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Among the ancient dead ruins of the old internet that it seems few people these days remember anymore, there lies a site that started way back in 1989 around when the internet had first began and continued to grow and grow all the way until 2009 when it was suddenly and very unceremoniously shut down by its owner, Jeff Hunter. Old members of this site have LONG since speculated about the true reason why the site shut down the way it did, but it doesn’t really matter in the end as, regardless of the real reason, the site was never seen again. That site was the Temple of the Screaming Electron. And today, I’m here to pass down my knowledge of this incredible site to anyone who will listen and to tell them why they should care about this lost relic, even if just a little.
Abbreviated as T.O.T.S.E., or TOTSE for short, the site was founded on freedom of speech and freedom of information. It started as just a way to share interesting text files on all sorts of stories and information, from the curious to the dangerous. To put it shortly, it was a site to freely and openly share ideas. Now, TOTSE was an internet forum, but I know that some of our younger viewers may not know what an internet forum is, so I will go through it very briefly for those who don’t know.
An internet forum is basically a community in wh ich there are fixed topic categories such as sports or games or music or news. Those categories are called sub-forums. In those sub-forums users can make threads which are basically text posts, although they don’t have to contain just text. In those threads, other users can make posts responding to that thread. And finally, threads in a sub-forum are sorted by the date of the latest post in them.
Now, there’s a long history with such a long-running site as TOTSE, but I’m not here to share those stories today. Instead, I want to focus on what is most important and what desperately needs to be preserved, and why it needs to be preserved. You see, if you look at the landscape of the modern internet from the perspective of someone who was there in the 90s and early 2000s, things have changed mostly for the worse. Instead of an open sharing of, and individual critical judgment of ideas, there’s all-powerful and utterly broken voting systems. In place of fair and open rules, there is overbearing moderation. In place of an open and independent mind, there are social bubbles where it seems the walls just get thicker with every passing year and the same common beliefs and attitudes are reinforced at an alarming rate, regardless of whether they’re correct or not.
But wait, that’s not all. Oh no. On top of all of this, we have corporate influencing on so many of these sites and a war against privacy with both corrupt countries and corporations leading the charge. But wait, it gets even worse! With pretty much all the sites that hold a massive majority of the internet marketshare, users wise, a major corporation controls them. Now, this is not an anti-capitalist video, believe it or not. Far from it. I actually do believe in capitalism. And I mean TRUE capitalism by the way. Not whatever the hell frankenstein system we’re in now. The problem instead comes when SO MANY of the high-traffic sites are company-owned and there’s nowhere else to turn.
Coming back to the topic of this video, there used to be a website where none of this was true. The rules were structured in a way that allowed for maximum freedom while still maintaining order on the site. The social bubbles were few and far between, if they existed at all, and cross-pollination between the numerous sub-forums was very commonplace. There WAS a voting system introduced later on but it wasn’t taken seriously and it didn’t actually affect anything. You still decided for yourself what you thought was good and what was bad. Anonymity was fully possible and was also the norm on the site. And finally, there was no corporate owner. The site was entirely funded through banner ads. Back when that used to be possible.
But again, this site that avoided all of these problems no longer exists and lives on only in memory. Perhaps back then, it wasn’t such a big deal that it ended. The big social media sites we all know and hate today were only just picking up steam and the internet was still mostly dominated by forums. The internet world was safe then and we were all innocent of the massive baggage that these now infamous sites would bring with them in the future.
Now, there are many people who would agree with what I just said there, but I KNOW that there are still many people who would ask just exactly why I am blasting these major sites. Maybe you think they’re great. Or maybe you think they’re not so great, but hey, they’re not THAT bad. Well, for those who ask such, these next sections will be for you. Timestamps are down in the description and in the video timeline, so you can go ahead and skip to whatever site you wish to hear about specifically.
Reddit
Of all the sites I’m about tear into, Reddit is probably the least of the social media evils. Nevertheless, it is still HEAVILY infected with cancer. Now, there have been MANY complaints lodged against Reddit before such as the moderators and the dumb “””beta””” site that’s been sitting in development for years and the very site staff themselves. All of this has already been talked about extensively before by others, but the WORST thing about Reddit by far… The one thing that pervades every single sub-reddit of this blasted site… Is the voting system.
You know, when Reddit first started, we didn’t really know any better. Voting systems were the hot new thing, and with Reddit’s system on paper, it sounded like a great and simple idea. Upvote posts that contribute to the topic and downvote posts that don’t. Upvoted posts get promoted and downvoted posts get demoted and censored. The people en masse decide, and with that, the front page of each sub-reddit should at least mostly only have good posts and most of the bad posts would be weeded out by popular vote.
Unfortunately, it didn’t really work like that, and such a system turned out to have many nasty consequences. For starters, the system assumes that posts can be graded objectively, and it also assumes that people can grade posts objectively. Both assumptions are wrong. Let’s take a simple example post here in a plants sub-reddit. “I like flowers. Specifically daisies.” There we go. Simple. Peaceful. Innocent. But then someone reads that and thinks, “My mother was killed with Nightshade! How can you like flowers? Clearly, at very least, some flowers are not likeable!” And then that person downvotes th at post. After that, another person comes along, sees the score for the post and IMMEDIATELY comes into this now subconsciously biased against it, because they see that score, and the VERY FIRST thing that pops into their minds is, “Oh, this post has a non-positive score. There must clearly be something wrong with it.” They then read it and downvote it too. And here’s another thing. None of those two leave a reply explaining the downvote because they think that the downvote’s enough for whatever reason. So now, our simple innocent statement now has a -1 score. Now, let’s say another person comes along, and THEY like flowers. They love them actually. But they see that score and decide, “Oh, it looks like no one’s upvoting this post so it’s probably already dead in the water. I’m not even gonna bother upvoting it and just move on.”
