RationalWiki talk:What is going on in the clogosphere?

Magic Nerds mad about tiddies
A creator from the Wizards of the Coast creator program has been fired for allegedly sexualising the game with her onlyfans content and antifeminist chuds are blaming it on her being 'too hot so feminists shut her down' instead of a corporate decision about their image. Read the comments on this Source: https://boundingintocomics.com/2020/07/03/wizards-of-the-coast-removes-lizbeth-eden-from-magic-creator-program-for-photos-featuring-nudity-and-sexualized-posing/

Do book reviews go in the clogosphere?
[https://theworthyhouse.com/2020/04/13/mine-were-of-trouble-peter-kemp/ If so, here's a good one, from a soldier in the Spanish Civil War. Enjoy!]

Spells coming through your tv screen
Why do they think you have wear a Victorian witch costume to cast spells? Didn't they know that God's Not Dead casts a spell to turn your children into shrimp-eating, mixed-cloth-wearing, hell bound sinners? There's even an atheist on screen! ikanreed 🐐Bleat at me 14:44, 6 October 2022 (UTC)
 * The "concerned Texas mother" who posted this is literally a farmer, so obligatory Blazing Saddles.
 * (I haven't seen the sequel, but I have caught enough of the original Hocus Pocus on the teevee. The real "devil's bargain" must be in how many souls were sold in order for that hot mess of a movie to actually become popular...) 35.140.177.2 (talk) 14:58, 6 October 2022 (UTC)

A lot of people seem to think Elon Musk buying Twitter heralds the return of Trump and associated ills
Is that true? I'm genuinely curious. I know where Musk's political loyalties lie, but the resulting PR would be a disaster. Then again, Musk is a literal proll, so I'm not sure he'd even care. Vee (talk) 17:59, 27 October 2022 (UTC)
 * I kinda hope his stewardship of the platform renders the whole industry toxic, well more toxic than it currently is. So much so, that it becomes financially untenable. Implodes in a glorious display of human selfishness and narcissism, to fizzle out impotent and spent like MySpace is today. (Undecided if I'm referring to Twitter itself, all of social media or simply Elon Musk. Why not all three.)
 * Bloody hell, can you believe we can now look back at Myspace with slight misty eyes nostalgia? Don't, it was just as shite Cardinal Chang (talk) 18:39, 27 October 2022 (UTC)
 * Musk already is having to calm down advertisers, to point out one aspect.
 * The other aspect that I think doesn't come easily to those who babble about politics all day: most social media users don't post about politics. Judging by the relative low traffic of most "conservative" political social media sites, my hunch is that most of the reason is not because of "censorship" of viewpoints, because there are plenty of outlets for free-for-all political discussion of any political orientation where "censorship" doesn't apply. Rather, I suspect that politics is not what most people want to use social media for. It's to keep in touch with friends, post funny memes, listen to tunes, and the like. "Social shit". No duh.
 * It's my theory for one reason why Tiktok has succeeded of late: anecdotally, their algorithmic feed seems very good at pushing the dumb but fun meme crapola. (There obviously is toxicity on Tiktok especially if you look for it, but whenever I've browsed Tiktok's main feed, admittedly not much, it seems rather clear of a lot of the political talking head bullshit brigade as well as the anger karma farming. My experience is limited here, though, so corrections welcome.) Whereas Facebook is dying, with a reputation of pushing toxic content and anger karma farming into people's feed whether people wanted it or not.
 * In other words, what Musk is buying Twitter for is not what I postulate as a successful formula for a successful social media site these days... which would really be, for your algorithmic stuff, downplay the anger shit, upvote the cute cats and whatnot. And don't let the algorithm interfere with the personal connection (as Facebook really annoyingly does now).
 * It's actually worse for Twitter in a sense, because he's become a toxic repulsive tech bro symbol to many. And since I bet he won't be able to bring back all the racists from Parler/Gab/etc. due to advertiser pressure, I bet he'll also tick off "conservatives" too. We'll see. 72.184.99.135 (talk) 19:49, 27 October 2022 (UTC)
 * the reasons people prefer not to post political stuff on social media is because they fear the harassment that comes with it, according to the article you cite. also, not posting political content says little about consuming political content, or that social media is not all equal. if i wished to share photos of my niece and nephew, i would not be posting them on twitter or youtube. my hot take on the issues of the day, though - #what i think. i would also not bother responding to a youtube video via youtube video of my own. i would not bother watching a youtube video that i thoroughly disagree with. not all the way through. 10 mins easnt exactly a long time, but its long enough to prevent all but already interested bother. a tweet take a second or two to read to consume and a second or two to respond, and i dont have to worry about the lighting and the sound and does my hair look alright. i would not do any of this via tiktok either. its not really twitter with videos because the video component removes the immediacy of twitter. its not really youtube either, as the short length of the videos are not really enough for effort of producing a video that says anything more than look at me. 'look at me' is the reason for the tik tok, being visually and sonically interesting is the name of the game not your politics. that, and tiktok is chinese and there are alot chinese people on tiktok.


