Watching these guys twist in the harsh reality that nobody actually wants to hear from them is rather gratifying. "It's not a free speech platform!" Gab is a fr

Watching these guys twist in the harsh reality that nobody actually wants to hear from them is rather gratifying. "It's not a free speech platform!" Gab is a free speech platform, and truth.social, right? If simple free speech on a platform was all they were after, they would simply be posting there, it seems to me. So, what could it be, other than free speech, that they are looking for on these sites? Could it be... legitimacy? We know they want reach of course, but quite a lot of the world has made it clear they prefer to be out of their reach, including a lot of companies that understand who is actually buying their products and services. Forcing oneself in front of eyeballs, on the old internet we called that spamming and regarded it as the lowest form of bad behavior. Well, other than sharing CSAM, they were definitely the lowest. But the spammers, they're actually people who are probably not into images of child abuse for their own enjoyment, but would think nothing of trafficking in them in order to make money. True story actually, by the way - I know a guy who used to run warez servers waaaay back, and sometime in the mid-aughts he went to jail because one of his servers had a bunch of the bad kind of nasties on it. I don't know whether he was secretly into that during the brief period that I played warcraft at his place or whether he just got used by some random scumbag, I haven't talked to him since a long time before that story made its way round to me. These people all achieved their momentary delusion of legitimacy through behavior that they would describe as "clever" or "effective" or some other value-free chessboard assessment whereby they identified that a gameable system was being used as a source of truth, and set to gaming it. Their actions were the catalyst for a lot of people waking up to the reality that we can never trust our communities to capital, because capital will always choose the money over the ethics, every single time. Welcome, nazis, to The Great Smartening Up.