#oneaday Day 245: Unplug

It is the end of what has been a long and stressful week, but I think today was actually reasonably productive, so hopefully next week I will feel a bit better about things. I still want to take a bit of time off sometime soon, but I'm feeling somewhat less in the "I need to get out right now" panic that I feel like I was in the other evening.

I mean, don't get me wrong, the world is still burning around me, but at least in my own little haven of calm here, things are pretty peaceful. Andie is painting the stairs, the cats are sitting either side of me napping, I have no other commitments besides this blog this evening, and I don't have to get up tomorrow if I don't want to. Not a lot to complain about there, really.

It's important to take a step back from the chaos of life in the 21st century every now and again and consider How Things Really Are. A good means of visualising this is imagining what life would be like if you unplugged the Internet and had no means of being contacted besides someone calling you on your phone or stopping by your house. If you can look at your life from that perspective and see that things are, for the most part, Okay, then you should probably do your best to keep seeing things from that angle when you plug the Ethernet cable back in.

Because ultimately, as shit as some of the stuff going on in the world can be, there's little you can probably do about it, particularly if you're far away from the Bad Things. Take the situation in America, for example; I am concerned for the safety and wellbeing of the people I know over there, of course, but practically speaking, there's absolutely nothing I can do to affect that whole situation. Things are different for those in the middle of that whole shitshow, of course — and I'm gratified to see that at least some folks are waking up to the fact that posting disapproving messages on a social network is not the same as getting out there and Doing Activism — but from where I'm sitting, all I can really do is be a supportive ear if people need it and not be a jerk to those who are Dealing With Shit.

It's difficult to keep your mind trained to think in this way, particularly when the buzz of Online is always there, encouraging you to check in on things and "just see how bad things have gotten". You can tell yourself all you want that you're doing it because you find it darkly humorous rather than utterly terrifying, but deep down, you, of course, know that all you're doing is deliberately and wilfully making your own mood darker for no real discernible benefit to your life as a whole.

That may sound callous. That may sound uncaring. But at some point you have to disconnect. At some point you have to focus on yourself and the people directly around you. At some point you have to remember that as enriching and fulfilling and exciting as an online life can be, it will always have to play second fiddle to your Real Life. Your Real Life is in the here and now, surrounding you, defining you. Your online life can be made to go away by just pulling out that Ethernet cable. And, as long as you haven't stumbled into any situations where your online life has seeped into your Real Life — which is an increasing risk these days, I will concede — you can just go about your day.

That's what I'm going to attempt to keep telling myself, anyway. The alternative just feels like perpetual misery.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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#oneaday Day 244: Is "best practice" the enemy of expression?

I, as you probably know, have a YouTube channel. I have had it for a grand total of about seventeen years at the time of writing, though I would say I've only really been actively, semi-regularly using it since about 2018, initially to host video versions of a podcast I was doing, and subsequently to kick off the series that I'm still running in one form or another to this day.

Over the course of those 17 years, I have picked up just over 3,600 subscribers at the time of writing, with the vast majority of those showing up since 2018. While that is obviously a drop in the ocean compared to big, successful channels out there, I am pleased with it, and honestly I don't particularly want my channel to grow any faster.

In order to acquire those 3,600 subscribers, I have done… nothing particularly special, to be perfectly honest. I have steadfastly ignored the advice of YouTube "gurus" to pursue trends, to be clickbaity with titles and thumbnails, and to "edit for engagement". In short, I consistently reject what is supposed "best practice" in favour of just doing whatever the hell I want — and I have seen some success doing just that. Could I see more success if I was following the supposed "rules" to the letter? Quite possibly. But then I don't think my channel would be mine any more.

One of the things I object to most about online culture in general these days — not just YouTube, but this applies all over — is how no-one really seems to have a personality any more. Everyone says the same things, everyone responds to things in the same way, everyone uses the same bank of reaction GIFs when they can't be bothered to use their words. In YouTube, this is best exemplified by the way you could watch five randomly chosen videos from five moderately sized channels, and I bet you'd hear the exact same sound effects and music clips, and see the exact same visual memes, in at least half of them — if not all of them.

