• Apeman42@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1162·
    9 months ago

    So, when you remove what I assume is an announcement bot and lizard people from the equation, the answer is George Takei? Yeah, that sounds about right.

    • gedaliyah@lemmy.worldEnglish
      20118·
      9 months ago

      So, when you remove what I assume is an announcement bot and lizard people from the equation, the answer is George Takei? Yeah, that sounds about right.

      I don’t like threads at all, but referring to Mark Zuckerberg and Adam Mosseri as “lizard people” is pretty antisemitic, especially since they are both Jewish people.

      I’m guessing that you were unfamiliar with this antisemitic dogwhistle, but I also understand that’s the point of a dogwhistle - It doesn’t sound racist unless you already know about it.

      Here are a few links to learn more:

      https://www.businessinsider.com/lizard-people-conspiracy-theory-origin-nashville-bomber-qanon-2021-1

      https://www.tiktok.com/@bookersquared/video/7144513038274661675

      • db2@lemmy.world
        8016·
        9 months ago

        Or just possibly it hasn’t got anything to do with Jewish people. This might come as a shock but not everything does.

        This is from someone with a reasonable amount of that heritage telling you to shut the hell up already. You’re not the main character.

        • PolydoreSmith@lemmy.world
          1617·
          9 months ago

          You’re talking out your ass. Do some research on David Icke, the dude who started the whole lizard people thing. Dude is an antisemite.

          • db2@lemmy.world
            215·
            9 months ago

            Henry Ford had a portrait of Hitler on the wall by his desk, doesn’t mean I’m not going to drive cars.

            • LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com
              146·
              9 months ago

              Nah, but you can recognise that his social/political thought and language used to express that is not something you should repeat mindlessly and accept and be appreciative of criticism when its given so you can correct future behaviour to make the world a more welcoming place for all. Right?

        • gedaliyah@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1645·
          9 months ago

          Calm down there achi. You’re coming in with a lot of pretty unnecessary defensive energy. I’m just letting people know about some language that is harmful to a vulnerable minority in case they want to avoid it. You feel free to do with that information what you need.

          • db2@lemmy.world
            1217·
            9 months ago

            Vulnerable. Sure.

            I blocked you though so how am I even seeing your silly reply?

        • PolydoreSmith@lemmy.world
          1111·
          9 months ago

          The article (correctly) names David Icke within the second paragraph or so. That dude popularized the “lizard people” thing and he is EXTREMELY antisemitic. This the whole point of a dogwhistle; it leaves room for plausible deniability. See also: Alex Jones.

          So, sorry friend, try again.

      • Cosmicomical@lemmy.world
        122·
        9 months ago

        Never heard this take before, lizard people has always been the upper class of non-human psychopath rulers and billionaires. I won’t stop using the term in that sense, certainly using tiktok and business insider as sources adds credibility to all this.

        Then of course, if you ACTUALLY believe they are lizard people, you may have bigger problems.

      • squid_slime@lemmy.world
        41·
        9 months ago

        So people calling the British royal family lizards are actually calling them Jewish?

        I like lizard people being a term to put down the upper class.

        • Mouselemming@sh.itjust.works
          155·
          9 months ago

          Mosseri has dual US/Israel citizenship, and Zuckerberg was raised Reform and has Jewish ancestry. So whether or not that’s why you despise them, the point about the dog whistle is legit. Maybe you should edit it to something more befitting the reasons you despise them. Be creatively critical!

          • Leate_Wonceslace@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            813·
            9 months ago

            the point about the dog whistle is legit.

            No, it isn’t; a dogwhistle is a message that isn’t detectable by someone unaware of it. Using lizard person like that isn’t an antisemitic dog whistle because people have been using it to disparagingly refer to the wealthy/politicians/etc. irrespective of their heritage for decades at the very least. Whether the term used to be used a specific way, or even how it originated isn’t actually relevant to the question.

            Basically what I’m saying is you need to calm down and figure out the difference between being woke and being a wokescold. It’s hard to strike that ballance, but the first step is realizing you haven’t done it yet.

            • LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com
              91·
              9 months ago

              He’s correct and the more defensive you get the more I feel like you just wanna keep using the term. This is coming from someone who didn’t know any of this and won’t use the term in the future. I can always call Zucc a robot instead 🤖

              • Leate_Wonceslace@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
                1·
                9 months ago

                I asked some friends what they thought, and one of them mentioned they were accused of being antisemitic for doing exactly that. So what is true about the lizard joke that’s definitely not true about the robot one that you think determines antisemitism?

