That didnāt take long. Iāve been on NewTumbl 15 days and already a trollās been by (the above is in reverse chronological order). I guess this is the internet in the late 2010s: people donāt believe in exchanging views, and that trolling is the new normal. You see it all the time on Twitter and Facebook, though it surprised me to see it happen so quickly on NewTumbl.
Usually, it takes a lot longer for the unthinking to join a platform. Online, where opinions count and your bank balance doesnāt, we are looking at an intelligence gap. This was predicted long ago; by whom I donāt recall, but it wouldnāt surprise me if it came up in the late Norman Macraeās writings many years ago.
It took a while for spammers to ruin email for me. I was on email for years before I received my first spam. Twitter and Facebook were pretty nice places to be 12 years ago. Even there, it took a while to descend.
You can blame certain politicians if you like, but the fact is we would have got there on our own, because most of us have seen the quality of debate declining on social media. Mansplaining, whitesplaining, trolling, abuse, the list goes on. The intelligence gap means that there are those incapable of having a reasoned argument without resorting to one of the above methods.
The disappointment I feel about one NewTumbl user is simply the speed at which itās happened, since their comment was pretty tame. Tumblr, for all its faults, actually never got political in the 12 years I was there. If you didnāt like a political view, it was usually too much trouble to comment, so you did what you might do in real life if you overheard a political comment you disagreed with: you moved on.
Many NewTumbl users are ex-Tumblr, so itās disappointing that one person decided not to carry forth the old platformās culture, and infected the new place.
So what do you do at a platform which is your unwinding social medium? You block.
Normally I wouldnāt block. My Dadās uncanny ability to call US presidential elections was down to, at least for 2016, his reading of the comments on their political blogs. The more views he read, the better an idea he had of which way the wind was blowing. On Twitter I block only a very few people; certainly a differing political opinion is not a reason to do it. In fact, I used to live by the mantra of āThey who lose an argument block firstā but lately Iām revising my opinion.
Some people are just lost causes. An analysis of the intelligence gap tells you that theyāre too far along the path to hell that no amount of reasoning can help them. If others canāt resort to a civil disagreement from the outset, then they might be lost causes, too. Their opinion is actually not worth hearing.
But the most important thing is your time. It is precious. Is engaging with a troll or a racist or a nutjob really something you wish to do?
I realize some might think that blocking is āletting them winā or that they āget off on itā. I suppose even trolls have their fans. We congregate to those on the intelligence ladder who are closest to us. This has the inherent risk of us not hearing viewpoints we mightnāt like.
But does it? If you donāt block based on opposing political views, and you donāt block because someone is either richer or poorer than you are, then what are you really missing? (And I doubt anyone blocks based on gender or sexuality.) Surely that still gives you a sense of where the world is, and allow you to get opposing viewpoints so you can refine your own thinking.
And you can always block differently for each platform. Do it more in online places where you want to relax. Do it less in places where you want to engage and debate.
Today, I did my first NewTumbl block. Our wee troll should be delighted.
Above: Flowers at the Islamic Centre in Kilbirnie, Wellington on Monday.
On 9-11, I wrote an editorial in Lucire immediately. It was clear to me what I needed to write, and the editorial got quite a few readers at the time.
Today is March 20, five days after a terrorist attack on our country, and itās only now Iāve had some idea of how to put my thoughts into a longer-form fashion, rather than a lot of Tweets, some of which have had a lot of support.
I guess itās different when the attack happens to your own people in your own country.
One of the earliest points I made, when the death toll hit 49, was that this was āour 9-11ā, at least when you consider the per capita loss of life. When it hit 50, it actually exceeded the number of lives lost per capita in 9-11. This helps put the matter into some context.
While the terrorist is a foreign national, who was most likely radicalized by foreign ideas, it has generated a great deal of soul-searching among New Zealanders. Even the right-wing talking heads have suddenly changed their tune, although, if a friend and colleagueās experience as a waiter in New York City in September 2001 is anything to go by, they will return to their regularly scheduled programming in two weeksā time. Certain media bosses, especially among foreign-owned companies, would have it no other way, since they are not here to benefit New Zealanders, only their foreign shareholders and their own pockets. Stoking division is their business and I do not believe leopards change their spots.
