The internet didn’t kill counterculture – you just won’t find it on Instagram

That's the one that made me laugh out loud.

And I don't think of it as a personal preference: async information exchange is objectively less intrusive, which is why it should be preferred when possible (which isn't always the case, because it's also objectively less fluent). Unless you are some girl I'm mindlessly infatuated with, I'm probably not waiting for you call all day long, so when you are forcing me to interrupt whatever I was doing, because you are calling to say something as simple as "so, you asked me about X the other day, the answer is yes" or to ask a simple question without any follow up (or, my favourite: a courtesy call with no actual information exchange): I'll be polite, of course, but I'll hate you.

If you want to ask or tell me something short: send me a text, I'll read and respond in 5 minutes, so that I don't have to interrupt what I'm doing right now. If it isn't short and you are too lazy to type: no problem, send me a voice-message. If you just want some chit-chat: ask me to go grab a beer (via text). If it's complicated and we'll need some back-and-forth, we should call each other, but I'll appreciate if you'll send a text/voice first, asking me to talk over the phone about X. And only if it's URGENT you call me right away. And because it's just sensible thing to do, when you are suddenly calling me, I'm already assuming it's URGENT: in fact, that's the only reason to answer you when you are calling, and not to call back when I'm in the mood. So when it turns out that it really wasn't, you are already an asshole, even if I don't show it.

I like chat programs used as email - that is, non-real-time. I have lowered my anxiety a lot by realizing that texts are not realtime in my life 98% of the time, and to treat them accordingly: Checked on upon occasion. Don't stress about whether the person on the other end will be upset if you don't get back right away.

Planning something? Need someone right away? Set the expectation of response beforehand or just call them.

I don't exist at your beck and call. Text me and respect that I have a life beyond hanging on the telephone, or I don't care to distinguish you from the billions of autodialers who are the only ones still rude enough to make such demands on my time.

BTW, cute misspellings. Little jugs got big ears, I suppose.

I love texting. And email is basically texting.

I'm thinking of getting one of those wrist phones so I can voice-text everything.

MMMMM

I really hoped that Clubhouse would corral all the hardcore narcissists away from all other social media, but it's made them worse, they spend all their time on Twitter bragging about how they're on Clubhouse now. Pathetic.

I think I have seen the same argument about anime conventions. The idea is that a trend starts with a small group of passionate people, as things get bigger and more popular, followers arrive. Followers are not really passionate, they just jump on the bandwagon, but will leave and jump on another bandwagon as the thing gets less trendy. With the followers come people who will try to profit on them since they represent a sizable market. Among the "exploiters" are former members of the original group, who see a find a way to monetize their passion, taking advantage of their deep knowledge of the field.

So the idea that "people start to profit and the game is over" is mostly right, but the dynamic is more complex than just having a small number of people ruining it from everyone else.

And it is not all bad. While the community is less genuine, it is also more productive, if anything, just from the sheer numbers.

Which means, that even if they only want to be companies, they (unfortunately for all) indeed are the "social media" in some sense. Sometimes even borderline with "essential infrastructure".

Nonetheless, they do. Medium is the message and all that.

What you describe is simply the nature of a trend, it's happened with everything from modern Occupy movements to the teachings of Jesus. Something original and authentic becomes stale after it's been repeated a million times over.

The problem is with trends themselves, the original idea is authentic, but then it passes like a wave in the frenzy of a "trend".

I don't know that these would qualify as counter-culture or subculture, but they are free of marketing and advertising, and people are there because we have shared interests. The conversations are organic and not curated for us and we are isolated from anyone else we don't want to be part of that group.

So, my gut tells me that the younger generations are using Discord like people used IRC.

To be fair, I'm not saying that we should all ditch Reddit and only congregate on obscure message boards with maximum user limits; I'm simply saying that a place like a default subreddit should never be considered counter-cultural.

> Also, voting systems take care of a lot of this, because naked propaganda spam gets downvoted by the users.

Strong disagree. Naked propaganda is downvoted, sure, but good propaganda is never naked. Add enough eyeballs and increasingly sophisticated and coordinated actors will find a way to get their message to the top.

Upvote/Downvote is very susceptible to headlines that exploit confirmation bias, and bot activity.

> Also, voting systems take care of a lot of this, because naked propaganda spam gets downvoted by the users.

I disagree: crowdsourced moderation can only really take care of the most obvious crap, so it doesn't really take care of this problem.

