EVERYONE’S choices just so you can get dumped again for being a selfish bastard, you are a terrible person.

Jerk.

Take the money, shithead.

Withdrawing even further from crowdfunding… aka, thanks for the marketing stunt

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-09-12

In Internet, Rants

Current musical mood: Syayos’s Anthem 1.1.

*from photo by Madeline Liu on Unsplash*

Last November, on my RPG/Solo-play blog, I posted about setting limits on my crowdfunding this year. I simultaneously spent too much on campaigns but also kind of hit the goal (backed fewer, paid more for the ones I did back). A partial success, in other words.

A few brought instant joy and have maintained that energy.

A few others: exact opposite.

Most campaigns I backed had very mixed results as to their delivery this year. Some of it was very much on them. Some of it was on the vast ocean of international shipping changes and charges (and the double whammy of changes to charges).

Some of it was obvious business strategies to treat Kickstarter and Backerkit as a lower responsibility store front to keep pushing hype.

The long and short of it can be summed up as:

I don’t need your extra crap designed to trigger FOMO
It is generally cheaper for me to buy it at full retail through a shipper who can handle international shipping

This past June had me me paying €30 in customs fees for a £12 deck of cards. Not like a fancy deck of cards with handwritten unique and bespoke fonts. Just…a deck of cards with some branding. Kind of stuff you’d expect to be for a tenner.

I had one book show up and thanks to the jackasses handling shipping (€40 I spent on it, including fees being supposedly pre-paid) writing it out as a “gift” worth only $0.01 I had to pay an additional €40. That’s €80 extra for a €40 book.

It sours things.

Many of the small projects I like to back are frankly economically untenable for me to get any physical tier in their current forms. Some creators are leaning hard on POD and I like that when I can print it either in country or through companies who will take the fees up front so I don’t have to pay extra fees later.

Shipping can still be steep, and quality takes a hit, but it’s doable.

There are also plenty of upper/mid-tier projects. Those can be nice because I know the product will be good, the shipping will be handled, the add-ons will be of quality….and I can buy everything I want from those campaigns from a store without going through crowdfunding tomfoolery. It’s ironic that those are the best ones to back for customer satisfaction.

Which brings me to a third bullet point which I held back, and it’s the most damning one for my own continued participation:

It is obvious that crowdfunding as a whole no longer aligns with my personal philosophy of what it means

This morning I got recommended a Youtube video with a name not quite but essentially: “Our Dream Is Dead.” I absolutely refuse to share any part of it [besides one graphic at the top of this post] but picture something like below for a thumbnail only he made himself up to look a bit like a clown (?) and slapped the word FAIL on it and you will get the point:

*Photo by Christian Buehner on Unsplash*

Over the video he goes on to explain a lot of things, mostly about how he is a great marketer for crowdfunding and how much he understands how to game Kickstarters and how, despite this, how much this dream campaign ultimately failed.

Dead, Space Pilgrims, dead in the water.

Screenshots of conversions and the lack thereof. Actively mentioning board game content creators for not being good marketing. Talking about Substacks and how to build marketing lists and, this cannot be stressed enough, how the man talking about a “failed” Kickstarter campaign knows how to market Kickstarter campaigns. All the while showing quality, PR-team-approved shots of the game in question.

wink, Space Pilgrims, wink

If you haven’t guessed the twist: the Kickstarter has actually fully funded within days of launching and still has 20+ days to go.

The video is marketing. How much is debatable. I feel like a lot but (see edit below) the creators are saying it was mostly accidental. There feels like some cynicism, here. It was not a “Day 3 and we are 70% there!” but “Day 3 and our studio is doomed.”

Marketing released before the campaign had succeeded but shown to me and many others after. Turning Kickstarter into GoFundMe but the thing on life support is the dream.

People trying to point this out in the comments are either being ignored or, in one case, having it explained to them how if a Kickstarter doesn’t fund in the first 24 hours it is a failure.

