r/technology • u/RunDNA • Nov 15 '24

Social Media Stephen King leaves X, describing atmosphere as "too toxic"

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/nov/15/stephen-king-quits-x-atmosphere-too-toxic
50.4k Upvotes

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2.7k

u/Octavian_96 Nov 15 '24

Glad to see so many people leaving that platform

1.5k

u/BlackBlizzard Nov 15 '24

Annoying that it took them this long, Elon has owned it for over two years now.

290

u/gottago_gottago Nov 15 '24

Platforms seem to die "at first slowly, and then all at once", and they can be peculiar in that they often never entirely die, they just linger -- so then people get into pointless arguments about whether it's actually dead or not.

107

u/itsmythingiguess Nov 15 '24

I used to post on a gaming forum in the early 2000s.

If you're old, our claim to fame is finding the "devils face" in the the twin towers smoke.

CNN ended up linking directly to our forum which absolutely destroyed the server bandwidth. We asked them to rehost it. CNN ignored the request.

So the photo was changed server side to be GOATSE. And that's how we goatse'd CNNs viewers for a couple hours. Oddly enough, they decided rehosting wasn't that hard after all.

If you're really old, you might remember a meme/ytmnd-esque short created on that forum, "all your base are belong to us"

Which is all a long way of saying that today that once thriving forum of gamers has the same 20 people for the last 15+ years refusing to leave. Every couple years I check it out and find out that , yep, still here. Probably won't die until the remaining users do

Reddit killed forums. Hopefully something kills reddit.

26

u/gottago_gottago Nov 15 '24

Hey now. I don't feel old.

I remember both! I was not on that particular forum but both of those spilled out into things I was on at the time. Image hotlinking was a big ol' kerfuffle and for a moment goatse was a common countermeasure. I think jwz still uses it for anyone hitting his site with HN in their referrer.

But while we're comparing notes, I occasionally still pop in to one of the IRC channels I spent entirely too much time on back in, uh, 1995? ...and a couple of the regulars have still been there. DalNet is still online, but ever so much quieter than it once was.

4

u/75Meatbags Nov 16 '24

a few of us are still in one of the undernet channels that is the default for some old Mac IRC clients. It's always fun when somebody with a pirated version of ircle pops in.

15

u/Meat_Robot Nov 15 '24

Oh geez, I remember my band director showing a small group of us that "All Your Base" video

11

u/mrnotoriousman Nov 15 '24

I had an all your base T-shirt in 2004. Almost nobody got the reference lol

1

u/sirbissel Nov 15 '24

A group of teens got my hometown stirred up because they put a few flyers up...

1

u/excaliburxvii Nov 15 '24

I miss those days, when it was a niche. I bet most people who got the reference had other things in common with you too.

2

u/mrnotoriousman Nov 15 '24

Yeah one was actually one of my professors which was funny

8

u/[deleted] Nov 15 '24 edited Nov 26 '24

[removed] — view removed comment

11

u/itsmythingiguess Nov 15 '24

Tribalwar. It was a gaming forum based around the FPS game, Tribes.

Not to be confused with tribal wars

1

u/GermanBeerYum Nov 16 '24

Best FPS game ever made, in my not-so-humble opinion.

If there's an afterlife, I'd wish mine could be spent just zooming around in OG Tribes, zipping around in light armor and a jetpack, sniping from the clouds.

Man, I miss that game.

3

u/Dramatic_Buddy4732 Nov 15 '24

Omg that was you!!

3

u/BlooregardQKazoo Nov 15 '24

All Your Base can't be THAT old, I was already in college when it came out! Next you're going to tell me that Bonzai Kittens is old.

2

u/Mr_YUP Nov 15 '24

I understand why people miss forums but I had such a hard time navigating them and following the conversation that was happening. I know reddit has its own issues but I can follow a convo on a post a lot easier.

2

u/[deleted] Nov 15 '24

That song still slaps to this day. A few months ago I sent it to someone who'd never heard of it.

I miss old Internet.

2

u/ResolverOshawott Nov 15 '24

Reddit IS by itself an evolution of a forum, I doubt anything can kill it at this point unless they fumble as hard as Twitter did.

2

u/lelgimps Nov 15 '24

digg fell. reddit can fall.

1

u/Spram2 Nov 15 '24

I have stairs in my house, yet I am not protected.

2

u/itsmythingiguess Nov 15 '24

Something Awful was always literally awful.

Nothing original came out of SA, ever.

2

u/rigabamboo Nov 15 '24

But- P-P-P-Powerbook?!