Therefore, the majority of right-thinking New Zealanders are not complicit, but a minority of us harbour bigoted thoughts, and enough of that minority infect the commentsā sections of mainstream media websites and social networks to make it seem as though they are more numerous in number. The outpouring of support for our Muslim community highlights that the good far outnumber the rotten eggs in our society. And I think more of us are now prepared to call out racism and bigotry knowing that, in fact, public opinion is behind us.
So many Kiwis, myself included, say that hatred toward Muslims is not in our national character. But it is sufficiently in our national character when Muslim groups have pleaded with government agencies to step up, to be met with endless bureaucratic roadblocks; and many political parties have stains on their records in appealing to Islamophobia, something which indeed was foreign to this nation for all of my childhood.
I grew up with a Muslim boy and we remain friends to this day, but I never thought of him by his creed. If I was forced to ālabelā him I would have called him a Pakistani New Zealander. I am willing to bet many Kiwis were in the same boat: we probably knew Muslims but never thought once about their religion.
It takes certain people to make changes in mainstream thinking. I thought I might be labelled a āChinese New Zealanderā till Winston Peters, now our deputy PM, droned on about āAsiansā out of some fear about the weakness of New Zealand culture; and we might have only become aware of Islam to any degree after 9-11. But these are, in fact, foreign ideas, adopted here by those who lack imagination or a willingness to do some hard work. They have been imported here through the sharing of culture. While I support the exchange of ideas, in some misguided utopian belief that dialogue is good for us all, I certainly did not anticipate, during the first heady days of the web, that we would have so much of the bad come with the good. I believed in some level of natural selection, that educated people would refrain and filter, and present their countryās or community’s best face. But as each medium boganfied (yes, I am making up words), the infection came. Newspapers changed thanks to Rupert Murdoch cheapening them, eventually morphing into publications that sensationalized division, especially against Muslims after 9-11. Television went downhill as well largely thanks to the same bloke and his lieutenant, Roger Ailes. The web was fine till each medium became infected with negativity, but Google, Facebook and Twitter were all too happy for it to continue because it increased engagement on their properties. Each fuelled it more with algorithms that showed only supporting views, deepening each userās belief in the rightness of their ideas, to the exclusion of everyone elseās.
Most Americans I know believe in civility. Iāve spoken often enough in their country to know this. They donāt believe their freedom of speech is absolute, and personally draw the line at hate speech, but their big websites act as though this is absolute, and allow the negative to fester. It seems it is for profit: we see Twitter remove Will Connollyās (āEgg Boyā) account but not racist Australian politician Sen. Fraser Anning. It is tempting to believe that Twitter is following the dollars here without regard to their stated policy. We have, after all, seen all Big Tech players lie constantly, and, for the most part, they get away with it. We let them, because we keep using them. Mark Zuckerberg doesnāt need to say anything about Christchurch, because weāll keep using his websites (Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp) and heāll keep finding ways of monetizing us, dehumanizing us. He wonāt show up to the UK when summoned, and Facebook will continue to lie about removing videos and offensive content when we know many reports go unheeded. Umair Haque wrote in the wake of the Christchurch terrorist attacks: āFacebook and Twitter and YouTube etcetera really just bring the American ideal to life that there should be extreme, absolute freedom of speech, with zero consequences whatsoever, even for expressing hate and violence of the most vile and repellent kinds.ā
As people become dehumanized through words and campaigns, it makes it easier for people to commit violence against them. They no longer see them as deserving of respect or protection. In the foulest version, they no longer see them as having a right to life.
Now, I donāt believe that this absolute approach can be branded American. And I do believe Big Tech has very different values to Americans. Their newsmedia have, too. When regular people are censored, when big money talks more loudly than their laws, then there is something very wrong with their companiesāand this is the common enemy of both Republicans and Democrats, not each other. And this wrongness is being exported here, too. Iāve said it for years: we are a sovereign nation, and we have no need to copy their failed idea of a health system or even their vernacular (on this note: retailers, please cease using Black Friday to describe your end-of-year sales, especially this year). We do not need to import the political playbooks, whether you are a political party, a blogger, or a local newspaper. There are Kiwis who actually talked about their āFirst Amendment rightsā because they may have watched too much US television and are unaware we have our own Bill of Rights Act. Even the raid on Kim Dotcomās home seemed to be down to some warped idea of apeing their cop shows, about impressing the FBI more than following our own laws on surveillance and our own beliefs on decency.