This is because these things, supposedly, work. But in using that "best practice", you are eliminating a lot of the soul from your own work. You're making something that caters to the mysterious "algorithm" — or rather, an imaginary audience — rather than expressing yourself, as yourself. It's the same with the way people talk to one another online; because those reaction GIFs and snippy retorts like "skill issue" are universally understood by everyone, everyone uses them because they're seen as an efficient means of communication.

But, again, there's no personality there. Any time someone comes out with "skill issue" or "tourist" or whatever the derogatory term-du-jour is, I lose all interest in getting to know that person, just as I lose interest in a YouTube video the moment they start busting out the Metal Gear Solid alert noise, The X-Files theme and Spongebob "a few moments later" interstitial cards… and just as, at some point in the last 20 years, you've probably lost interest in someone who won't shut up about bacon, won't stop saying "the cake is a lie" or thinks declaring that pineapple on pizza is "weird" is a daring and brave opinion to express.

People like that don't have a personality of their own; their personality is The Internet, Circa 2025. And, as we've pretty comprehensively established at this point, The Internet, Circa 2025 is not someone you'd want to bring home to meet your parents. It's someone who deserves to be kicked into a ditch 50 miles from the nearest town and left to rot.

So, as much as there are probably things I could do "better" with my YouTube channel, I choose not to do them. I don't feel the need to. I didn't create that channel to be famous, I didn't create that channel to be a huge "thing", I created it as a means of expressing myself and sharing my own, personal enthusiasm for things that are important to me. That's it. That 3,600 people like what I do enough to want to follow it without me resorting to "best practice" says something to me: it says "if you're happy, just keep doing what you're doing".

So that's what I intend to do.

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#oneaday Day 243: I think I'm stressed

I think I am, as the title says, stressed. I yelled at the robot vacuum cleaner earlier because it was being a dimwit and chewing up loose threads rather than going back to its charging base. I get infuriated by stupid little acts of clumsiness that really shouldn't be as annoying as I am feeling they are right now. And at work today I felt more overwhelmed than I've felt for a long time, for a variety of reasons.

I probably just need a good break to get away from… everything, so I'm going to see about getting a bit of time off in the not-too-distant future. Everything just feels like… a lot to deal with right now, and I'm not coping with it very well. It's the combination of a particularly busy patch at work, coupled with a few annoying specific stressors related to that (which I won't go into now), with The Situation in the world (particularly America) piled on top of that, and a general sense of helpless frustration at how, with every passing day, I feel less and less like I really "belong" in the world we're apparently building.

Take the AI thing. As time goes on, more and more people seem to have resigned themselves to the fact that the lake-boiling plagiarism machines don't appear to be going away, so we "might as well" embrace them because you shouldn't get "left behind". As far as I'm concerned, the ones being "left behind" are the ones wilfully giving up their own skills — and the opportunity to learn new ones — in favour of typing a fucking prompt into a dumbshit autocorrect that hallucinates complete bullshit a statistically significant proportion of the time.

Earlier on, someone posted (mockingly, thankfully) a "tool" that allowed people to generate Bluesky posts using AI. If you're too much of a lazy cunt to think of 280 characters you want to share on a social network, you shouldn't be using that social network. Now, granted, I absolutely fucking hate the vast majority of the time I have to spend doing social media posts for work, but I'm still not going to use AI to generate them, because I know it'll be just as much work checking through all the dross it produces to ensure it's not saying anything fucking stupid or completely fabricated.

I checked in on LinkedIn for the first time in like 15 years the other day, and was horrified to see how much generative AI is all over the place on that platform. LinkedIn is already a place that joy goes to die, so it doesn't surprise me to see tools for generating vapid slop placed front and centre there. I can't think of anywhere I want to hang out less. It was already insufferable before people could just get a machine to generate their "inspirational" posts about what the coffee they had that morning taught them about B2B sales, and now… God.

I'm wound up, I'm irritable, and I just want to… escape for a bit. So once I've dealt with my most pressing commitments, I'll be doing everything I can to ensure that I can take a bit of time to get my shit together and calm down a bit. Because feeling like this probably isn't good for me. I've seen the endpoint of feeling like this, and it's not pretty. I don't want to end up there again.

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#oneaday Day 240: Fair and Balanced Critique

Hello! First of all, here:

That's the first of the two videos I recorded this weekend. Please enjoy a full playthrough of King's Quest II: Romancing the Throne on Atari ST.