So now, we got what was supposed to be a simple innocent statement that still got downvoted. Now this is a simple example, but the same principles still apply to other posts. There is no post that is objectively good for everyone and people do not objectively grade posts at all or sometimes even bother to leave a reply explaining why they disagree. Let’s take another example.
This time, this example post is in a vehicle sub-reddit. The post says, “I like motorcycles. They’re pretty safe as long as you’re not stupid.” It gets a lot of upvotes and people there generally agree about this. Another person then replies to this post, “Motorcycles are fun, but they really are unsafe! You could get into a nasty and fatal accident very easily with nothing protecting you even though it might not have been your fault.” And thennnnn… It gets downvoted. Why? Because it goes against the grain. Because it tells people something that they don’t want to hear. And as we all know, the worst crime anyone can commit is the crime of being annoying. And yeah, some people may have a legitimate complaint against this reply, but the majority will be downvoting due to an emotional response, not an objective one, and most will also not even be willing to discuss it. They’re just going to add their downvote to the pile and leave.
This response is not new at all. In fact, it’s a very old one that has an official name. Tyranny of the Majority. The concept itself originally came from Polybius who lived in 2nd century BC Greece. This issue describes a problem with a purely democratic system where the majority will pursue their own interests at the expense of those in the minority.
Ok, let’s put all this aside now and talk about a final example. Our example post is now in a book sub-reddit. Someone makes a post with a very helpful and in-depth analysis of a non-fiction book. And hooray! It doesn’t get downvoted! Yep. Instead, it gets… 5 upvotes. After that, someone else posts a much more shoddy review of the same book. There are even replies to the post also saying how terrible the review is. And yet… And YET… It gets 526 upvotes and reaches the sub-reddit front page. What in the hell?
Well, my friends, the technical and professional term for this one is called, uh… Cheating. Yep, just plain old gaming the system with paid clickers and/or bots. So even if the other two examples were nonsense, even if I was totally insane about those and didn’t actually know what the hell I was talking about, it doesn’t matter anyway because the system is incredibly open to abuse, and it’s been done many many times. I even have serious suspicions of mods in the larger sub-reddits doing this too, but that’s another discussion for another time. This problem also presents another problem along with it as well. The cheating can get so rampant that if you want your post to even have somewhat of a chance of it making the front page, then you need to cheat too, which of course, makes the problem even more rampant and the system even more broken than it already is.
Twitter
I don't think I need to fill anyone in on all the cancel culture, toxicity, and stupidity that's been pretty inherent to Twitter since the very beginning, but it is important to know WHY exactly all this happened. I may have missed a few things, so if I have, let me know.
The first and foremost problem here is that the post length is greatly restricted. When Twitter first started, no one could make an individual post that had more than 140 characters, and for roughly 11 years, that was how it worked. This is probably the most integral reason why Twitter has failed from a communications perspective as much as it has. While you could split what you needed to say into multiple posts or use TwitLonger to make a much larger post, it was kind of a pain, and not something a lot of people did. So, right from the start, Twitter was dumbing down discussions everywhere. Tweets had to be appealing at face value, or many wouldn't read them. Now, later on, this restricted length was increased in 2017 to 280 characters, but it was too little too late. The site culture had long since been established and 280 characters just wasn't much of an improvement anyway.
The second problem is that hashtags devolve arguments further into a single phrase. Now, the harm that this caused is a little more abstract. Basically though, the hashtags further encouraged hot takes and sensationalism. Something had to be shocking enough for a hashtag to spread effectively, even if it was total nonsense. Only the most loud and easy to understand hashtags could reach incredible popularity.
Now, if we add all this together, we see a cycle of simplistic posts, inflammatory or shocking hashtags, and followers often agreeing with said simplistic statements. Basically, the whole system encourages outrageous easy-to-understand posts in order to get more attention (or followers). This is why mobs form so easily on the platform.
And finally, although this one isn't entirely Twitter's fault, it is a factor nonetheless. Facebook was the one who first started the push to make everyone use their real names (more on them later), and then Twitter followed that up later with the blue checkmark system to further discourage anonymity. Since everyone became comfortable with giving out their real names via Facebook, it seemed a natural progression to give all the followers you've earned and may earn in the future your real face and name. And if one de-anonymizes themselves, anything they say now is linked directly to their identity, which means that such people can be easily targeted in real life by hate mobs.
Facebook
After ripping Twitter a new one, it's time to move on to our third entry here, Facebook.
This first thing is the cornerstone of all of Facebook's privacy concerns and where it all starts. User registration will force you to give your real name. As said in my last article on Twitter, if one de-anonymizes themselves, anything they say now is linked directly to their identity, which means that such people can be easily targeted in real life, whether for advertising, location tracking, or hate mobs.