No matter how cynical this is, though, versus how honest: it really demonstrates how crowdfunding has long been digested and eaten by the exact same language it was meant to fix.

Pitting content creators against content enjoyers.

Thank you for helping to make it really clear to me how much I don’t care about participating in the guilting-customers into liking, sharing, subscribing, backing, and buying game.

Parasocial bullshit is destroying content creation more and more everyday.

To the rest of you, with only a couple of exceptions, I’ll see your stuff after it gets released and people come up with reviews that you didn’t pay them to write.

I hope it makes it. I truly do. I’m sure there is an audience out there somewhere for it.

Now I’m wondering how long until someone Kickstarts a campaign to market Kickstarter campaigns. Probably been done, hasn’t it?

EDIT/ADDITIONAL

Around the same time I was typing up my post someone else was calling them out for the “stunt” and the creator feedback actually makes the core issue sound much worse:

Third, we do not think we set [a dishonest] target; we set the minimum funding goal, which, of course, was expected to be surpassed quickly. If “funding goal” were the final objective for campaigns on Kickstarter these days, the campaigns would end once they reached it. But the algorithm here rewards those who raise 1000% of their minimum funding goal, ranking them higher. That explains why almost every campaign (regardless of their status and size) sets goals like this. Even in your list of backed projects, we can see many examples like these. They just succeeded in raising these “1000%,” so it is not presented to them as a sin. At least, we see it this way.

Even if this takes some disdain off the eyes of the creators, it just shows that this style of crowdfunding is a dead endeavor. Because people backing a project but not getting what they backed because the costs weren’t covered?

That’s a terrible practice.

I’m not giving the people who made the video a complete pass, though. I saw the video.

Today’s Conspiracy Theory: Election Years and “New Maps”

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-09-10

In Rants, The Algorithm

I’m going to not wade into the fact that you are almost definitely hearing about post-partum depression a lot because it is a mid-term election year in the United States (though you most likely are). In 2024, there was a certain track meet. 2020 I don’t even have to talk about.

Let’s just say certain patterns persist.

The less emotionally draining side of this same conspiratorial coin — though frustrations do run deep — is people trying their absolutely hardest to Both Sides™ the UN’s adoption of Equal Earth Projection maps.

Just today, this post popped up like so many others on Reddit as of late…

Obviously, I highlighted the text to bend it to my argument but the fact that the poster [whose name I kept in if you want to look some of their stuff, which does include some quite interesting map discussions besides this] felt to describe this in terms of victimhood just shows how people are baking the argument into the pretense of a statement. Begging the question or some such legal term. The mind boggles. Et cetera.

“Biggest victims…” Lord save us from Redditors. Could have just said something like “have the largest distortions in Atlantic centric versions of the maps” or whatever.

I legit feel that certain algorithmic forces are trying to poke this bear and ride the US-defaultism nature of sites like Reddit, Youtube, Facebook, etc to try and convince you that you should feel victimized by a map. Maybe I am just really unlucky. Who knows.

OP is also just wrong. Here’s what the above would look like if they had used the Pacific centered version of the map (which honestly gets more landmasses right so I don’t mind it, even as an Euro-located person, sorry Greenland/Iceland).

Heck, several places already use projections that are closer to to Equal Earth than Mercator. Go look at stuff like Winkel Tripel and Robinson Projections.

Good for all the people learning this past week that not everyone uses the same Atlantic-centered Mercator map (even if they end up preferring what they know). It is a nice moment to find out how other people do such things.

For the record, my favorite is probably something like Dymaxion or Hao’s Projection. Pole focused maps make the various landmasses much more interesting to me.

Also, we are now in the era where digital maps and the ability to have multiple projections at once makes this very, very moot. Different maps for different tasks.

A phenomenon that worries me though it might not actually exist…

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-08-12

In Internet, Rants, The Algorithm

*Photo by* *Mohammad Alizade* on Unsplash+

Have you ever been bothered by something which might not exist but also probably does? Something that is out there, perhaps intangibly, but its inchoate presence is felt like a fear more than actually touched?