Part of the reason I'd felt inspired to play this (and Space Quest) this weekend is because I've been watching the videos of a channel called Space Quest Historian. This is a chap who absolutely loves adventure games, but had little experience with the King's Quest series prior to a donation drive on his Patreon, where he said he would play through each and every King's Quest game for reaching various donation milestones. He also doesn't really like "fantasy" as a genre.

I have been absolutely loving his entertainingly scathing teardowns of the King's Quest games, and I adore those games for the most part. And I've been racking my brains trying to think why I'm enjoying these vids so much when sometimes I feel oddly upset and defensive when someone is negative about something I love.

And it all comes down to intent. Space Quest Historian isn't malicious about these games at all, even when ripping them a new one for their more absurd elements. Instead, he's inviting us to be in on the joke; inviting those unfamiliar and existing fans alike to come along on a ride where he entertainingly points out all the ridiculous things in these games. And, to be clear, as a fan of King's Quest, I can quite happily admit that there are a lot of ridiculous things in those games.

Where this differs from, say, reviews of Japanese stuff that have upset me in the past, is that Space Quest Historian is not being mean about these games, nor is he being mean about the people who like them. He's not suggesting that you are a bad person for liking the games, nor is he suggesting that you are wrong for liking the games; instead, he is simply providing some light-hearted commentary in a series of videos that it should be abundantly clear from the very opening seconds should not be considered serious critique or analysis. And he's often the first to say as much.

Compare and contrast that approach with, say, reviews of Japanese games that outright call people who like them paedophiles, or suggest that people who enjoy a particular series are sex pests, or that they only like anime women because no real woman would ever want to touch them. That crosses a line. That's mean, and uncalled for. All of the games I'm thinking of with those examples have plenty about them that can be poked fun at, but without it being at the expense of those who genuinely love them and have found meaning in them.

It can be a fine line, of course, between being hyperbolically nitpicky about something and the audience feeling like you're attacking it. And indeed, some commenters on Space Quest Historian's channel feel he veers too far in the "bad" direction. But as someone who is normally quite sensitive to this sort of thing, I've been really enjoying his work, and I'm looking forward to seeing more. It doesn't stop me from enjoying the King's Quest games; in fact, I probably find these videos funnier precisely because I recognise all the things that he's discussing.

Anyway, just fancied saying all that — and sharing my King's Quest II playthrough above. Please enjoy!

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#oneaday Day 237: The library is open

A number of things occurred today that I could potentially talk about: some positive, some not so positive. In the interests of… (gesticulates at all this) everything I'll focus on probably the most positive one, because it's something I'm really excited and happy to see.

Those of you interested in video games as a medium may be aware of the work of the Video Game History Foundation. They've been working as a charitable organisation chronicling the history of the medium for some time now, and they're responsible for the figure you may have seen bandied around that "87% of classic games are not available".

Something they've been working on for a while is providing a means of public access to their library of materials, which includes not only old computer and gaming magazines, but also development and marketing materials as well as some thoroughly fascinating bits of miscellanea, such as a gamer's hand-drawn maps of two early Zelda games that found themselves among a donation of other bits and pieces.

Today, the organisation launched the library for "early access", presumably meaning that there might be some kinks to work out and that it will expand over time, but already it's clear that it's going to be both a valuable resource and something that is just interesting to explore.

There are two main components to the library. First of all is the main catalogue at library.gamehistory.org, which is a catalogue of the materials that the organisation holds. This is interesting to browse through and see what's in their collection, but isn't of that much use when researching things. For most, the real attraction will be the digital archives at archive.gamehistory.org, which include digitally preserved material — scans and other digitised content, in other words.

At present the archives only contain a fraction of what is listed in the main catalogue, and the organisation notes that there is some material that may never be digitised for public access via the Internet for one reason or another. But what's there already is plenty to get stuck into. There's a library of magazines, for example, including 33 publications at the time of writing, including complete or near-complete runs of well-known mags such as Game Informer, Electronic Gaming Monthly and GamePro, plus early attempts at gaming media like Electronic Games, a spinoff of Video magazine's Arcade Alley column.