            • Mouselemming@sh.itjust.works
              83·
              9 months ago

              Hahaha, I think the only person getting worked up here is yourself. I mean really, what’s cringier than “wokescold”? Next you’ll be calling me a “wokewitch.” For the high crime of checking Wikipedia. Put down the torch and pitchfork, sweetie, you’ll hurt yourself.

              • Leate_Wonceslace@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
                4·
                9 months ago

                Yeah, things like calling me “sweetie” and implying that my mild criticism is me acting like you committed a high crime are not exactly going to change my mind. Telling other people what to do based on a misplaced notion of what’s harmful is exactly what I mean. It reminds me of that really creepy phase of internet discourse when a large ammount of people started insisting on saying “Latinx” as a gender-neutral inclusive version of “latino” or “latina”. The worst part about that was it was an exonym that was being forced on a minority community by a bunch of white liberals who had a notion of what was wrong with someone else’s culture and were actively trying to fix it. So instead of being slightly annoying and unhelpful they were being actively harmful in their ignorance. BTW, for anyone wondering: I’ve learned through speaking with people that the preferred term is “Latine”.

                Now, obviously the same damage is not being done in this instance, but it illustrates why I’m saying this, and shows the dangers of bandwagoning as soon as you think something might be perpetuating oppression. No doubt that it’s good to be aware of how our behavior affects others and to adjust accordingly, but what I see here is people defending a billionaire against a term by saying that it’s antisemitic without being educated on it by the wider Jewish community beforehand, and so I find it largely unconvincing. If I see further discourse about it I’ll investigate, and if one of my friends starts talking to me about it I’ll heed their concerns. However, a small number of strangers on the internet saying something isn’t enough to change my mind, especially not without a good argument.

                • Mouselemming@sh.itjust.works
                  16·
                  9 months ago

                  There’s billions of reasons to hate those guys that have nothing to do with their religion.

                  And using “woke” as a pejorative? Woke is simply having basic human decency and a modicum of common sense, so nobody who finds it used about them really minds. “Scold” has been used for centuries to shove outspoken and/or educated women into submission. It’s a label I’ll be proud to wear.

                  As for your defending dehumanization, and calling some people’s attempts to be gender-inclusive “creepy” rather than simply ungrammatical? Gee, sorry you find even the merest reference to anything other than heterosexual-male humanity so icky you can’t even.

                  Supporting the Reptilian Conspiracy puts you squarely in the same camp as David Icke, follower of Robert E. Howard, who referred to the “Kosher Nostra” and said powerful men in the Bible couldn’t have been really Jewish, but must have been “Aryan, like myself.”

                  You’ve told us who you are, and I believe you.

    • WeirdAlex03@lemmy.zipEnglish
      34·
      9 months ago

      Well @zuck (and @mosseri) are from Threads and, like @Mastodon, it makes sense a lot of people would first choose to follow the top leaders. I imagine the majority of those are actually legitimate users, though the Threads bubble also very quickly popped, so who knows how many are still active

  • Vespair@lemm.ee
    511·
    9 months ago

    I will never understand why people follow “celebrities” on social media. Isn’t life already forcefully inundated with these overly self-important assholes as is? This is the same to me as people who go on YouTube to watch commercials; I just cannot fathom the appeal

    • VeganCheesecake@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      15·
      9 months ago

      Depends on the celebrity. Neil Gaiman is actually pretty chill online. Takei too, but the amount of articles he posts started to annoy me, so I dumped him. I don’t really know what people see in Zuck, though.

    • daltotron@lemmy.world
      4·
      9 months ago

      I mean, how else do you propose to organize the sea of information that the internet is constantly swamped in? Individual personalities work as a pretty consistently navigable waypoint and information gatekeeper, a pretty decent filtration mechanism. Most other methods are somewhat vulnerable to corruption over time, or are less consistent, or demand higher maintenance for different tradeoffs.

    • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2·
      9 months ago

      On Twitter, I can see it. I always thought Twitter was a great place to do things like “Performing LIVE at the astro dome 2/31/2024! Tickets on sale now!” I could see following your favorite bands or comedians or whatever.

  • 𝔼𝕩𝕦𝕤𝕚𝕒@lemmy.world
    402·
    9 months ago

    What does this even mean, I can’t “follow” users on Jerboa. Is this some shit zuck added to his specific Threads then wanks about how he has all the followers?