An asteroid drifting through space an AU away. Undoubtedly there, but maybe just never here?

I have a similar feel to the collective responses and comments across online forums, social media, and more or less any place with open comments.

This post is directly in response to a couple of crowdfunding campaigns I backed early last year which have this year run into delays largely due to variances in the whole global shipping market (especially for smaller creators). A fair percentage of the comments are relatively positive or positively constructive, maybe asking for a refund due to the delay.

Just, there are a lot that are oddly…passionate. I’m talking about, “This is your last warning, you will SEND ME MY BOOKS!,” type stuff. Sometimes across multiple paragraphs. This is the stuff publicly posted so I can only imagine the personal emails and such are worse. Saw a couple of exchanges where people went back a bit later to apologize for some of the things they said, but then there were newer comments where these delayed shippings were deeply emotional troubling to the commenter.

I get it, I really do, but delayed shipping due to 2025/2026 is not exactly a personal attack. Few things are. If there is one thing I need you to take away from this post, it is this:

The content creator most likely does not know you and despite the constant drive to content consumers towards parasocial relationships¹, virtually (even absolutely) nothing the creators do is aimed at YOU personally. Fact is, one step towards happiness is realizing how few people actually even know you exist. Start with those people.

It is also just a broad response to why I can’t quite stand getting back into any social circle on the internet as a whole for long.

This is not a new phenomenon. “Don’t read the comments!,” has been internet wisdom longer than many current internet users have been alive. Back 10-20 years ago I had multiple scripts and style overrides in place to essentially hide every comment section on every site I regularly visited.

It just also feels worse. There’s a flavor there that I cannot fully place or identify. But it bothers me.

Years ago, maybe decades ago now, there was a comment/forum section for AL.com² where posts were strangely deranged and strangely off-topic. A collection of ego-centric diatribes in which virtually any topic was an assault on their particular self and way of life. Museum having a new exhibition? Dozens of rants about how art erodes the community while eating up valuable taxpayer dollars and also their nephew saw a painting of a fish that was aesthetically unpleasing. Which might turn into a debate about best fishing spots and how BamaKid033 is mentally broken if he likes fishing on X River. New fried chicken restaurant? THEY are destroying property values in good Christian neighborhoods. Space and Rocket Museum getting a grant to help preserve some of their exhibits? I kid you not, the end of all goodness as we know it. This last one happened a few times.

It has been some time since those were in existence so I am just taking some broad swipes but, Space Pilgrims, I need you to understand they are only gently broad. I just dialed them up a tiny bit for effect (and also dialed down for palatability).³ These were regular commenters. Racist. Deeply political (especially, on AL.com, to the right-wing side). Paranoid. Snarky. You can tell they thought they were funny when posting it. Starting from an immediate stance of aggression and personal attacks. Simultaneously painting the commenter as both the victim and also the powerhouse of the known universe. “You will listen to me! I am tired of being used!”

Maybe now that I’m largely off social media and largely in my own sphere doing IRL projects it feels worse than it is, but it feels to me like the AL.com comment section has taken over the internet.

OR, to use a different but similarly timed example, remember how Rebecca Black and her mom paid money to make a fun video where it was just a bunch of kids having a blast being in a music video? And the internet decided that because they could see it that the video was somehow forced on them and people, including somewhat reputable musical journalists, felt the stupid need to comment on it? To attack children for a video that should have been seen by a few dozen people and be a fun, core memory?

The hatred towards Rebecca Black’s “Friday” should be studied as one of the dumbest moments in internet history and a lesson we absolutely did not learn.

I really don’t think the human race has caught up to the fact that the internet is by and large voluntary. I’m not sure, at this point, if we ever will.