 * Twitter does not mean the death of facebook, tiktok does not mean the death of youtube. they all serve different purposes, used and consumed in different ways by different people. they can all exist in their own space alongside each other. as much as their owners would like no one site is a one stop shop for all ones social media needs. if facebook dies it will because of the rise of a better facebook not because of twitter or tiktok. if twitter dies, it will be because of a better twitter.


 * twitters problem, now musks problem is advertising revenue. ad revenue has dropped significantly as a result of the pandemic. facebook and instagram are better and bigger mediums for businesses to spend their advertising budget on, and dont have the same kind of toxicity problems that twitter has, and twitter has a tiny userbase by comparison. letting nazis tweet risk shrinking their userbase so less ad revenue, hence musk is talking about subscriptions. but who would pay to use twitter? AMassiveGay (talk) 12:45, 3 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Sure. "Politics" has a special meaning on social media though: a bunch of people IN A RAGE POSTING ALL-CAPS BULLSHIT WHO ARE MAD AS HELL AND POST ABOUT *EVERYTHING* AS POLITICS EVEN IF IT IS NOT!!!! (Insert deranged personal attack here) It gets tiresome *real* fast when someone on general social media babbles about politics all of the time, especially if they are mad and not very coherent. A lot of these types are *really* engaged and it thus tends to warp any primitive "engagement" algorithm, so on something like Facebook people you tangentially know (or even bullshit clickbait posted by God knows who) tended to be prioritized over the normal updates you previously got from close friends. Basically, it's the r/TheDonald problem Reddit had (where their high "engagement" flooded the general feeds with bullshit), but it equally applies to those affected with "Trump Derangement Syndrome". Obviously many people have a political side but from what I see most people are more subtle or a little more nuanced, IMHO, it's more like maybe "let's check out this commentator I agree with" every once in a while or post a news article here and there. There's a correlation between "high engagement" and "high asshole factor".
 * I kind of agree with this article that over the last decade there has been a shift from the text-dominant social media of the past to video (and pictures). This shift does not bode well for the text-oriented Twitter in the first place. (Add to this the fact that Twitter previously had, which should have fitted the times perfectly, and killed it for some reason.)
 * But social media platforms actually can rapidly decline if a major change causes user revolt or if something way improved comes along. Myspace "died" when Facebook came and was better (and new owner Rupert Murdoch desperately tried to flood MySpace with ads for teh revenuez). Tumblr "died" when The Powers That Be decided to ban porn on the platform. Digg "died" when a redesign was horribly botched.
 * Twitter's base from my perspective was celebrities, journalists, and other people of news and culture and whatnot. It was in trouble before Musk precisely due to the r/TheDonald type problem of lots of "highly engaged" assholes who often formed mobs that attacked not only each other but the high-profile content drivers. ("Celeb XYZ deletes Twitter account due to harassment / abuse" was not an uncommon news story of late.) Opening the floodgate to even more highly engaged assholes, charging celebrities (who generate the content non-assholes actually might be "highly engaged" by) for a "verified" check box, and firing half your employees (many who probably have the skills to create whatever the next Twitter will be)... well, at this point I'd put the odds on Twitter having a Digg-style exodus higher than the odds of Twitter thriving. It may still be around, of course, but it could be a wasteland. We'll see. 72.184.99.135 (talk) 15:47, 3 November 2022 (UTC)


 * [EC] There's also the non-corporate alternatives where some (maybe especially technical) people go when pushed to finally abandon Twitter. Mastodon (decentralized Twitter alternative sometimes described as "Twitter without Nazis") has so far gained roughly 200000 users since Musk completed the Twitter buy. But while a very big increase for Mastodon, it's a tiny drop for Twitter. Still, Musk certainly seems to boost the chances of decentralized, non-corporate and non-profit alternatives eventually becoming big in the mainstream, more than anything before him. As a reaction to him (a little like with Microsoft and software development forges). --ApooftGnegiol (talk) 16:10, 3 November 2022 (UTC)


 * It is not merely Musk buying Twitter that heralds the return of Trump or someone like him in the future. The billionaire Kanye West's intent to buy Parler and the billionaire Peter Thiele's big investment in Rumble echos what Musk did. West and Thiel are in camps that traditionally favor Democrats. West is an African-American and Thiele is gay. But American billionaire values are overwhelmingly Republican and that is why they overwhelmingly donate to Republicans. George Soros is the most notable exception to this trend. The American rich don't want to pay more taxes in return for more government social spending so they are resisting the Democrats moving more to left. Independents who are more libertarian is a growing segment of the American political pie. ColinETaylor (talk) 09:02, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
 * so you saying hitler loving billionaires are the voice of the people? gotcha AMassiveGay (talk) 09:32, 28 February 2023 (UTC)