The second thing is that the Facebook app just blatantly spies on your phone. This isn't a conspiracy theory (https://arstechnica.com/information...t-message-data-for-years-from-android-phones/) and I will link the source for this in the description. While it is true that you can set a bunch of privacy settings in the app, it's pretty unknown now just how much it actually helps, and given Facebook's absolutely atrocious record of privacy breaches, both unintentional and otherwise, it's very likely that for the most part, the privacy settings are just a placebo.
The third issue is that even if you set your privacy settings to completely lock everything down, any information collected by Facebook, can easily be acquired by the government. Also not a conspiracy theory (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data), and again, the source link for this will be down in the description. This obviously includes both information you gave permission to Facebook to have, and information that was harvested without your knowledge and/or permission.
Putting the Facebook company itself aside for a second, there’s the easiness of getting doxed or employers finding out your private history. Generally, anyone that has been friended can see where you've been, what you've been up to, where you live, where you work, who you talk to, and even probably that cringey rock band you like. And there’s nothing stopping employers from setting a trend of demanding that you let them see your full profile just to get a job.
The fifth problem with Facebook is that its news feeds are being influenced. It's unclear though exactly what kind of agenda Facebook wants pushed. Perhaps the news feeds are influenced simply according to the highest bidder. Regardless though, the whole system is blatantly rigged.
Coming now to the actual user-to-user interactions, when people use Facebook, they usually use it to keep up with contacts they know outside the internet. This, unbeknownst to most users, creates a social bubble. You generally aren’t friends in-real-life with people you don’t agree with. Family tends to break this trend, yes, but by exposing the user to their family’s every thought and action, it creates friction, and unless everyone in that family is mature enough to handle that friction, it creates fights. But it gets worse too since, often, the disagreements are public and people don't want to admit they are wrong in a public forum, and this creates even more friction, especially since the reputation of their real names is on the line here.
And then there’s also the higher potential for addiction. Although technically there is a potential for this for any site you love in particular, Facebook just seems to be particularly bad for this due to the much more personal aspect of it and also due to the fact that perhaps some of the people you’ve friended are local. We want and crave validation from those people and want to be accepted, and Facebook tends to give us that validation easily. Further, people tend to wonder where you are if you're not checking in to the app often enough, which creates a bit more pressure for you to use it.
And THEN there’s the fact that just the simple act of friending and unfriending can cause unnecessary drama. It’s a simple point, but damn, I swear this must be the #1 cause of drama on the platform.
Finally, we are at the last point, and that is that constantly seeing people at their best invites comparison. As you use the platform, you begin to see more and more of people's lives naturally, but of course, no one generally wants to post about any of the negative stuff that is happening to them. Mistakes they made. IRL conflicts with friends, family, and romantic partners. Lost career opportunities. Instead, it's all a constant flow of seemingly amazing things happening to them and because of them which makes you look down on your own life.
Now here's an interesting bonus question. If MySpace had actually survived, would they have fallen to these same issues? I'd say most likely, even if MySpace may have had slightly better features.
YouTube
Unlike all the entries in this list before this one, there isn’t actually anything inherently wrong at all with YouTube’s core system. You upload a video and viewers can watch and comment on it. That’s basically all it is. Very nice and simple. Now, there is a voting system in place, yes, but the likes-to-dislikes ratio doesn’t actually seem to affect anything unless I’m mistaken. And this was rendered even more ineffectual very recently when YouTube removed the dislikes counter anyway.
No, the problems with YouTube stem almost, if not entirely from those who run it, turning what should have been a nice and simple video hosting and sharing site into something MUCH more broken and frustrating for both content creators and viewers alike.
For starters, the rules for videos are very inconsistently enforced, and, most frustratingly in this regard, there are even some rules that YouTube won’t actually tell you about but you will be graded with nonetheless. Rules for comments are hardly much better, and in some ways, are even worse. YouTube will scan every comment for words it doesn’t like, and if it sees one of those bad words, it will instantly delete the comment. And the best part? You have no visual notification as to whether it was deleted or not. From your end, it looks like the comment posted successfully, but check it right after or even try to edit it, and it won’t be there to see or edit. It will also delete comments with ANY links in them. And you’d think this would be to curb all the bots, but somehow, they can post links anyway.
Heading on over to the monetization side for content creators, any user can copyright-flag any video for any reason. And while it’s flagged, that video will not make any money for the creator instead of the earned money being held in escrow as it should be.
And then there’s the video recommendation algorithm. There have been many videos and channels that were rejected for promotion by YouTube for completely unknown reasons. A channel owner may be getting recommended to others one day, and the next, it will just stop and the algorithm won’t recommend the channel again despite the fact that the channel owner is still putting out the exact same quality content that people enjoy. Going into a bit of tinfoil hat territory here, it seems like the algorithm is focusing most of the attention onto a relative handful of YouTubers and the occasional meme video.
And finally, there are privacy concerns with any person registering a YouTube account. Specifically, in order to have a bunch of restrictions on video uploads lifted, YouTube will require an account to submit a non-VoIP phone number to them to verify. This was probably done to stop bots, but a dedicated spammer could easily get around this while the actual well-intentioned users are punished by being forced to submit their own phone number to YouTube, needing to trust that YouTube won’t just abuse it or sell it.