I saw a video this past week where a person who posts regular videos-of-the-day to talk about fun topics — in other words, using Youtube kind of like it was first and for a long time used — just was discussing an odd thing he read on Reddit and there were multiple comments where people were angry about the existence of the video. It felt like the presence of that video in their subscription feed was an affront to them.

Find any article that is slightly negative — about veganism, Doctor Who, whatever, pick a topic — and then people coming out to comment in a kind of hateful, snarky tone is not precisely unexpected. Studies have shown how people are drawn to negativity in social media and online discourse. It is just the vibe feels… well, it’s a vibe.

Paranoid. Self-obsessed. Angry. Lacking thoughtfulness. Lacking respect. Personally wronged. Gleefully antagonistic. Raging against the dying of the light (which might not ever have existed, another fake fall from Eden). Victim and aggressor. And, perhaps most annoyingly, utterly convinced that a slightly humorous, snarky tone is the exact way to make them sound sane. Why is it always posted in a faux-humorous tone? Did Vine and X break us? That short form commentary must be cute and funny? Hell if I know.

To put it in another way, it is like we have regressed as a digital society. Because we are on our phones on our own couch, maybe we think the internet has come to our living rooms rather than us going to it? A generation of people being fed by food delivery drivers complaining about the decor of restaurants. A generation waiting for the AI bubble to pop and spending hours each day creating AI art to pass the time out of fear of boredom.

“We drove to the gym…” only it’s everything, everywhere. All at once, even.

You blend this with rampant positivity on the “other side” and it is maddening. Of course both being couched in various oft-repeated phrases that have been The Algorithm™ approved. Generally without personality.

Four blue hearts in a line or death threats with nothing in between. Where “mid” and “average” are active insults.

“Ahh gurl energy got me feeling some way…,” fucking indeed.

THEN, Space Pilgrims, then we add in the bots…

Something made worse by platforms driving creators to fake friendships and engagements in order to court people towards things like Patreons and Youtube Memberships. It is deeply gross. ↩︎
I’m not linking it because I don’t really like their new website but it is awfulllly trivial to figure out how to get to it if you want to see it. ↩︎
I had a friend who hung out on that forum who got involved in a MULTI-year MULTI-party bullying cycle where many members claimed other people were stalking them or trying to destroy their lives. It was…odd. ↩︎

It’s Helpful When They Tell How Much They Need You

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-06-06

In Internet, Rants, The Algorithm

Remember when Snopes would dig up “No, Facebook ain’t going to charge you, silly!” debunks every few years? Presumably to fish ad clicks from that elderly aunt scared she’s going to lose access to her favorite local knitting group.

What Snopes failed to disclose, there, is that the call was coming from inside the house.

The new proposal would offer European users two choices: continue using free versions of Instagram and Facebook with personalized ads, or pay for ad-free subscriptions. The changes would not affect Meta app users in other countries, including the U.S.

Now, you could argue — if you are a sycophant who thinks giving billionaires your personal data is a fair deal just so you can continue to doom-scroll instead of taking up useful hobbies and getting more sleep — that giving up personal data for “advertisements” is easy. And free.

And you might say even, “Sure, they will sell it to law enforcement to carry out mass surveillance on an unprecedented scale, but the doom-scrolling, Doug. You want me to just like…live with myself?”

But in their desperate push to devour more data to justify eco-crashing data centers being fast-tracked around the world, Meta has starting telling the same content creators that justify the existence of their entire site that…well…

Got to love it when Meta tells its users that their data is worth €5.99 – €7.99 [I’ve seen two different values, quoted] per month. That much, huh?

Sounds like a great backbone for a really big lawsuit to recoup all the stolen value from content creator’s hard work currently being funneled into AI-training machines.

Please Don’t Lie about Item Value when Fulfilling Kickstarters

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-04-23

In Rants

I got a text from UPS this evening that required me to click enough things that I was slightly convinced it was a scam for the longest time.

Turns out that a book I ordered through Kickstarter — at this point I am not naming-and-shaming because I’m going to assume honest mistake or software glitch — was shipped into Belgium with a reported value of $0.01.