I honestly donāt see the attraction of turning us into some vassal state or a mutant clone of other nations, yet foreign-owned media continue to peddle this nonsense by undermining the Kiwi character and everyday Kiwi unity.
Did the terrorist see any of this? I have no idea. I equally have no idea if the people he came into contact with here cemented his hate. However, I think he would have come across sufficient international influences here to validate his imagined fears of non-whites and women. By all means, we should call out bad behaviour, but when we do, we shouldnāt restrict it to individual cases we see in our daily lives. There are entire institutions that are doing this, strings pulled from faraway lands, and to them we must also say: enough is enough. The way you do business isnāt in line with who we are. We need to be aware of who the non-Kiwi players are, often masquerading under locally grown brand names (such as āNewstalk ZBāāa quick peek of shareholders suggest the majority are as Kiwi as Ned Kelly), and, if need be, vote with our time and money to support those who really understand us. Be alert to whoās really trying to influence us.
Of my friends, about eight or nine voted for President Trump. Two voted for Brexit. These are my friends, who I vouch for, who I like. Other than a difference of opinion on these topics, we remain friends. I still think incredibly highly of them.
Since I know them well, I know a little bit about why they voted their way.
Of the Americans, some wanted an end to the neoliberal order and hoped Trump would deliver. Others saw Clinton as corrupt and that Trump would actually be better. Of the Brits, their reasons were more complex, but among them were the thought of an unwieldly EU bureaucracy, and the belief that a customsā union would be sufficient to keep trade going with the Continent.
None of these people are racists or xenophobesāthe opposite, in fact. None of them are hillbillies or gun-loving, NRA-donating hicks, or whatever narrative the mainstream media would like to spin. Most of them would be regarded by any measure in society as decent, intelligent and compassionate.
I have found little reason to dislike someone, or not vote for someone, over one relatively minor disagreement. If their hearts are in the right place, it is not for me to condemn them for their choices. Indeed, when it comes to these issues, I find that while our actions differ (hypothetically, in my case, since I cannot vote in countries other than my own), our core views are actually quite similar.
In the US, strip away the hatred that vocal fringe elements stoke, and youāll find that most people have common enemies in big business, tax evaders, and censorship. In 2018 we have seen Big Tech silence people on both the left and the right for voicing opinions outside the mainstream. My two Brexit-voting friends share some concerns with Remainers.
Therefore, in August, when one of these American friends wrote a Tweet in support of her president, it was horrible to watch Tweeters, total strangers, pile on her.
Iām not saying I like Trump (quite the contrary, actually), but I will give him props when he does things that I happened to agree with. If Iāve Tweeted for years that I disagreed with US military involvement in Syria, for instance, which at least one US veteran friend says lacks an objective, then Iām not going to attack the man when he pulls his countryās troops out. However, it was interesting to see some viewpoints suddenly change on the day. Those who opposed the war suddenly supported it.
I canāt say that I praise him very often, but I like to think Iām consistent. I was also complimentary about his withdrawal of the US from TPPA, something I have marched against.
And this friend is consistent, too.
In fact, her Tweet wasnāt even one of actual support. Someone called Trump a āloonā and she simply said, āYou don’t have to like my president,ā and added a few other points in response.
The piling began.
It seems almost fashionable to adopt one prevailing view peddled by the mainstream (media or otherwise) but there was no attempt to dissect these opposing views. My friend was measured and calm. What came afterwards did not reciprocate her courtesy.
Since I was included in the Tweet, I saw plenty of attacks on her that day. I was included in one, by a black South African Tweeting something racist to me.
When the mob goes this unruly, and itās “liked” or deemed OK by so many, then something is very wrong. These people did not know my friend. They didnāt know why she supported Trump. They were just happy to group her in to what they had been told about Trump supporters being ill-educated hicks, and attacked accordingly.
Call me naïve, but social media were meant to be platforms where we could exchange views and get a better understanding of someone else, and make the world a little better than how we found it. The reverse is now true, with Google, Facebook et al ābubblingā data so people only see what they want to see, to reinforce their prejudices, and having been convinced of their “rightness”, those espousing a contrary view must be inhuman.