This is simply not true, although I suppose it depends on the definition of naked. Here's some random examples - although like anything, whether it qualifies as propaganda depends on one's beliefs:

- When the previous US president wanted to pull out of Syria, or at least scale down the activities there, a bunch of headlines to the effect of "[President's name] abandons the kurds, leaving them to die" were written, and went straight to the top of Reddit. (This is a classic war propaganda technique where there's always an excuse as to why you can't end a certain war, while failing to account for the negative effects of continuing wars, or the facts that many of these "problems" only exist because of previous foreign policy blunders and doubling down on those blunders simply doesn't help)

- Without going down the COVID rabbithole too much, there would routinely be articles that either (a) spread Chinese-state-originated propaganda videos of stuff like "man randomly collapses in the middle of the street", (b) articles that would credulously take China's metrics at face values, (c) scientific publications that immediately denied the possibility of non-naturalistic origins of the virus, (d) articles intended to shame those who don't believe in masking as an intervention, etc

- (This is a fun one since many won't agree) Many articles raced to the top which made just completely wrong statements about the portfolios of firms like Melvin Capital and basically depicted the WSB gamestop fiasco as a classic david vs goliath narrative, instead of the reality which was for a brief period of time it was a real short squeeze and then almost immediately became a classic bubble/pump and dump scenario that had no connection to fundamental asset valuation. (To be clear, in a short squeeze stock prices can easily be pushed past the "intrinsic value", but so long as there's still a squeeze it is not irrational to buy the asset. However, once it's no longer actually a short squeeze and is now just a normal bull-run / bubble, an article selling the david v goliath narrative is now propaganda)

- Here's a headline that's #2 on /r/politics, which I just visited to find the first headline that counts as propaganda in my book: "Conservatives Are Furious Biden Delivered a Non-Insane Presidential Speech" (regardless of what you feel about the speech or conservatives, it should be trivially obvious that they are not furious about a "non-insane" speech)

- Any of the dozens of articles about the "Capitol Hill Insurrection" which grossly exaggerated what occurred as an attempted coup instead of the reality which was a bunch of (largely deluded) self-styled patriots who changed and prayed and took stupid selfies inside the capitol building (note: me saying that it was grossly exaggerated is not the same as saying that there was no wrongdoing, etc)

---

I do think it is true though that "articles which are clearly propaganda to the average user" i.e. one thats go against the status quo of a cite will be downvoted. But propaganda in the other direction won't because they will never think of it as propaganda

Open source is mainstream now, even Microsoft are doing it.

Trying to rid my life of google has opened all sorts of doors. If you're a tinkerer there are a plethora of options available for you to customize your experience and discover new capabilities.

One of my hobbies is boatbuilding, and there is a LOT of good material that is still available on forums since they just happily sit there seemingly forever, and are easy to archive. But a lot of the new stuff is now done on FB, and it means that knowledge gets pushed to the bottom of the feed, and it is impossible to archive.

My feeling is that the switch to algorithmic feed-based discussion is a serious regression for a lot of interest groups.

An excellent illustration of this is Stack Overflow. They take after the forum model of preserving knowledge to the degree that they shut down discussions that have happened before. Stack Overflow's database of solutions brings literally billions in value to the world, and it simply would not work without persistance of information.

It reminds me of a chapter from Kino's adventures, where she finds a city, which has a culture of cat lovers. When she leaves them, she meets their king, who tells the story of the land: people had decided they don't need the king and any culture, so they've decided to appear to every traveller with a different culture.

However, the king says, they are not aware that that is their new culture.

There is at least one group who (arguably in part) eschews political social media: the grillpilled.

Hacker News is basically that culture. A lot of people here spend their time complaining about how much they hate every aspect of social media, the web and modern culture (except for HN, of course) and make a point of virtue-signaling how unplugged, and detached from the mainstream they are, including their refusal to touch any form of social media.

I think it's fair to say that a part of the userbase here has built a cultural identity around its contrarianism.

It is being intentional about one’s time, attention, and emotions. Me, I play a lot more guitar these days, and really enjoy having something that I can learn.

Social media just doesn’t work for me. I can’t deal with a constant stream of people dumping their emotions. I’m aware that most other people can. And that’s fine. But I’m happier just ignoring it and working hard on work, family life, and guitar.

It's a lot of hassle for the average internet user. The worst case scenario: you end up paying ~70$/year for something you have no idea how to setup property. Beast case scenario: some startup takes over the hassle for you for "only" 50$/year... But that's not that different from Facebook (except that you would "own" a domain name and a host you have no idea how to "own").

(This was sarcasm)

YouTube always seems to stick me in a bubble and never recommends any worthwhile new channels.

/r/artisanvideos

* pleasant guy talking for 45 minutes about his lifetime of experience using chains: https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtisanVideos/comments/lyvfzz/just_...

* man weaves a bed: https://www.reddit.com/r/EngineeringPorn/comments/978s2c/man...

No, it isn't.

We've been doings like this for twenty years. We made Potato Phones in 2002 before a potato phone was a thing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lo3StA3INws

Youtube is lame- our work is also archived on Internet Archive and other places- this is a 172 gb master of one of our films https://archive.org/details/heartstringmarionette

Flag? I don't see a flag. I see text.