1

u/Spram2 Nov 15 '24

I agree they were awful but they came up with a lot of stuff. Most famous might be Slender Man.

1

u/Poon_Dragoon Nov 15 '24

Oh my god ytmnd unlocked some memories for me

1

u/Fritja Nov 15 '24

I still follow some of the old school boards.

1

u/Manlysideburns Nov 15 '24

I miss the days of ytmnd. My expectations for internet content werent as high as today and people would just make random 3 second jokes. My favorite were the misheard lyrics posts. When I hear Kelly clarksons miss independent and can't help but hear "what happened to my cinnamon buns?"

1

u/[deleted] Nov 16 '24 edited Feb 20 '25

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This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

1

u/CrumbCakesAndCola Nov 16 '24

Reddit is dead, long live Reddit

75

u/atreides_hyperion Nov 15 '24

Very true. They enter into a lower energy state and in the quantum flux they pop in and out of existence in a way that makes them seem almost real, but not quite real either.

This process continues until an observer interrupts its causality and at which point the waveform collapses and you end up with FARK.com

14

u/gottago_gottago Nov 15 '24

...and then "hilarity ensues".

Thanks for reminding me of fark. :-)

3

u/Perslue Nov 15 '24

It's a streetlamp...

2

u/VIPERsssss Nov 15 '24

FREE GORGOR!

2

u/Xenophonii10 Nov 16 '24

All we are left with is the hawking radiation of media marketing accounts and scammers

9

u/Hellknightx Nov 15 '24

Poor MySpace. Kicked off the whole social media craze, then got surpassed by Facebook. Tom took his paycheck and sailed off into the sunset.

7

u/poeir Nov 15 '24

The Internet is a global system of distributed, interconnected computer networks that—for some reason—keeps aggregating into centralized hubs with complete disregard of John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton's admonition.

2

u/Hellknightx Nov 15 '24

Well, you know what they say:

"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

-Some British dude, probably

1

u/motoxim Nov 16 '24

I can respect that. I would probably do the same.

2

u/worotan Nov 15 '24

Also, people think they can get away with not bothering to do the obviously right and necessary thing, until it’s too late.

See also our response to climate change.

2

u/ooMEAToo Nov 15 '24

Reminds me of an old text based game I used to play and really enjoy called Earth2025 it switched to www.earthempires.com now. It was pretty big but slowly died as the internet grew however there are still a few thousand players that will probably die with that game and that game will die with them. Sad actually.

2

u/JakeVonFurth Nov 15 '24

they can be peculiar in that they often never entirely die, they just linger

Just look at this shit hole. I miss when Ellen Pao was the worst thing about Reddit.

1

u/Wookovski Nov 15 '24

RIP Myspace..... or don't

1

u/The-Snuff Nov 15 '24

If they “seem to” and it’s “often” then there’s nothing “peculiar” about it

1

u/twalkerp Nov 16 '24

Apparently Disney and others are now advertising on X again. And X had crazy high numbers for politics. I don’t think it’s going anywhere for a while.

1

u/ciarandevlin182 Nov 16 '24

X is generating more money now than five years ago when it was twitter.

1

u/Aknelka Nov 16 '24

I mean, LiveJournal is still around.

0

u/BadTeamSupporter Nov 15 '24

Sounds oddly familiar to Reddit

3

u/flif Nov 15 '24

I would say SlashDot or Digg.

0

u/SuperTropicalDesert Nov 15 '24

You don't even know whether it has reached that inflection point yet

-7

u/LegNo2304 Nov 15 '24

Lol it isn't dying at all. Reddit has been certain of this for years. Hasn't happened.

Stephen King is just a reply guy on Twitter now lol. His whole thing is simply posting anti trump tweets.

Now he has realized nobody cares.

Twitter isn't going to die because the reddit crowd leaves it lol. The fact there is diverse opinion and no censorship. Is exactly why it will always be at the top.

Bluesky is just another attempt to make a social network where the left can censor opinions they don't like under the guise of being anti hate. It's a purpose built echo chamber for a declining identidy politics driven user base. 

6

u/Daetra Nov 15 '24

The fact there is diverse opinion and no censorship

As long as you don't use technical terms like cis, of course.

1

u/LegNo2304 Nov 16 '24

You don't get banned for that lol. That just shows you don't actively use it.

Twitter is a fucking cesspit. On all sides. Anti semitism has exploded on there by causal lefties. Whatever hate you want you will find it on there

The reason it still survives is people want to have a place to go find people from the other side and abuse each other

-1

u/Antique_Department61 Nov 15 '24

"any day now theyre going to go out of business guys, trust me I saw it on reddit"