Just in case someone was trying to outsmart the system, here’s a bonus fact for you: Customs officials aren’t stupid.

No one is spending $10-$20 + $10-20 in what should have been submitted as VAT charges just for a $0.01 item.

And that’s the story of how I had to use my phone to try and edit a screenshot of the reward and likely pay a +€20 customs up-charge¹ because no way they actually paid the VAT if they declared it for a penny [if they did, they drastically underpaid].

Anyhow, we’ll see what the next step is.

I’ll let the person who came up with the project know the exact specifics, no doubt.

To clarify, I’ll have to pay the VAT on the book and THEN a €20 processing fee, which together will likely come close to equaling the cost of the book once you factor in the shipping I already paid. ↩︎

Chewing on a Proper “Self-Hosted” Web-Sphere: Very Early Thoughts

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-04-07

In Internet, Rants, The Algorithm

It wasn’t technically Daniel Sell’s “How to Stop Jumping Ship” that made me start thinking about the topic of this post, but that is a linkable resource that has some of the information that has filtered into my brain space:

How To Stop Jumping Ship
08 Mar, 2026

Almost all of us have been on the internet long enough to have had one of our essential community hubs go flying off into oncoming traffic. MySpace, G+, Discord (world weary sigh)? Facebook and Shitter's decent into I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream? Dead and dying, the lot of them, and they take what little community they generated down with them every bloody time. I'm tired of wasting energy on rebuilding community ties over and over again, it's not an especially good use of our time and it means that those of us who are most comfortable with, or benefit the most from, a fractured, chaotic wider community benefit and rise to the top. Behold, the world.

Important bit from slightly below that:

So I propose…we just toss it all in the bin and go back to the beginning. Blogs, newsletters, IRC, mailing groups, and, sure why not, Usenet, go nuts…These things are time tested, functional even in the face of overwhelming lack of interest from the general internet, and are, most importantly, utterly unbreakable. A specific blog, irc etc etc might disappear, but that won’t take anything besides that one facet of a larger whole with it.

What actually started it was an email which was sent out to the Melsonia email list. Same sort of information, a bit more pithy:

Do You Have A Blog Yet?

'Cos you should. Social media is poisonous, drains all your finer impulses. Wastes energy you could spend being happy. So I made a webring and a blogroll to make me happy.

How To Be Happy Too
Go make a blog now. Even if all you do is post your campaign notes up on it, I wanna see it.
Join a webring. Yes, like in the 90s. People will find your blog and you don't have to do anything other than be you.
You can even add a blogroll to it, just like in the Google Plus times.
Post. Read. Post. Read. Delete social media. Post. Read.

Really, it's that easy. You don't need to be good or popular or cool. If anything, they're the worst people to have blogs. The uncooler the better, I say.

Pretty much everything in that image is in the above linked post, though one addition is very much in-line with the stuff I talk about here, which I’ll quote:

Social media is poisonous, drains all your finer impulses. Wastes energy you could spend being happy.

He includes a link to Bear Blog which I won’t include because I’m sure it is fine but this is not an endorsement of a particular product over the other and at a glance, the software seems to violate a couple of principles I’ll talk about in a minute.

If anything, this post is absolutely an anti-endorsement of anything that might be considered a product. Websites/Apps-as-products are killing us. Killing the earth. Killing creativity.

I Digress All Over The Algorithm

One caveat creeps up almost immediately: Sells and I are at least partially concerned about two different things. He seems to be largely talking about (a) moving towards a platform where ideas exist outside The Platform® and are not beholden to the constant drive towards enshittification and profits AND (b) coming up with something that trumps the Algorithm Class’s version of a good time. I like both of those things, both fit strongly in my Reclaim Ownership concept I have been discussing here or there on the blog, but I think for me there is something else brewing in my brain:

Stop treating the Algorithm Class like your friend: you are a commodity to them and the current internet is designed to take resources from you and feed your resources into their bank accounts [money they use to take more freedoms from you].

