Great shot! Is it me, or does it have an expression reminiscent of Chicken of Chickenthoughts?

Looks like a wasp pretending to be a fly, really. Might just be the Beedrill shape it kind of has.

Which is the point of all of this. They’ve been flexing their ability to control the flow of information on their site to show off for investors since the minute they announced the API changes. They’re going to use Place to further demonstrate the level of control they have over the userbase by “shutting down the protests.” Advertisers and investors are going to be eating this up, especially since so many people are still engaging and giving hate-clicks along the way. Imagine how attractive a completely pliable and obedient userbase of literal millions of progressive swing voters is going to look.

Quality has been dramatically better here than Reddit has been for many years. Finding people actually discussing the post in the comments is rare on Reddit, you have to sift through endless lines of off topic puns and memes being promoted by bots for karma farming. The goal of comments on Reddit is to be funny, not interesting or useful. The fediverse is more like Reddit eight or nine years ago, when they were figuring out their control algorithms, building their own bot network to game their own site (remember the subreddit where the reddit-built bots used to exclusively talk with each other for practice? I wonder what those bots are doing today…), and learning how to control the flow of information on their page while also finally making some things more stable.

I’m really curious if any parts of the fediverse can avoid the same pitfalls that Reddit eagerly jumped into. It’s probably doubtful since once the advertisers get here, greed will win. It always does. But maybe.