What Solution Is There?
Alright, Arnox, you made your point. Major social media sites are the scum of the earth and blah de blah blah, but what can we do about it? Where else are we gonna go?
Well, back when TOTSE shut down, there were splinter sites that immediately formed afterwards. Again, there’s a long history with these but I’m not really going to go into that. It would take too much time and it isn’t really that relevant anyway. If you like, I will provide a link (https://intosanctuary.com/index.php?pages/history/) down in the description where anyone interested can read the full story. Instead, I will just skip ahead and say that in 2014, due to a need for a site that no one else at the time could or would make, I created my own site called Sanctuary.
Like TOTSE, Sanctuary is, first and foremost, an internet forum. That format was chosen very intentionally because it is my firm and heartfelt belief that we need to go back to our internet roots and re-establish the internet forum as the general purpose social media format without any of the modern cancerous trappings we see today such as a ridiculous character limit, overbearing rules, or a voting system.
The internet forum format is incredibly versatile and flexible in terms of all the kinds of sharing and communication it can support, from poll threads to Q&A threads, and all while preserving user anonymity, profile customization, post archiving and sorting tools, and fair and open discussion. It is not absolutely and totally perfect, but it IS the best format for a social media site we have, without question.
Frequently Asked Questions
Alright, now, I need to address some questions that will inevitably come up in regards to Sanctuary and/or me. The first question is,
Q: I noticed that you left out instant messaging platforms such as Discord when you were talking about all those social media platforms.
A: Immediate chat (assuming we're talking about Discord here as it's the most fully featured chat platform) definitely has its place and is one of the very few areas that a forum is a little too clunky to be able handle by itself, but it cannot replace forums. I don't think the two formats need to fight anyway though. As far as general discussions go, the forums are for long and/or more thought-out responses that are immediately and efficiently archived and categorized as soon as a new post is made for organization, search, and later perusal. An immediate chat platform is for, well, immediate purposes. Like organizing and socializing during a game night, or discussing an issue that needs immediate attention. You don't have to refresh the page to see any new posts, obviously, and you get messages instantly, but it all comes at the cost of a few very important things as well such as topic categorization. Searching for subjects and questions is also hackneyed at best. Perhaps one of the biggest things you lose though is simply that everyone has much more of a time constraint to get their message out and stay topical to the subject at hand. There's not a lot of room at all for longer, more thought out responses in immediate chat.
Q: What about TikTok?
A: TikTok is just Twitter in video form. Due to its constrained format, it inherits most of the problems from that. And that’s not even discussing how the Chinese government completely controls TikTok and uses it to spy on the platform’s users and censor any views it doesn’t like. And that’s not a conspiracy theory either. (https://www.theguardian.com/technol...al-moderation-guidelines-ban-pro-lgbt-content) That is confirmed. Because of redundancy though, I didn’t feel a need to bring the platform up in the list.
Q: It is well and good to point out problems with all these social media sites, but it also seems pretty suspect that you’re trying to sell us your site in the same video. How can we trust you and the site?
A: Well, I’ve owned and operated Sanctuary for over 8 years and will continue to do so for as long as I am possibly able. And in those 8 years, the core format has not changed, the rules have not changed after work on them was completed, and the site itself has only grown in terms of presentation, modern features, and capabilities. Sanctuary has resisted attacks in the past and is constantly backed up, ensuring that at any time, if the site hosting for any reason were to permanently go down, it would be a very simple matter to restore it somewhere else in a matter of hours or days at worst. Also, there is no one above me or beside, staff wise, which allows me to completely guarantee that Sanctuary will never ever deviate from its original ideals. It can never be “hijacked” or made to be something else it was never intended to be by malicious third parties. And if, for whatever reason, I later find I have to compromise those ideals just to keep the site running, the site will be shut down. Sanctuary will be a sanctuary, or it will not exist at all. And if after ALL that, you still doubt me, just know that if all I really cared about was getting a payday and/or making myself famous, I wouldn’t have spent over 8 years of my life (and counting) in support of an internet forum founded around free speech that is actually a financial liability to me.
Q: Why should I use your free speech internet forum instead of someone elses?
A: There is no other site like Sanctuary. Trust me, I have looked and looked. What we offer is not offered by any other site or community in the way we offer it and run it. Other sites are either too strict in their rules, are not strict enough, not stable enough, not maintained enough, have other dangling cancerous features on them, have untrustworthy staff, or etc. Sanctuary stands completely alone.
Q: But what about monetization? Do you collect private information about users? Do you allow them to be anonymous?
A: Sanctuary is entirely funded out of my own pocket. We do not run any advertisements save of course for the joke advertisements we made for fun. We also collect as minimal information as possible from the user. Bots are all screened out manually by hand. Now, it may be in the future that as more and more users join, I may have to start putting up ads or start asking for donations to fund hosting costs, but we are not even nearly at that point yet. Sanctuary is fully stable, finances wise, and has both the bandwidth and server power to handle a LOT more users.
Q: Fine, but what about the software? What is the front-end used to run Sanctuary?