We are witnessing the death of ownership and are being manipulated into thinking we need them. In 2026, The Algorithm tells you you are bored, that you are unhappy, that you are worthless without The Algorithm, that your replacement worth is derived from the dopamine you get from participating in a rich-person’s profit margin. And we believe it…

Come and share! Like and subscribe! Upvote! Get your five-year streak!

We live in a world where we give third-party companies all the content that makes the platform worthwhile but then you give up increasing rights to your own creations as they rapidly change the rules. They don’t even ask nicely. They just have your college friends’ content being held hostage and you are lonely.

AI amoebae demanding access to our creations. Less control over what we can share versus keep. Free-fall user unfriendly design based around selling digital baubles. Digitally engineered loneliness and disease. All the other terrible aspects forced upon you while specialists in behavioral modeling outsource whitepapers to tell the owners of the servers how to maximize profits from your work.

It’s Big Tobacco all over again. Paying experts to make things more addicting while telling us they are just giving us a product we really want and rumors of your own addiction are greatly exaggerated.

With the bonus that it’s not only our creations, but often the core of our friends and family groups being held for ransom. “Keep smoking and you can keep talking to your mom back home!”

THEN, they take extra data from you and sell it.

It’s like the worst possible version of the peer-review process. That process has volunteer writers being edited/scored by volunteer editors and volunteer peer-review committees. Then the output is given freely to scientific publishers who generate substantial profit off making it available. With the consequence of not publishing can include missing out on tenure and promotion.

Only instead of contributing to the ever-expanding world of valuable science, we are simply trapped in a loop where in leaving a billion-dollar money maker we have no control over ends up with being branded as anti-social and distant. No party invites without social media. Missing out on collector’s items by our favorite brands because people on X got first dibs. How in the hell do we know what Florida Man is doing this week unless we spend hours each week doomscrolling through made up posts about Florida Man?

“I can’t leave Instagram, what about all my friends!?,” we say over and over as our data is stolen and the money generated from it is spent to lobby for war crimes. Taking your joy of expression and turning into AI slop generated in data centers so environmentally unfriendly they are altering ecosystems while unwriting decades of copyright and intellectual property law.

Don’t say, “If you are not paying for it, you are not the customer.” That’s tired. Sad. Ignorant. You can pay for it all day long and to The Algorithm Class you are just money and never enough.

Besides, you are very much paying for it and its the most expensive purchase you have ever made.

Like cats, there is no free social media. We are collectively paying billions of dollars to avoid going to bed on time. Our tax money spent to subsidize The Algorithm Class. In return, The Algorithm Class buying out a large portion of our governments for their needs. Every lost ecosystem and plot of land to build data centers. We are spending generational wealth indirectly to look at ads on Facebook.

And the saddest thing is that for all this money, you and your creations are worthless to them individually. Sold for pennies. A penny today so they can buy congressfolk to not pass privacy laws and make a dollar tomorrow.

That’s the thanks you get. Being sold for $0.03 on loop with no protections just so hackers can get your national ID numbers and ruin your credit while the data hoarders say, “oops,” and face no consequences.

There is no ceiling that will stop folks from generating profit off of your hard work and there are very few protections to keep you from suffering the laziness of their vibe-coding neglect.

I DIGRESS.

An Early Thought Experiment Towards Doug’s Ideal Web-Sphere

The point is that reading Sells’ post made me think about how hard it would be for me to actually get any of my friends and family on board with creating a web-ring or similar. I could probably get two or three signed up but the siren call of the wide-open for-sale web would hang there. We are two decades into the social-media-and-search-engine revolution that has stripped us of a properly free internet.

This means this is all in the heady realms of though experiment, so taking that as an act of freedom rather than problem, I was thinking of things I would like to see if I could back and shove Myspace off a cliff.

