United States | News & Politics

There are basically no consequences for lying and making shit up. Not for normies trying to grift on TikTok and YouTube, and not even for alleged "professionals". Politico falls into that vague category of "blogger" or entertainment writing about politics. So does Fox News, who famously said "it's news entertainment, not news" when questioned on their truthfulness, asserting that they could fictionalize as they please while still calling themselves News.

Basically, the forever excuse is something like: it's just entertainment, you can't expect us to be all tellin the truth, that's not the job we're doing, oh my gaw, you are so unreasonable. Do your own research, and we're off the hook.

There's next to no danger of litigation, and there are heavy consequences for failing to bait clicks consistently. So that's their god, making sure there's enough traffic. They worship that. Everything else is secondary.

That's how so much journalism has devolved pretty badly into just kinda posting other people's Tweets.

There are consequences for using other people's IP, especially music, but zero consequences for falsehood or just doing the job in such a half-assed fashion that it's basically filler material. Then the dummies all dutifully pass the filler around the internet and everyone just reads the headline.

I don't know if you thought maybe moving to Lemmy would get you away from that, but it won't. It's bigger than Lemmy, and it's systemic. So it doesn't matter at all what an individual Lemmy admin's stance is, they're also victim to the same wind that blows this bullshit in our door. They can't control it either.

The average person has to take a step back and realize that, especially if you are middle-aged online and remember the old days, well, everything that brought you here is gone. This place - the internet as a whole - is no longer empowering for normal people, and the modern internet is just as exploitive and one-sided as television because all of it wants to be television, which was phenomenally profitable, and still is. It's worse, because at least television shows had decent budgets for their fictions. The modern internet just delivers shameless lies on cheap platforms at unprecedented speed, and you're lucky if they have eyeshadow on. It's "fiction" when they get caught and need to deflect responsibility, it's "the truth!" when they want attention, and this always works for them, so that's the new meta.

So don't waste time railing about Politico's weak journalism, understand that all of these socials are just the new smoking habit, and even though everyone is doing it in restaurants with their phone out like it's normal, it's time to go. It's nasty, it stinks, and it probably manages to cause cancer somehow. Work on breaking the habit of social media in all its forms, because all it's going to do from here on out is shovel straight lies into your eye sockets and demean you as a lesser person for protesting in any way. You get to clap and cheer and engage, as an inferior audience. That's it.

"You gotta respect the hustle" isn't an opinion, it's a command. It's saying that you don't have the right to do anything else, like question the "creator" who is trying to make money at everyone's expense with pure grift and straight up crowd pleasing lies. Nah, it's fine if that fucks you. You are obligated to respect the hustle, but it doesn't need to respect you.

You can protest my opinion, but the part I will stand by is that socials are the new smoking and have to go. Anything that's still good about the internet will tend to be independent of any social media, which is not "the internet" despite people calling it that. That website full of legit information that you want to point at is not a social media site, also nobody knows it exists except you and 5 other people. Go ahead and keep using that site if you want, though, that's fine. The more we use the "not social media" internet, the better off we'll all be. NASA's website is very nice, you should browse it.

Social media is a bad habit and it will take time to break, so it's best to think of weaning yourself off social media as a New Year's resolution, work on getting the time you spend online down until it's close to zero. Otherwise, you lose, basically.

No, TikTok is not the problem. They are all the problem. The entire paradigm is the problem, don't get caught acting like the different cigarette brands matter, it's all cancer.

For the record, I've heard that the next big thing in mainstream use is just group chats and other things that allow people to socialize in private without corporate controls and unwanted randoms commenting on everything. That's the future. That's all anybody wanted. You aren't quitting the expensive infrastructure, keep using that. You're quitting the 5 websites full of bullshit that everyone consumes, we don't actually need those at all, any more than you need a billboard to use the highways.

As a last thought, understand that the reason it all feels so bad lately is that the normal people have all been leaving for private spaces without any long-winded Lemmy posts that nobody will read to act as a warning. So what's left is grifters talking to grifters reposting grifters, forever. If you aren't making money here, you seriously have to go. This place isn't for us anymore.