Alright you twisted freaks! After a very long hiatus, The Subverse forum is back online.
Why has it come back now?
Well the bottom line is that social media is dead.
Now sure, the normals might not realise this yet, but the death knell of Facebook and Twitter is sounding as society descends into a state of complete paranoia and uncertainty. Operation Mindfuck has been a success, it just didn't quite pan out the way the original architects probably intended it to.
The mere fact that huge online social networking companies were able to replace the likes of the humble user created online forum was, without a doubt, a tragedy. But it was inevitable.
As the masses flocked to share all their data for the chance of centralised peer recognition, the resulting outcome has proven to be precisely what is expected from selling your soul to the devil - a brief period of hopeful yet unfulfilling opportunity, followed by an eternity in hell.
I was never a particular fan of social media, having never bothered jumping on the Facebook death slide, but I did tinker with the Twitter for a while, only to come to the realisation that it was turning out to be exactly what I expected from a centralised social media system; where the advertisers are the customer and the users (i.e. user data) are the product. Inevitably the algorithms that tailor your feeds have lead to an increase in bias and polarisation. The world is now a total clusterfuck and so any sane person has gone back to looking for decentralised alternatives.
So will a return to decentralised forums be a solution? I dunno, but I've now eradicated all centralised social media from my life and, for me, it's a step in the right direction. I'm not, however, particularly interested in reinstating The Subverse for nostalgia - although I am curious to see if any old faces return to the boards - but I've missed the community spirit of a small forum and can no longer deal with the suffocating feedback loops created through profit driven corporate vampirism.
So unplug, tune out and sign up to The Subverse if you find yourself concurring. At the very least we can discuss these issues without troves of personal data being gathered to try sell us ideas and products that none of us really need or require.
media-underground.net