    • Baŝto@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      68·
      9 months ago

      Lemmy doesn’t work like that, lemmy is about communities and you can join communities here. But Mastodon, PixelFed and PeerTube don’t work like that, they are about people posting stuff and therefore you follow people.

      • masterspace@lemmy.caEnglish
        562·
        9 months ago

        Its fundamentally weirder and more problematic to build your news feed around people rather than topics.

        • LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com
          104·
          9 months ago

          Not to normies who are people people and love short form posts by “thought leaders” or more realistically celebrities and corpo brands (like sports teams or Taylor swift) they want to ape or consume products of.

          They never visited forums and got on the internet through mobile phones and Facebook, so the format of Reddit is strange and unfamiliar to them.

          It’s always been this way and it’s why twitter was/is way more popular than Reddit, the naturally pseudonymous throwaway nature of Reddit accs made it all seem too impersonal for most people.

          They probably see the internet as a whole as a negative and they think everyone is just there for ads and twitter and getting their dopamine systems hijacked instead of just actually wanting to be here and getting some kind of value out of it. All protests to the contrary are only seen as proof of their own theories.

          Everyone who’s interested in tech be it fediverse, cryptocurrency or godforbid AI to them must be in it to make money because no normal person is interested in anything other than people and therefore must be a musk/zucc fan and is thus branded a tech bro.

          These people vote in elections.

        • GoodEye8@lemm.eeEnglish
          6·
          9 months ago

          Following individuals is weird, but being able to follow certain news outlets is less weird because then you’re creating your news feed around sources of news. Building around topics can lead to unreliable sources and people have to be more critical of what they read, which should be a good thing but in reality most people aren’t critical of the source.

          That said, I prefer making topics central because it supports community building whereas making people/outlets central makes it a cult of personality/company.

        • Churbleyimyam@lemm.ee
          3·
          9 months ago

          One of my favorite things about Pixelfed is being able to view a feed of only particular hashtags.

        • daltotron@lemmy.world
          22·
          9 months ago

          I don’t necessarily think so. Following individuals (granted that you are actually doing so, and not following just an individual’s “brand”) is kind of a better way to guarantee that you’re going to get a consistent perspective. If you just followed topics, oh, here’s this perspective, this perspective, this perspective, ahhh, and it all becomes so much noise. Now you have to engage with the kind of, surface level summation of so many people’s cited sources and comments. It becomes harder to judge, potentially, harder to understand.

          It’s like if you were trying to find a good video game to play.

          You could search by genre, right, or, by “topic”, and that might get you some stuff that’s similar, but if you’ve ever tried to browse the steam store by just tags alone, you’ll find pretty quick how useless it is.

          So, maybe you go by publisher, or, likewise, by magazine, by news site. That might be decent, for finding similar games, through a publisher, right, but it’s kind of a toss-up. If you like street fighter 6, it’s a toss up whether or not you like any of capcom’s other games. Same thing could be said of most publishers. And I don’t think you’re going to find consistent perspectives, necessarily, from kotaku, or even really useful information. It is the kind of, MO of a news company to flatten every journalists’ output into a kind of unified, easily consumable, inoffensive package, to bump up readership numbers and ensure they keep getting review copies, and ensure they keep hitting deadlines that line up with, or come a day or two before, release dates.

          So, then you just go to one singular journalist. Now you can trust their perspective, now you can understand their tastes and where they line up with you and where they don’t. What they are possibly more predisposed towards reviewing. This is easier if they’re a private entity, rather than part of a larger model. Or, you could start following a single studio, or a single developer. Now you can understand what they are likely to produce in the future, as viewed through the lens of their past catalogue. Do they produce point and clicks? First person horror? Do they make games with particular subject matters that you find fascinating, or do they just have a kind of vibe that you like?

          So that’s kind of why it would make sense to follow specific people, instead of just kind of, crowdsourcing your topics, and then following those collectively defined topics. One will give you the more consistent set of answers about what you’re looking for, one will give you a much broader net, and maybe will inform you more of the “cultural zeitgeist”, insofar as it exists among people who also want to make posts on those topics, to people who only want to follow those topics, and not follow the posters themselves. And I would, broadly, say the consistency is more important than “accuracy”, not that I think you’re going to get either from following topics and not people.

      • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        3·
        9 months ago

        It was one of the things I don’t miss from Reddit. “u/PM_Me_Your_Spleen has followed you.” Peachy fucking keen, another dimwit for the block list.