I donāt like dominant viewpoints unless it’s something like ‘Intolerance is bad’ or a scientific fact that is entirely provable, though you could probably take issue with where I draw the line. Generally, I like a bit of debate. No position is perfect and we need to respect those with whom we disagree. That day, Twitter was a medium where there was no such respect, that it was OK to pile on someone who fell outside the standard narrative. To me, thatās as unhealthy was a socialist being piled upon by conservatives if the latter groupās view happened to prevail. It doesnāt take much imagination to extend this scenario to being a Chinese republican in the early 20th century in the face of the Ching Dynasty. Iām always mindful of how things like this look if the shoe were on the other foot, hence I was equally upset when Facebook and Twitter shut down political websitesā presences on both the left and the right wings. We should advance by expanding our knowledge and experiences.
It encouraged me to head more to Mastodon in 2018, where you can still have conversations with human beings with some degree of civility.
And, frankly, if you disagree with someone over something relatively trivial, then there is such a feature as scrolling.
Twitter became less savoury in 2018, and it has well and truly jumped the shark.
Scott Milne and I had a little fun over ‘American English’ recently on Twitter (and hopefully US friends will see this in the humour in which it was intended). He wrote:
It's the 23rd of November. Black Friday's are the 13th. Unless I am missing some imported America bullshit, I call bullshit.
I responded that Americans like big numbers. It’s a big country, and everything must sound more impressive, even yuge. Therefore:
Rest of world: Audi 100
USA: Audi 5000
Rest of world: 2019 Range Rover Evoque
USA: 2020 Range Rover Evoque
āBlack Fridayā
Western world: Friday 13th
USA: Friday 23rd (it was this year, anyway)
1,000,000,000
Originally in English: ‘one thousand million’
USA: ‘one billion’
1,000,000,000,000
Originally in English: ‘one billion’
USA: ‘one trillion’
I realize Americans mean something different when they say ‘Black Friday’ (and it doesn’t mean we need to adopt a change in definition, though judging by the last two we probably will), and I realize how their model years work (and they have nothing to do with calendar years).
Since (mostly) leaving Facebook, and cutting down on Twitter, Iāve come to realize the extent of how outdated traditional computing definitions have become. To help those who need to get up to speed, Iāve compiled a few technobabble words and translated them into normal English.
app: in many cases, an extremely limited web browser for your cellphone that only works with one site, as opposed to a proper web browser that works with many sites.
bots: fake, computer-driven profiles masquerading as real humans on, predominantly, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
clean install: something entirely unnecessary, but suggested by tech support people who want to cover up buggy operating systems (q.v. Windows 10).
cloud: hackable online repository of naughty photos of celebrities.
comments’ section: when you see this while surfing, it’s a reminder to leave the web page you are on and make up your own mind.
Facebook: a website where bots live, where post-sharing is intentionally broken to ensure you need to pay for attention. Once paid, your posts are shared with bots, so even fewer humans actually see them.
Facebook friend: (a) a friend; (b) a total stranger; (c) a bot.
Google: (a) a virtual hole into which you dump all your private information, to be sold on to corporations, but feel good doing it because you gave it up to a private company to use against you rather than have the state take it to use against you; (b) a cult that supports (a), whose members will think you have a degenerative brain disease if you dare question the perfection of their god.
malware scanner: malware (especially when offered by Facebook, q.v.).
messenger app: an inefficient messaging program where typing takes 10 times as long as on a desktop or laptop computer. Designed to dissuade you from actually calling the person.
phone: portable computing device, not used to make calls.
remote desktop: when your operating system fails, and the odds of you seeing your familiar screen are remote.
social media: media where people are antisocial.
Twitter: (a) social media with no discernible rules on who gets kicked off and why; (b) where the US president gets angry.
white balance: when racists attack people of colour but pretend they are noble and against racism.
Weibo: a website monitored by the Chinese Communist Party, where users have more freedom than on Facebook and Twitter.
Windows 10: a buggy operating system that requires 10 goes at any updates or patches, hence the name.
Some visiting Australian friends have said that they are finding New Zealand politics as interesting as their own, although I donāt think this was meant as a compliment.
Those of us in New Zealand had a few days of House of Cards-lite intrigue, in that it was stirred up by a conservative whip, in an attempt to take down his party leader. Except it was so much more condensed than the machinations of Francis Urquhart, and, if you were Chinese, Indian or Filipino, in the words of Taika Waititi, it was āracist AFā.
Two of my Tweets garnered hundreds of likes each, which generally doesnāt happen to me, but I am taking that as reinforcing something I truly believe: that most New Zealanders arenāt racist, and that we despise injustices and treating someone differently because of their ethnicity.