The "try too hard" stuff usually comes from weak people who are wannabe creators but lack the guts to do it, let alone stick with it for several decades while remaining original and independent.

Just put a qr code on it containing the same info plus a digital signature, and have verifiers scan it with an app. That sounds a lot more secure than the enduser having an app that the verifier just looks at with their eyes.

That makes no sense - consensus must exist within a counterculture for it to be definable, therefore counterculture and consensus can coexist.

Being "prevalent" has no bearing whatsoever on being a counterculture. It's entirely possible for a counterculture to have a subreddit and not be prevalent. The vast majority of content on Reddit never even touches the frontpage.

You could say that a counterculture can't exist on Reddit that runs counter to the platform's terms of service, and that might be true, but it's also conditional.

I'm happy to listen to the bemoaning, mainly because the newest and largest groups on the internet are the most problematic and most of them have no self-awareness to that end. Better that they hear the bemoaning and get a chance to change and choose not to.

Kpop is deliberately manufactured culture. The personalities and music are meticulously curated by corporations. "Underground Kpop" is practically an oxymoron like a "married bachelor" would be.

And that's not to insult or knock it.

redisman, could you tell more about this?

Now we’re talking. Doom was a massive deal because of the violence (as you mentioned), but also because it moved entertainment revenue away from MSM and onto PC’s and the internet.

Any successful culture, be it sub- or counter-, will eventually be swallowed by the mainstream. That’s because a culture is such only if it gets transmitted from person to person. Denying transmission is not counter-cultural, it is anti-cultural: it denies its own validity. Which is why I laugh at the elitism and pretentiousness of articles like these, who want to be purer than pure then take their clues from the likes of MTV Unplugged. The search for purity in culture is a fool’s errand, one might as well burn every page one writes. In reality, culture has to be transmitted, and the purists are just another bunch of competitors desperately trying to elbow everybody else with what little leverage they have.

The modern lack of visible “alternative” cultures is simply due to the fragmentation and recombination that new media have allowed. Guthenberg has invented his press a few years ago, Luther just started writing his thesis, and we are all here wondering why amanuensis culture is not as vibrant as it was.

> And who exactly has been fired for "believing male and female are real concepts"?

I recall some kind of minor debacle about a Stack Overflow moderator (or employee? details are vague) who got in trouble for something related to individual choice of pronouns. It seems to be what they're refering to.

Is this not polite company? Do you think adding an asterisk makes a significant difference?

I'm black myself, do I get to say it? Could the question be more complicated than you're making it out to be?

edit: I mean - MCNeil at the NYT was quite literally doing what you just did: discussing whether certain language was acceptable or should be punished. Imagine being fired for this post two years from now. I don't care about McNeil in particular (the US is an "At-Will" country, workers have no real rights, he's a privileged guy), but the state of free expression right now is bizarre. The fact that it comes when old (and most of new media) media is more consolidated than it's ever been is not coincidental.

.. if you think this, your definition of left leaning is completely broken and your Overton window is in a very strange place.

You are doing an awful lot of generalizing from your own experiences. I have met a LOT of conservative managers and business owners, including more than a couple openly sexist and racist ones, who are doing just fine for themselves in life. The idea that conservatives are some sort of tiny suppressed minority is bonkers.

Where did you work where your boss thought worker-ownership and workplace democracy were the best ways to get work done?

Corporations pay lip service to the left but they don’t really follow through. There’s no divestment from China, fossil fuels, or even Diversity and Inclusion that reaches the board level.

Did you forget this is a US based website? Are you posting from China?

I'm not saying any of those things are bad (in fact, I like fighting with fake swords) but there's not hostility to them from the culture and they, in turn, are not hostile to the mainstream culture, so I just don't think they're countercultural at all.

By definition I think countercultural groups will strike you as weird and bad unless you belong to them specifically. Q-Anon, for example, which speculates that the leaders of society are <bad things>, is a countercultural group because they both hate and oppose elements of the main culture and are hated and opposed by it. The kind of antifa or anarchists who are attempting to burn down courthouses or police stations in Portland are another clear example.

Ironically, both are disliked some because of that. The nofap rose as a real counterculture to commodified kink and porn; and the "i love fucking science" type of reddit atheist the FSM people were at heart are mocked.

The far right isn't tolerated as they're dangerous to advertisers sensitivities. Meanwhile the far left individuals are mostly tolerated but they're also all very aware that if the far right were to disappear overnight, they'd be the next target.

Yes. A real problem is that the US has no consensus on how society should work. It did, in, say, the 1950s. People were expected to get jobs, and work, and the spectrum of available jobs was matched, roughly, to the range of human capabilities. That was a generally stable situation. That's the US from 1945 to 1975 or so.

That's changed, leaving behind a huge number of unemployed and under-employed people. More education doesn't help; about half of US college graduates are doing jobs that don't need a college education.

Nobody really has a good answer to this. Which is why conservative populism looks to the past.