A: We used to use Simple Machines Forums, and they were a very solid free alternative, but we’ve long since upgraded to a paid solution, specifically XenForo, which is pretty much the leading solution in internet forum software. In summary, XF is pretty damn powerful, secure, and stable and is the perfect choice for an all-purpose versatile forum like Sanctuary. If you’re sufficiently old enough like me, you may be interested to know too that the core XF team originally came from the formerly much celebrated vBulletin team. And by the way, no, I’m not sponsored by XenForo. I doubt they even know I exist.
Abbreviated as T.O.T.S.E., or TOTSE for short, the site was founded on freedom of speech and freedom of information. It started as just a way to share interesting text files on all sorts of stories and information, from the curious to the dangerous. To put it shortly, it was a site to freely and openly share ideas. Now, TOTSE was an internet forum, but I know that some of our younger viewers may not know what an internet forum is, so I will go through it very briefly for those who don’t know.
An internet forum is basically a community in wh ich there are fixed topic categories such as sports or games or music or news. Those categories are called sub-forums. In those sub-forums users can make threads which are basically text posts, although they don’t have to contain just text. In those threads, other users can make posts responding to that thread. And finally, threads in a sub-forum are sorted by the date of the latest post in them.
Now, there’s a long history with such a long-running site as TOTSE, but I’m not here to share those stories today. Instead, I want to focus on what is most important and what desperately needs to be preserved, and why it needs to be preserved. You see, if you look at the landscape of the modern internet from the perspective of someone who was there in the 90s and early 2000s, things have changed mostly for the worse. Instead of an open sharing of, and individual critical judgment of ideas, there’s all-powerful and utterly broken voting systems. In place of fair and open rules, there is overbearing moderation. In place of an open and independent mind, there are social bubbles where it seems the walls just get thicker with every passing year and the same common beliefs and attitudes are reinforced at an alarming rate, regardless of whether they’re correct or not.
But wait, that’s not all. Oh no. On top of all of this, we have corporate influencing on so many of these sites and a war against privacy with both corrupt countries and corporations leading the charge. But wait, it gets even worse! With pretty much all the sites that hold a massive majority of the internet marketshare, users wise, a major corporation controls them. Now, this is not an anti-capitalist video, believe it or not. Far from it. I actually do believe in capitalism. And I mean TRUE capitalism by the way. Not whatever the hell frankenstein system we’re in now. The problem instead comes when SO MANY of the high-traffic sites are company-owned and there’s nowhere else to turn.
Coming back to the topic of this video, there used to be a website where none of this was true. The rules were structured in a way that allowed for maximum freedom while still maintaining order on the site. The social bubbles were few and far between, if they existed at all, and cross-pollination between the numerous sub-forums was very commonplace. There WAS a voting system introduced later on but it wasn’t taken seriously and it didn’t actually affect anything. You still decided for yourself what you thought was good and what was bad. Anonymity was fully possible and was also the norm on the site. And finally, there was no corporate owner. The site was entirely funded through banner ads. Back when that used to be possible.
But again, this site that avoided all of these problems no longer exists and lives on only in memory. Perhaps back then, it wasn’t such a big deal that it ended. The big social media sites we all know and hate today were only just picking up steam and the internet was still mostly dominated by forums. The internet world was safe then and we were all innocent of the massive baggage that these now infamous sites would bring with them in the future.
Now, there are many people who would agree with what I just said there, but I KNOW that there are still many people who would ask just exactly why I am blasting these major sites. Maybe you think they’re great. Or maybe you think they’re not so great, but hey, they’re not THAT bad. Well, for those who ask such, these next sections will be for you. Timestamps are down in the description and in the video timeline, so you can go ahead and skip to whatever site you wish to hear about specifically.
Of all the sites I’m about tear into, Reddit is probably the least of the social media evils. Nevertheless, it is still HEAVILY infected with cancer. Now, there have been MANY complaints lodged against Reddit before such as the moderators and the dumb “””beta””” site that’s been sitting in development for years and the very site staff themselves. All of this has already been talked about extensively before by others, but the WORST thing about Reddit by far… The one thing that pervades every single sub-reddit of this blasted site… Is the voting system.
You know, when Reddit first started, we didn’t really know any better. Voting systems were the hot new thing, and with Reddit’s system on paper, it sounded like a great and simple idea. Upvote posts that contribute to the topic and downvote posts that don’t. Upvoted posts get promoted and downvoted posts get demoted and censored. The people en masse decide, and with that, the front page of each sub-reddit should at least mostly only have good posts and most of the bad posts would be weeded out by popular vote.
Unfortunately, it didn’t really work like that, and such a system turned out to have many nasty consequences. For starters, the system assumes that posts can be graded objectively, and it also assumes that people can grade posts objectively. Both assumptions are wrong. Let’s take a simple example post here in a plants sub-reddit. “I like flowers. Specifically daisies.” There we go. Simple. Peaceful. Innocent. But then someone reads that and thinks, “My mother was killed with Nightshade! How can you like flowers? Clearly, at very least, some flowers are not likeable!” And then that person downvotes th at post. After that, another person comes along, sees the score for the post and IMMEDIATELY comes into this now subconsciously biased against it, because they see that score, and the VERY FIRST thing that pops into their minds is, “Oh, this post has a non-positive score. There must clearly be something wrong with it.” They then read it and downvote it too. And here’s another thing. None of those two leave a reply explaining the downvote because they think that the downvote’s enough for whatever reason. So now, our simple innocent statement now has a -1 score. Now, let’s say another person comes along, and THEY like flowers. They love them actually. But they see that score and decide, “Oh, it looks like no one’s upvoting this post so it’s probably already dead in the water. I’m not even gonna bother upvoting it and just move on.”