Botany MP Jami-Lee Ross and opposition leader Simon Bridgesā phone call, where the former stated that two Chinese MPs were worth more than two Indian ones, drew plenty of thoughts from both communities, where we felt we were treated as numbers, or a political funding source, with none of us actually getting into a National Cabinet (or the Shadow Cabinet) since Pansy Wong was ousted last decadeāmaking you feel that had other Cabinet ministers been held to the same standard, they would have been gone as well. Here was my first Tweet on the subject:
In a bid to win National Party clients, Iām changing my business slogan to āWorth more than my mate Krishna.ā
Thereās the inevitable look back through the history of Chinese New Zealanders, who have largely been humiliated since the gold-mining days by earlier generations, and the Poll Tax, for which an apology came decades after during the previous Labour government.
And the scandal also inspired Tze Ming Mok to write an excellent op-ed for The New Zealand Herald, which I highly recommend here. Itās one of the most intelligent ones on the subject.
Sheās absolutely right: those of us with few connections to the Peopleās Republic of China donāt like being grouped in among them, or treated as though weāre part of the Chinese Communist Party apparatus.
Her research showed that roughly half of Chinese New Zealanders were born on the mainland, and that the group itself is incredibly diverse. My fatherās family fled in 1949 and I was raised in a fairly staunch anti-communist household, images of Sun Yat Sen and the ROC flag emblazoned on my paternal grandfatherās drinking glasses. My mother, despite being born in Hong Kong, grew up behind the Bamboo Curtain and survived the famine, and didnāt have an awful lot of positive things to say about her experiences there, eventually making her way out to her birthplace during her tertiary studies.
Tze Ming writes:
This chilling effect is harming Chinese people in New Zealand. Many people cannot differentiate Chinese people from the actions of the CCP (I mean hey, many people canāt tell a Chinese from a Korean), but this is made worse when hardly any authorities on the topic will address the issue openly. Concerns can only erupt as xenophobia against the Chinese and āAsianā population ā¦
CCP-linked politicians parroting Xi Jinping and promoting Beijingās Belt & Road priorities don’t speak for at least half of us.
āAt leastā is right. My father was born in the mainland where åå ± was a catch-cry in his young adult life. Iām willing to bet thereās an entire, older Chinese-born generation that thinks the same.
She continues:
It’s endlessly irritating and insulting that both Labour and National have lazily assigned Chinese communities as the fiefdoms of politicians openly backed by the Chinese government.
Thatās true, too. In 2014 I was approached by the National Party asking how best to target the Chinese community. My response was to treat us the same as any other New Zealanders. Iām not sure whether the advice was taken on board, as within months I was invited to a Chinese restaurant for a $100-a-head dinner to be in the presence of the Rt Hon John Key, a fund-raiser that was aimed at ethnic Chinese people resident here. It certainly didnāt feel that I was being treated like my white or brown neighbours.
The other point Tze Ming touches on, and one which I have written about myself, is the use of the term Asian in New Zealand.
Let me sum it up from my time here, beginning in 1976, and how I saw the terms being used by others:
1970s: āChineseā meant those people running the groceries and takeaways. Hard working. Good at maths. Not good at politics or being noticed, and Petone borough mayor George Gee was just an anomaly.
1990s: āAsianā became a point of negativity, fuelled by Winston āTwo Wongs donāt make a whiteā Peters. He basically meant Chinese. Itās not a term we claimed at the time, and while some have since tried to reclaim it for themselves to represent the oriental communities (and some, like super-lawyer Mai Chen, have claimed it and rightly extended it to all of Asia), itās used when non-Chinese people whine about us. Itās why āMy best friend is Asianā is racist in more than one way.
2010s: āChineseā means not just the United Front and the Confucius Institute (which has little to do with Confucius, incidentally), but that all Chinese New Zealanders are part of a diaspora with ties to the PRC. And weāre moneyed, apparently, so much that weāve been accused of buying up properties based on a list of āChinese-sounding namesā by Labour in a xenophobic mood. Iāve been asked plenty of times this decade whether I have contacts in Beijing or Shanghai. If youāre born in Hong Kong before July 1, 1997, you were British (well, in a post-Windrush apartheid sense anyway), and unlikely to have any connections behind the Bamboo Curtain, but youāve already been singled out by race.