Adolf Hitler and the Nazis believed in big government. Libertarians believe in very little government. While I am not a libertarian, I will say that unlike the authoritarian right/left, libertarians believe in free speech and have never set up internment camps, gulags or engaged in mass murder. ColinETaylor (talk) 13:07, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
 * thats because there hasnt been any libertarian countries. even the commies managed that one. bravo on such an idiotic false dichotomy. can you say 'mixed economy' even anarchists have done much better than libertarians. its as if 'fuck you, ive got mine' isnt a great model for government (as we are far too often reminded by the politicians so keen on pushing us all that way). run along and play now AMassiveGay (talk) 13:38, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
 * A lot of the culture war and division in America is stoked by indoctrination in substandard, public schools. In Belgium, the Netherlands, and Ireland, school choice is a constitutional right. The USA should do the same. If the USA broke out in civil war or had an economic collapse that affected me badly, Ireland would be one of the countries I would consider fleeing to. ColinETaylor (talk) 13:58, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
 * A lot of the culture war and division in America is billionaires pushing propaganda, usually based on a combination of jingoism, religion, and (in the tradition of the Southern Strategy) racism that they know is complete bullshit on outlets like Fox News. That way, they can push also push shit favored by the billionaires like "school choice" (aka the fuck public education stance). My "conspiracy theory" on this stance is that in addition to the "reduce income taxes" thing, much of the ruling class would absolutely love to move to an expensive private school model in order to separate out the "undeserving riff raff" from the "deserving", which of course is their kids. They probably look longingly at "ruling class education" systems set up elsewhere like the French or the UK  style; even though the  is somewhat comparable I guess it's not enough. BobJohnson (talk) 14:16, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
 * to be fair, as ireland is place touted for its school choice, it is a place where black history month might not be big a part of of the curriculum - so no 'culture war' there for the transparent troll. guess thats win them. they have gay rights there though, so swings and roundabouts AMassiveGay (talk) 14:33, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
 * It just occurred to me that American libertarians don't have to win elections for the Libertarian Party. Independents are now 40% of Americans. Most independent voters lean either right or left so they are not totally independent. Libertarianism began as a form of left-wing politics, but post-1950's libertarianism in the United States leans towards right-wing politics and therefore leans Republican. In swing states which decide national elections, libertarians can be kingmakers. They can also be pivotal voters on issues that the American public is closely divided on. ColinETaylor (talk) 14:53, 28 February 2023 (UTC)
 * I don't follow politics too closely. But I just found out about political affiliation, that independents saw a big surge from 2004 to 2014, but post-2008 independents haven't changed that much. Republicans have been gained since Obama's second term (2013 onwards). Democrats have been losing members since 2008 (Obama was elected in 2008). So as the Democrats have shifted leftwards, they are losing support. The Iraq War started in 2003 so anti-war sentiment is rising (Libertarians are isolationists). ColinETaylor (talk) 15:40, 28 February 2023 (UTC)

the BBC...
...does not imply anything at all regarding the gender recognition reform bill. the bbc does not in any way imply it will lead to men harassing anyone in restrooms at all. the bbc is not continuing any sort of 'tradition' of transphobia in the uk media in any way.

what the bbc is doing is reporting about the passage of the bill through holyrood, about the current law, the proposed reforms. and the significant controversy around the bill within the snp itself, between the scotish and uk governments, within the UN even, and the grounds for potential legal challenges floated by its supporters and detractors depending on if it passes or not.

this clog does trans people a disservice by instead of railing against those oppposing this bill with transphobic arguments, it has us attack the bbc instead in a gross example of shooting the messenger.

the clog is dogshit misrepresenting both the article and the bbc itself. do people even read the articles they post here? AMassiveGay (talk) 11:48, 22 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Agreed here, the BBC has run some dogshit transphobic stuff, but this is not one of them. All the bathroom stuff comes from JK Rowling so I adjusted the clog to reflect that. BobJohnson (talk) 16:22, 22 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Thank you. I was going to pipe in that the article wasn't about the BBC. You could say, "Why does the BBC present both sides" but at that point it's not really a CLOG thing and you can rebut that too. 01:15, 23 December 2022 (UTC)

New clogs
I see I’m not the only one who follows Jason Campbell’s Twitter account for new Clog entries lol. 10:03, 18 February 2023 (UTC)
 * I'm glad Media Matters exists to document this shit (っ◔◡◔)っ ♥ Natsuki Marx ♥ (talk) 14:35, 19 February 2023 (UTC)