So now, we got what was supposed to be a simple innocent statement that still got downvoted. Now this is a simple example, but the same principles still apply to other posts. There is no post that is objectively good for everyone and people do not objectively grade posts at all or sometimes even bother to leave a reply explaining why they disagree. Let’s take another example.
This time, this example post is in a vehicle sub-reddit. The post says, “I like motorcycles. They’re pretty safe as long as you’re not stupid.” It gets a lot of upvotes and people there generally agree about this. Another person then replies to this post, “Motorcycles are fun, but they really are unsafe! You could get into a nasty and fatal accident very easily with nothing protecting you even though it might not have been your fault.” And thennnnn… It gets downvoted. Why? Because it goes against the grain. Because it tells people something that they don’t want to hear. And as we all know, the worst crime anyone can commit is the crime of being annoying. And yeah, some people may have a legitimate complaint against this reply, but the majority will be downvoting due to an emotional response, not an objective one, and most will also not even be willing to discuss it. They’re just going to add their downvote to the pile and leave.
This response is not new at all. In fact, it’s a very old one that has an official name. Tyranny of the Majority. The concept itself originally came from Polybius who lived in 2nd century BC Greece. This issue describes a problem with a purely democratic system where the majority will pursue their own interests at the expense of those in the minority.
Ok, let’s put all this aside now and talk about a final example. Our example post is now in a book sub-reddit. Someone makes a post with a very helpful and in-depth analysis of a non-fiction book. And hooray! It doesn’t get downvoted! Yep. Instead, it gets… 5 upvotes. After that, someone else posts a much more shoddy review of the same book. There are even replies to the post also saying how terrible the review is. And yet… And YET… It gets 526 upvotes and reaches the sub-reddit front page. What in the hell?
Well, my friends, the technical and professional term for this one is called, uh… Cheating. Yep, just plain old gaming the system with paid clickers and/or bots. So even if the other two examples were nonsense, even if I was totally insane about those and didn’t actually know what the hell I was talking about, it doesn’t matter anyway because the system is incredibly open to abuse, and it’s been done many many times. I even have serious suspicions of mods in the larger sub-reddits doing this too, but that’s another discussion for another time. This problem also presents another problem along with it as well. The cheating can get so rampant that if you want your post to even have somewhat of a chance of it making the front page, then you need to cheat too, which of course, makes the problem even more rampant and the system even more broken than it already is.
I don't think I need to fill anyone in on all the cancel culture, toxicity, and stupidity that's been pretty inherent to Twitter since the very beginning, but it is important to know WHY exactly all this happened. I may have missed a few things, so if I have, let me know.
The first and foremost problem here is that the post length is greatly restricted. When Twitter first started, no one could make an individual post that had more than 140 characters, and for roughly 11 years, that was how it worked. This is probably the most integral reason why Twitter has failed from a communications perspective as much as it has. While you could split what you needed to say into multiple posts or use TwitLonger to make a much larger post, it was kind of a pain, and not something a lot of people did. So, right from the start, Twitter was dumbing down discussions everywhere. Tweets had to be appealing at face value, or many wouldn't read them. Now, later on, this restricted length was increased in 2017 to 280 characters, but it was too little too late. The site culture had long since been established and 280 characters just wasn't much of an improvement anyway.
The second problem is that hashtags devolve arguments further into a single phrase. Now, the harm that this caused is a little more abstract. Basically though, the hashtags further encouraged hot takes and sensationalism. Something had to be shocking enough for a hashtag to spread effectively, even if it was total nonsense. Only the most loud and easy to understand hashtags could reach incredible popularity.
Now, if we add all this together, we see a cycle of simplistic posts, inflammatory or shocking hashtags, and followers often agreeing with said simplistic statements. Basically, the whole system encourages outrageous easy-to-understand posts in order to get more attention (or followers). This is why mobs form so easily on the platform.
And finally, although this one isn't entirely Twitter's fault, it is a factor nonetheless. Facebook was the one who first started the push to make everyone use their real names (more on them later), and then Twitter followed that up later with the blue checkmark system to further discourage anonymity. Since everyone became comfortable with giving out their real names via Facebook, it seemed a natural progression to give all the followers you've earned and may earn in the future your real face and name. And if one de-anonymizes themselves, anything they say now is linked directly to their identity, which means that such people can be easily targeted in real life by hate mobs.
After ripping Twitter a new one, it's time to move on to our third entry here, Facebook.
This first thing is the cornerstone of all of Facebook's privacy concerns and where it all starts. User registration will force you to give your real name. As said in my last article on Twitter, if one de-anonymizes themselves, anything they say now is linked directly to their identity, which means that such people can be easily targeted in real life, whether for advertising, location tracking, or hate mobs.
The second thing is that the Facebook app just blatantly spies on your phone. This isn't a conspiracy theory (https://arstechnica.com/information...t-message-data-for-years-from-android-phones/) and I will link the source for this in the description. While it is true that you can set a bunch of privacy settings in the app, it's pretty unknown now just how much it actually helps, and given Facebook's absolutely atrocious record of privacy breaches, both unintentional and otherwise, it's very likely that for the most part, the privacy settings are just a placebo.
