OctopusNemeses

They used sockpuppet accounts to game r/adviceanimals to push posts from quickmeme.com to the top and bury their competitors. At the time it was the most popular image macro site and subreddit. Once it was exposed, that format of meme basically collapsed.

Case in point. The world doesn't revolve around San Francisco. You guys are neurotically hyperfocused on your little world.

I think some of them actually believe. Like on Blind where the tech bros think $100k/yr is poverty wage. They haven't been living in reality in a long time. The tech boom has been going on since what like 2010. It's far longer than the dotcom bubble. They keep managing to jump from one fad to the next. It's far eclipsed prior bubbles.

It's long forgotten how reddit was open source. Not only that but people hosted their own instances of reddit as test beds for botting and who knows what else.

The quickmeme incident got memoryholed real fast. That era of image macro memes was basically entirely fabricated.

And once upon a time there were more than three PC graphics card makers. The paranoid schizo US really fucked up scientific and technological progress.

Humanity may never see anything like the 90s-2000s era again. That was a distinct milieu of nearly unbound creation and discovery. Not only did corporations remained skeptical of the internet. People were highly averse to being manipulated because the internet was untrustworthy. Paradoxically that's what made the internet trustworthy. Once trust was established of course. It was a perfect mix of factors that made it a unique period in history.

False equivalencies are trite.

And yes, gun companies make weapons of destruction.

As if it wasn't obvious enough that nazi posters have special protected status on social media platforms. The report buttons do nothing against them.

The world wide web has come back to an era where people and content are sparse.

"We" being the technologically inclined. The majority of the population see these headlines and think of it as something closer to a Gibson novel. These stunts work. It's why people think Elon is Tony Stark.

You need to touch some grass for a while. Or don't.

Your mental gymnasticing is not my problem. Just pointing it out.

There's some kind of Jedi mindtrick with technology that causes people to hyper-fixate on the idea of futuristic miracle tools, and ignore the horrible real life results. If I sold hammers that magically transformed into an ineffective plastic toy hammer on 7 out of every 10 strikes, nobody would buy it. They probably would for the novelty, but not for practical use.