An actual emphasis on creator ownership, not just virtue signaling. No caveats or catch-EULAs where you give up the rights.
An emphasis on self-hosting or hosting done by entities where you pay them real world money to host your data and in exchange they treat it as hands off for any other use unless they pay you to use your data.
Related to above, but you are free to take your data whenever and wherever you please. Zero retention in a third party and absolutely no “a third party sold your stuff to another third party that has no contract with you explicitly” unlike the current real world problem.
“Censorship” and moderation are generated at the hands of the end-user through tools easy to read and use.
No advertisements unless the content creator is getting paid a substantial portion of the fee [let’s say 80+%] and at their behest [yes, this means content creators will have to pay to post stuff].
Multiple media streams — text, microblogging, video, audio — can be handled by servers optimal to them, each chosen by the content creator.
No addiction-behavior models. Discovery layer predicated by the needs and desires of the end user rather by a creation of any sort of presumed force.
In fact, there would be optimally many many end-user tools that have their own approach to discovery and moderation.
Anonymity vs ID exposure decided by content creators.
Absolutely NO Upvotes and, perhaps most controversial, probably NO comments posted to your own data stream [they would be posted to the commenter’s data stream]. The idea is to break apart the Skinner Box variation of the internet [as described here or there by Cory Doctorow]. You will not get algorithmically friendly shiny cookies. You share data and information and art: others can read it and watch it and enjoy it. SEO is the mind killer. SEO will pass right through you. When SEO is gone, all that remains will be memes.

In other words, something where people create content streams through many different self- or creator-focused-hosted methods and something — webrings, RSS/Atom feeds, metadata chunkers, your own eyes and fingers — will handle this and there will be no fake digital commons generating billions of dollars in revenue as long as you keep playing ball and getting your grandma to sign up for an account.

No lectures from AI-generated moderators about how you need to tweak your content to maximize conversions.

Hell, there would be no conversions. Death to the trust-economy. No product of The Algorithm Class has earned the right to addict us and constrain us to the information/data/consumption-complex they have chosen.

You decide what you want to read and no one knows what you do with it but you.

The Tower of Babbling Replies

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-04-01

In Internet, Rants

There are a few “Explain the Joke” subreddits on reddit and most, probably all, are trash-tier karma farming circle jerks. Just absolutely awful.

The same easy-as-shit jokes or rage-bait memes are posted over and over with people showing up in the thousands to comment. Sure, some of the replies are just bots joining in on the blatant karma manipulation. Which is fitting since it is likely mostly bots posting them. Bots and people trying to farm a few easy k karma to kickstart a reddit account so they can then sell it to bots.

In fact, you could probably automate a script to block every person who ever makes a post in one and trim a fair number of crap from your reddit experience.

Some of the replies are just going to be people who can’t help correcting others or sharing their thoughts, even when the same posts show up once a week or less. It’s weaponized tribalism versus default redditor behavior.

It is especially painful because posts from a couple/three of these subreddits frequently drift to the popular feed which dirty little no-accounts like me are forced to browse without extensive bookmarks: which might be the point. Let the shit float so people are forced to make an account just to have the tools to block them. Eh. Every day is a gift.

HOWEVER, you do occasionally get gold despite the massive attempt by gravity to pull sanity off a cliff. Like this one asking about the Tower of Babel made in [not-]LEGO [look at me violating my “never link to reddit or any social media” rule].

Pardon the proximity to a pun, but my brother in Christ, what could we possibly explain? I can get folks posting references to obscure-but-knowable things with a bit of a gate-keep to even knowing search terms. Sure.

Things like the Tower of Babel might not be universally known but when the immensely searchable words are right there….

At any rate, like all good circle jerking on reddit, the scant pretense of actual joy is people running with it and the replies are full of people posting answers [some on point] in various languages….and some people then trying to argue about the true meaning of Babel. Which is like the true meaning of Dollar Store kitten calendars. It’s aliens, my man. All aliens. All the way down.