The third issue is that even if you set your privacy settings to completely lock everything down, any information collected by Facebook, can easily be acquired by the government. Also not a conspiracy theory (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data), and again, the source link for this will be down in the description. This obviously includes both information you gave permission to Facebook to have, and information that was harvested without your knowledge and/or permission.
Putting the Facebook company itself aside for a second, there’s the easiness of getting doxed or employers finding out your private history. Generally, anyone that has been friended can see where you've been, what you've been up to, where you live, where you work, who you talk to, and even probably that cringey rock band you like. And there’s nothing stopping employers from setting a trend of demanding that you let them see your full profile just to get a job.
The fifth problem with Facebook is that its news feeds are being influenced. It's unclear though exactly what kind of agenda Facebook wants pushed. Perhaps the news feeds are influenced simply according to the highest bidder. Regardless though, the whole system is blatantly rigged.
Coming now to the actual user-to-user interactions, when people use Facebook, they usually use it to keep up with contacts they know outside the internet. This, unbeknownst to most users, creates a social bubble. You generally aren’t friends in-real-life with people you don’t agree with. Family tends to break this trend, yes, but by exposing the user to their family’s every thought and action, it creates friction, and unless everyone in that family is mature enough to handle that friction, it creates fights. But it gets worse too since, often, the disagreements are public and people don't want to admit they are wrong in a public forum, and this creates even more friction, especially since the reputation of their real names is on the line here.
And then there’s also the higher potential for addiction. Although technically there is a potential for this for any site you love in particular, Facebook just seems to be particularly bad for this due to the much more personal aspect of it and also due to the fact that perhaps some of the people you’ve friended are local. We want and crave validation from those people and want to be accepted, and Facebook tends to give us that validation easily. Further, people tend to wonder where you are if you're not checking in to the app often enough, which creates a bit more pressure for you to use it.
And THEN there’s the fact that just the simple act of friending and unfriending can cause unnecessary drama. It’s a simple point, but damn, I swear this must be the #1 cause of drama on the platform.
Finally, we are at the last point, and that is that constantly seeing people at their best invites comparison. As you use the platform, you begin to see more and more of people's lives naturally, but of course, no one generally wants to post about any of the negative stuff that is happening to them. Mistakes they made. IRL conflicts with friends, family, and romantic partners. Lost career opportunities. Instead, it's all a constant flow of seemingly amazing things happening to them and because of them which makes you look down on your own life.
Now here's an interesting bonus question. If MySpace had actually survived, would they have fallen to these same issues? I'd say most likely, even if MySpace may have had slightly better features.
YouTube
Unlike all the entries in this list before this one, there isn’t actually anything inherently wrong at all with YouTube’s core system. You upload a video and viewers can watch and comment on it. That’s basically all it is. Very nice and simple. Now, there is a voting system in place, yes, but the likes-to-dislikes ratio doesn’t actually seem to affect anything unless I’m mistaken. And this was rendered even more ineffectual very recently when YouTube removed the dislikes counter anyway.
No, the problems with YouTube stem almost, if not entirely from those who run it, turning what should have been a nice and simple video hosting and sharing site into something MUCH more broken and frustrating for both content creators and viewers alike.
For starters, the rules for videos are very inconsistently enforced, and, most frustratingly in this regard, there are even some rules that YouTube won’t actually tell you about but you will be graded with nonetheless. Rules for comments are hardly much better, and in some ways, are even worse. YouTube will scan every comment for words it doesn’t like, and if it sees one of those bad words, it will instantly delete the comment. And the best part? You have no visual notification as to whether it was deleted or not. From your end, it looks like the comment posted successfully, but check it right after or even try to edit it, and it won’t be there to see or edit. It will also delete comments with ANY links in them. And you’d think this would be to curb all the bots, but somehow, they can post links anyway.
Heading on over to the monetization side for content creators, any user can copyright-flag any video for any reason. And while it’s flagged, that video will not make any money for the creator instead of the earned money being held in escrow as it should be.
And then there’s the video recommendation algorithm. There have been many videos and channels that were rejected for promotion by YouTube for completely unknown reasons. A channel owner may be getting recommended to others one day, and the next, it will just stop and the algorithm won’t recommend the channel again despite the fact that the channel owner is still putting out the exact same quality content that people enjoy. Going into a bit of tinfoil hat territory here, it seems like the algorithm is focusing most of the attention onto a relative handful of YouTubers and the occasional meme video.
And finally, there are privacy concerns with any person registering a YouTube account. Specifically, in order to have a bunch of restrictions on video uploads lifted, YouTube will require an account to submit a non-VoIP phone number to them to verify. This was probably done to stop bots, but a dedicated spammer could easily get around this while the actual well-intentioned users are punished by being forced to submit their own phone number to YouTube, needing to trust that YouTube won’t just abuse it or sell it.
What Solution Is There?
Alright, Arnox, you made your point. Major social media sites are the scum of the earth and blah de blah blah, but what can we do about it? Where else are we gonna go?
