Community? What's that?

xrayspx's picture
Music: 

Jack Burton and the Lo Pans

I've had a bunch of people suggest that I post "content" and be a "YouTuber" and join the Retro Community and whatever.

I have never been interested in any community aspect to the Internet which doesn't involve face to face hacking on cool shit and putting it on the Internet. I can do that here and I really don't care about "engagement", "views", other people's opinions, or any of the rest. This is because I have no interest in dealing with the noise generated by other humans.

I recently posted to Nextdoor to ask whether anyone owns the stray cat we hang out with every day. The words "I want to make sure I'm not accidentally stealing your cat" should have clued readers in that absent anyone else, we'll take him in, get him neutered and all the rest. No one piped up that he was theirs, but then again, not that many people on the platform, so I can't take the lack of a positive answer to mean that no one owns this guy. However what it DID get me was two visits from people, with cat carriers, coming to collect their free cat.

At YouTube they do things a bit differently. They add the element of Scorched Earth. If there was one aspect of YouTube that I would deem the "Most damaging" it's the very democratized nature Google have worked to bake into it.

Think of it like there being one record label. All bands are on this label. The huge, established, old stadium acts like Kiss have a very different experience and ethical stance from Minor Threat, but they're labelmates nonetheless. As long as everyone is producing content and keeping their heads down, things go relatively smoothly. Then Ted Nugent puts out a record. Now you have Ian Mackaye putting out singles trashing fascism and decrying Nugent as a racist child sex abuser. Which is all correct. And since "get money" is not the top priority of the punk guys, they're happy to stand on principle and burn their album sales to the ground because Rule #1 is "Fight the Bad Guys, Always".

Then the punks start demanding Gene Simmons, as an established senior voice of the community also come out and