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  • At some point, pretty much everything becomes political. I like to cycle, walk and enjoy nature. Me not wanting to get killed by a car driver is political, and me thinking we shouldn't dump toxic crap in the environment is political. The new stop sign at the corner of the street is political. Housing is political. The high price of goods is political.

    It's understandable to want to escape, avoid all this crap and take a break for a while. But memes are also a way to vent and express the frustration about the current political climate.

    Unfortunately those two are narcissist shit stains that enjoy having people talking about them every day so they are nearly impossible to avoid for a while.

    I like to go touch some grass. Close social media and go take a walk or cycle. Think about how all the fucking money is... eeerh... touch some grass... go camping and hiking, admire the views that are about to get destroyed by capit... eeehm, that makes you feel small. Hear the beautiful sounds of nature accompanied by the dirt bikes illegally riding in the forest. All free of politics! Even when they'll invade and annex my country, I'll just be like "can't we all just stop talking about politics and share memes, please!?"

  • I am leaning harder and harder on 'political comedy isn't comedy' as a rule. 'It's just a joke,' is a far too common smokescreen for people pushing terrible ideas and mocking people spreading bad ideas doesn't do anything to stop them. It can even help. Politics isn't supposed to be entertaining. It's the decisions that affect how we live our lives. We need comedy in politics like we need strippers in surgery.

    • what I've leant into hard is the idea that those "clever comebacks" or "murdered by words" posts and communities do much more harm than good. 80% of the post is the most bigoted and hateful thing you've ever read, and 20% is "your mom lol". sharing hate speech with a lame joke tacked on the bottom is still sharing hate speech, turns out

      • “murdered by words” posts

        I was an OG mod for that sub and hearing you say that makes me so sad.

        Here's some history for you; MBW started out with high quality long-form content. Then one day an Admin hand selected it to feature on the Front Page which caused it to explode in popularity, going from about 5,000 subs to over 30,000 in just 48 hours. The new users started upvoting the old content which caused a 2nd and then a 3rd post to organically hit the FP. The growth accelerated.

        Later that week the sole mod had a panic attack over the stress and while melting down they deleted the whole sub. At that point I offered to help and they added me as Mod #2. My first official act was working with the Admins to restore the sub from backup. From there we built a moderation team and all of the crap that goes with it like sub rules, wiki, automod, Discord channels.

        As the sub got more popular people started posting ever more short form content which was causing the quality to go down even while the subscriber and traffic numbers continued to climb.

        A few of us fought hard for a long time to hold the line on quality content, wanting to keep with the higher quality long form content that made it popular even if it meant lower subscriber and traffic numbers. We tried a lot of things to accomplish that but relevant to your comment one of the things was to create "Clever Comebacks" as a place to push the tsunami of Twitter/Tumblr/Facebook dreck. Sadly it didn't work, people either posted stuff in both places and / or the mod team wouldn't remove short form content from MBW because it got too popular before it was noticed and they didn't want to delete something with tens or even hundreds of thousands of upvotes.

        As the mod team continued to expand to deal with the ever higher traffic first one then another Powermod was added. I strongly objected to it but was over ruled by Mod #1. Then the Powermods began to stuff the mod team with their friends and sock puppet accounts. That's when things really started going downhill. They'd delete things that were almost popular then repost it themselves. They'd refuse to remove Posts or Comments from their friends or sock puppets. They implemented bots without sharing the source code. They kept "accidentally" breaking the mod log. They forced endless re-writes of the sub rules, each one giving them more leeway on what fit the sub and what didn't.

        I eventually went hands-off because I couldn't stop them and couldn't deal with what MBW had turned into. I finally left the mod team during the API fiasco because they wouldn't hold the line on the blackout.

        So there you have it, a short history of MBW and CC from someone who knows.

        On a side note Powermods ruin everything they touch and they're now showing up on Lemmy.

    • Counterpoint, comedy is often a coping mechanism for people dealing with difficult things, be it politics or something else. I'll agree that it's not how everyone wants to deal with it, though, and I also agree that not everyone does it in a way that's constructive (but I think that's in execution, not everyone is funny and a bad joke without proper comedy is certainly just elevating a bad message)

      But I think if I didn't have political comedy, I'm not sure how I could deal with how absolute shit things have been for decades. For me that's not memes though, it's stuff like Last Week Tonight or something that actually is done with professional writers and researchers.

    • The "funny" parts of the internet like Twitter and Reddit are also owned by millionaires and billionaires, their express purpose being to entertain you and show you ads, not to actually inform you. An especially egregious example is YouTube when a video essayist tries to explain how the Native Americans were killed by colonists, or how most of Latin America was brutalized by capitalist oppression resulting in millions dead, and people have to bleep out their words like they're on cable TV.

  • FYI you can change to scaled or any other settings to get less political.

  • Not what I'm seeing, maybe I curated my feed differently? Idk maybe my server also blocks some?

216 comments