Well, back when TOTSE shut down, there were splinter sites that immediately formed afterwards. Again, there’s a long history with these but I’m not really going to go into that. It would take too much time and it isn’t really that relevant anyway. If you like, I will provide a link (https://intosanctuary.com/index.php?pages/history/) down in the description where anyone interested can read the full story. Instead, I will just skip ahead and say that in 2014, due to a need for a site that no one else at the time could or would make, I created my own site called Sanctuary.
Like TOTSE, Sanctuary is, first and foremost, an internet forum. That format was chosen very intentionally because it is my firm and heartfelt belief that we need to go back to our internet roots and re-establish the internet forum as the general purpose social media format without any of the modern cancerous trappings we see today such as a ridiculous character limit, overbearing rules, or a voting system.
The internet forum format is incredibly versatile and flexible in terms of all the kinds of sharing and communication it can support, from poll threads to Q&A threads, and all while preserving user anonymity, profile customization, post archiving and sorting tools, and fair and open discussion. It is not absolutely and totally perfect, but it IS the best format for a social media site we have, without question.
Frequently Asked Questions
Alright, now, I need to address some questions that will inevitably come up in regards to Sanctuary and/or me. The first question is,
Q: I noticed that you left out instant messaging platforms such as Discord when you were talking about all those social media platforms.
A: Immediate chat (assuming we're talking about Discord here as it's the most fully featured chat platform) definitely has its place and is one of the very few areas that a forum is a little too clunky to be able handle by itself, but it cannot replace forums. I don't think the two formats need to fight anyway though. As far as general discussions go, the forums are for long and/or more thought-out responses that are immediately and efficiently archived and categorized as soon as a new post is made for organization, search, and later perusal. An immediate chat platform is for, well, immediate purposes. Like organizing and socializing during a game night, or discussing an issue that needs immediate attention. You don't have to refresh the page to see any new posts, obviously, and you get messages instantly, but it all comes at the cost of a few very important things as well such as topic categorization. Searching for subjects and questions is also hackneyed at best. Perhaps one of the biggest things you lose though is simply that everyone has much more of a time constraint to get their message out and stay topical to the subject at hand. There's not a lot of room at all for longer, more thought out responses in immediate chat.
Q: What about TikTok?
A: TikTok is just Twitter in video form. Due to its constrained format, it inherits most of the problems from that. And that’s not even discussing how the Chinese government completely controls TikTok and uses it to spy on the platform’s users and censor any views it doesn’t like. And that’s not a conspiracy theory either. (https://www.theguardian.com/technol...al-moderation-guidelines-ban-pro-lgbt-content) That is confirmed. Because of redundancy though, I didn’t feel a need to bring the platform up in the list.
Q: It is well and good to point out problems with all these social media sites, but it also seems pretty suspect that you’re trying to sell us your site in the same video. How can we trust you and the site?
A: Well, I’ve owned and operated Sanctuary for over 8 years and will continue to do so for as long as I am possibly able. And in those 8 years, the core format has not changed, the rules have not changed after work on them was completed, and the site itself has only grown in terms of presentation, modern features, and capabilities. Sanctuary has resisted attacks in the past and is constantly backed up, ensuring that at any time, if the site hosting for any reason were to permanently go down, it would be a very simple matter to restore it somewhere else in a matter of hours or days at worst. Also, there is no one above me or beside, staff wise, which allows me to completely guarantee that Sanctuary will never ever deviate from its original ideals. It can never be “hijacked” or made to be something else it was never intended to be by malicious third parties. And if, for whatever reason, I later find I have to compromise those ideals just to keep the site running, the site will be shut down. Sanctuary will be a sanctuary, or it will not exist at all. And if after ALL that, you still doubt me, just know that if all I really cared about was getting a payday and/or making myself famous, I wouldn’t have spent over 8 years of my life (and counting) in support of an internet forum founded around free speech that is actually a financial liability to me.
Q: Why should I use your free speech internet forum instead of someone elses?
A: There is no other site like Sanctuary. Trust me, I have looked and looked. What we offer is not offered by any other site or community in the way we offer it and run it. Other sites are either too strict in their rules, are not strict enough, not stable enough, not maintained enough, have other dangling cancerous features on them, have untrustworthy staff, or etc. Sanctuary stands completely alone.
Q: But what about monetization? Do you collect private information about users? Do you allow them to be anonymous?
A: Sanctuary is entirely funded out of my own pocket. We do not run any advertisements save of course for the joke advertisements we made for fun. We also collect as minimal information as possible from the user. Bots are all screened out manually by hand. Now, it may be in the future that as more and more users join, I may have to start putting up ads or start asking for donations to fund hosting costs, but we are not even nearly at that point yet. Sanctuary is fully stable, finances wise, and has both the bandwidth and server power to handle a LOT more users.
Q: Fine, but what about the software? What is the front-end used to run Sanctuary?
A: We used to use Simple Machines Forums, and they were a very solid free alternative, but we’ve long since upgraded to a paid solution, specifically XenForo, which is pretty much the leading solution in internet forum software. In summary, XF is pretty damn powerful, secure, and stable and is the perfect choice for an all-purpose versatile forum like Sanctuary. If you’re sufficiently old enough like me, you may be interested to know too that the core XF team originally came from the formerly much celebrated vBulletin team. And by the way, no, I’m not sponsored by XenForo. I doubt they even know I exist.
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