Reddit, going dark

It was awesome, watching one subreddit after another go dark last night. I don't imagine that it will affect Reddit's IPO at all, of course; money doesn't care about the wishes of ordinary human beings. But with any luck at least SOME permanent damage will be done.

I set up new accounts on Lemmy, kbin, and BookWyrm - all part of the Fediverse, which I'm hoping is resistant to the cancerous corrosion of venture capital. I did try to suggest DreamWidth as an alternate destination, but nobody seemed that interested. They never are, although I'm not sure why. Apart from being privately owned, DreamWidth seems an outstanding alternative to me. But what do I know?

Lemmy is working well, but doesn't seem to allow me to blog; it only allows me to post to communities, as far as I can tell. Reddit allowed me to post to my own profile, which was effectively blogging. Although I have no reason to believe that anyone ever read those posts. On the other hand, who cares? That said, Lemmy is the best community site I've found so far. People are friendly, nice, and responsive. I even got to post some book recommendations there.

kbin is impossibly laggy so far. It supposedly allows microblogging, but I have no way to test it until it's actually usable. That might take days, given what I presume is the Reddit exodus.

BookWyrm (which is focused on book reviews) does apparently allow me to post "direct messages", which appear to be exactly the sort of blogging function I was looking for - except they seem to be private only, i.e. it's possible that only I can see them. Even if that's not the case, I don't know if they're visible to the Fediverse outside of Bookwyrm. I guess we'll see.

Here's the first direct message I posted there:

I'm hoping that this "Direct Message" will work as a sort of general status update about my experience here on BookWyrm so far. Will anyone see it? Is it visible to anyone elsewhere on the Fediverse? I have absolutely no idea. But I can hope.

I imported my CSV from GoodReads, but it carried a lot of garbage formatting along with it - bad links to GoodReads resources, for one thing, some HTML that doesn't work here, etc. etc. Since I have hundreds (?) of reviews, manually cleaning up each one is NOT an appealing prospect.

I could copy the CSV file and do a lot of search/replacing. Then re-import. But I suspect that would result in duplicate entries, which would also suck. Has anyone else dealt with this?

Winston Smith Lives Again

Attempting to discuss concerns about Covid-19 vaccinations on Facebook and Reddit is a dangerous game. It immediately invites hysterical attacks, shattering of old bonds of friendship and family, and group outrage.

In the last three weeks Reddit has taken censorship of those who question Covid-19 vaccination to an unprecedented new level of Orwellianism. The sub r/unvaccinated , a "Safe community for unvaccinated redditors that refuse or are hesitant to take the new experimental covid vaccine. A place to support, share thoughts and discuss news topics." has had no new posts since November 9th - seventeen days ago.

Does it seem strange that in the current environment the Unvaccinated subreddit would become a ghost town? There's no need to wonder. I myself posted there twice in the last ten days, only for my posts to silently and completely disappear.

Go there yourself; post to your heart's content. Watch as your posts vanish, one by one. They never existed. No one will ever hear what you have to say. Nor will you ever be given a reason for that censorship.

I tried writing to the group moderators, of course. No answer ever came. I've been writing to the moderators individually, but so far have received no answer. The first ones I wrote to seem to have been inactive for months.

Mind you, this was a fairly active group! And questioning the safety of Covid-19 vaccines is not illegal. That speech on that subject can be simply blanked out of existence is an ominous sign of what's to come.

The New Untouchables

 So here's what happened.

Six days ago someone posted on r/skeptic:

 

The rest of the post consisted of nine reasons, point by point, why the poster didn't get the vaccine - including that she had lost a family member apparently due to the covid vaccine (very shortly after receiving it), and that her mother had had severe reactions to the same vaccine. Genetic tests indicated that the covid vaccines were extremely dangerous for her. She had also herself caught covid and recovered; tests afterwards showed that she had acquired a natural resistance to covid (at least for a while) that was higher than that bestowed by the vaccine. Her doctor had recommended that she not get the vaccine due to the risk of a negative reaction.

The poster did NOT say that no one should get the vaccine, only that she herself didn't want to get it for the reasons she'd given. She also noted that she follows appropriate masking and social distancing protocols. She needn't have bothered, though, because she was accused of both. Told that she was responsible for the deaths of millions because of her reckless refusal to get vaccinated. The free-thinking minds of r/skeptic - or at least most of them - absolutely savaged her, downvoting her comments like mad.

I stupidly jumped in.

I know that a few people in the sub upvoted my comments, because they bounced up and down a little for a while. But they were downvoted into invisibility pretty fast.

Now, don't get me wrong. So far this is just a typical day on Reddit, more or less. But here's where it got interesting. First, the original post was mostly deleted - that is, all the facts and details that had been posted which supported the poster's original statement were removed. A huge number of comments were removed, too. But more than that: within a day or two the original poster herself disappeared, her account suspended with no reason given. It made no sense. She'd been far more polite that I would have been under the same circumstances.

The hypocrisy of supposed "skeptics" joining in such a blatant display of groupthink, conformism, and obedience to the "official truth" was simply sickening. I left the sub for good.

But there's more to the story in the next post.