Now, I donāt want to put a dampener on any Chinese New Zealander who does have ties back to the mainland and the CCP. We share a history and a heritage, and since I wasnāt the one who had any experience of the hardships my parents and grandparents suffered, I donāt have any deep-seated hatred festering away. My father visited the old country in 2003 and put all that behind him, too. A republic is better than the imperial families that had been in charge before, and if I’ve any historical power to dislike, I’d be better off focusing on them. So in some respects, there is āunityā insofar as Iāll stick up for someone of my own race if theyāre the subject of a racist attack. Iāll write about Chinese people and businesses without the derision that others do (e.g. here’s an article on the MG GS SUV that doesn’t go down the Yellow Peril route). But weāre not automatons doing Beijingās bidding.
Iāll lazily take Tze Mingās conclusion in the Herald:
We deserve better than to be trapped between knee-jerk racists and Xi Jinping Thought. Abandoning us to this fate is racism too.
I havenāt even begun to address the blatant sexual harassment that has since emerged as a result of the scandal, but others are far better placed to speak on that.
Iām not familiar with The Anti-Media, but New Zealand-based lawyer Darius Shahtahmasebi, who contributed to the site, notes that it was caught up in the Facebook and Twitter purge last week. The Anti-Media, he notes, had 2Ā·17 million Facebook followers. āSupposedly, Facebook wants you to believe that 2.17 million people voluntarily signed up to our page just to receive all the spam content that we put out there (sounds realistic),ā he wrote in RT.
After Facebook removed the page, Twitter followed suit and suspended their account.
Not only that, Shahtahmasebi notes that Anti-Media team members had their Twitter accounts purged as well. Its editor in chief received this message: āCareyWedler has been suspended for violating the Twitter Rules. Specifically, for:ā. That was it. Sheās none the wiser on what violation had been committed.
But here are the real kickers: their social manager had access to 30 accounts, and Twitter was able to coordinate the suspension of 29 of them, while their chief creative officer had his removed, including accounts he had never used. The Anti-Media Radio account suffered a similar fate, Twitter claiming it was due to āmultiple or repeat violations of the Twitter rulesāāand it had no Tweets.
Shahtahmasebi has his theories on what was behind all of this. It does give my theories over the years a lot of weight: namely that Facebook targets individuals and its ārulesā are applied with no reference to actual stated policies. Essentially, the company lies. Twitter has been digging itself more deeply into a hole of late, and itās very evident now, even if you didnāt want to admit it earlier, that it operates on the same lines. Google I have covered before, some might think ad nauseam.
One of his conclusions: āThere is nothing much that can be done unless enough people take a principled stand against such a severe level of censorship.ā In some cases, including one Tweeter I followed, it has been to vote with oneās feet, and leave these spaces to continue their descent without us.
I think the signs of a departure from Twitter are all there. Certainly on a cellphone there’s little point to it any more. As of last week, this began happening.
If you donāt seesee me on Twitter as often, itās becausebecause itāsitās no longer compatible withwith the Swype keyboardkeyboard on my phonephone. I canātcanāt be botheredbothered correcting faults createdcrcreated by technologytechnology and not me. Other sites are fine.
That last sentence refers only to the fact that Twitter is the only website on the planet where the keyboard is incompatible. (Thanks to Andrew McPherson for troubleshooting this with me.) Other sites are buggy, too: earlier today I couldn’t delete something from Instagram (being owned by Facebook means all the usual Facebook databasing problems are creeping in), and one video required four upload attempts before it would be visible to others:
I couldn’t reply on the Facebook website to a direct message (clicking in the usual typing field does nothing, and typing does nothing) except in image form, so I sent my friend this:
Earlier this year, many friends began experiencing trouble with their Facebook comments: the cursor would jump back to the beginning of text fields, pushing the first few characters they typed to the end. Others are complaining of bugs more and more oftenāreminds me of where I was four or five years ago. And we all now know about Facebook bots, four years after I warned of an ‘epidemic’.
It’s as I always expected: those of us who use these sites more heavily encounter the bugs sooner. Vox was the same: I left a year before Six Apart closed it down, and the bugs I encountered could never be fixed. I’m actually going through a similar battle with Amazon presently, blog post to come.
Now, since Mastodon and others work perfectly fine, and there’s no end of trouble to Big Tech, it’s inevitable that we jump ship, isn’t it?