Right now there is, unsurprisingly, a bit of a US bias to things (and as I type this, the site has crashed under the weight of day-one demand so I can't check what non-American stuff they have, if any!) but there's a significant chunk of gaming media history to explore here; the aforementioned publications all played an important part in shaping video game fandom at one point or another, and the digitally available collection will only continue to expand over time. I'm particularly excited to see the archive of Electronic Games there, as this is an incredible resource to see how early consoles (like the Atari 2600, Intellivision and suchlike) and 8-bit home computers were covered by a fledgling enthusiast press.

But it's not just about magazines. There's also stuff like an archive of the CDs GamePro had that contained press materials, from the days before press assets being distributed via the Internet. There's production materials from games, some of which never made it to market, like SimPeople (what would subsequently become The Sims). There's development materials from a wide variety of sources. And tons more.

I'm really looking forward to exploring this library of stuff and seeing how it expands over time. It's going to be an absolute boon to anyone researching the history of video games and how they were covered by the media of the day, and I can't wait to make use of all this material when composing videos and articles.

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#oneaday Day 236: Ode to Yanagi

There's a chap on YouTube. I think he's Dutch, if I remember rightly. (Checked. He is.) Continental European, anyway. He goes by the name Yanagi19871. And I don't mind admitting that his videos have helped me through some dark times by bringing a smile to my face every time I see them.

What is Yanagi's specialism? He must be a brilliant analytical critic, exploring underappreciated games on obsolete and forgotten platforms and giving them the love and attention they deserve, surely? That's what Pete must be into.

No. Yanagi burps really loud.

I don't remember exactly how I stumbled across Yanagi in the first place. It's entirely possible that I was specifically searching for videos of people burping, and he was, for several years, the leading player in the "burping really loud on YouTube" space. He somehow manages to achieve this without being disgusting about it, because for the most part he doesn't combine his incredible emissions with things like, say, chugging gallons of a drink at a time or whatever — though he has satirised a couple of notorious "challenges" from a few years back, such as the 2 Litre Diet Coke No Burp Challenge, which went about as well as you might expect.

Yanagi's bio on YouTube reads "although burping is considered rude in many cultures, I find it amusing and noticed there are a lot of people out there that also can appreciate my talent", and I have to respect that. The man found a thing that he was good at, and he made the most of it. He even appeared on a couple of television programmes around the world at one point.

You'll notice that I'm using the past tense when describing him, though, and that's because a few years back, he just… stopped. I don't think he's dead — at least I hope he isn't — but from looking at a few scattered comments here and there, it seems like he felt unable to continue going about his usual business, much of which involved belching thunderously in public places, due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and the subsequent mess that made of the world, and he's just never picked things up again since.

Ultimately, I guess one could argue that this doesn't really matter, that a guy who gained a small amount of notoriety by being able to burp really loud almost entirely at will probably only really deserves fifteen minutes of fame at most. But I have to admit that I came to genuinely like Yanagi. He always came across as a thoroughly affable individual, despite his occasionally antisocial belching behaviour, and one gets the impression that he would be a lot of fun to hang around with.

But I guess the age of Yanagi is over, and he's gone on to do something else with his life. I wish him luck, good health and good fortune with whatever he is up to now, because even though he's stopped making new burp videos on YouTube, his existing ones still always make me laugh to the point of crying on a fairly regular basis. And in this fucked up world we live in, anything that can do that is something which should be treasured.

I don't mind admitting at all that, at the age of 43 and a bit, I still find burping and farting absolutely hilarious — always have done. Flatulence and related expulsions were part of my familial culture growing up, and so I guess a hearty belch or a deep, sonorous fart is one of those things that reminds me of simpler times that feel increasingly distant with every passing day.

I salute you, Yanagi. You were a master of your craft, and I'll be in the front row if you ever decide to make a comeBURRRRRRRRRRRRP.

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#oneaday Day 226: I wish the TikTok ban was worldwide

I fucking hate TikTok, and while I know there are all sort of "considerations" about the American ban of it that is happening right now — and which people seem to think Trump will overturn when he takes office — you are never going to convince me that it was a good thing for humanity as a whole. I feel like it is an app which has actively made the world more stupid, less inclined to pay attention to things and generally quite a bit shitter.

As an autistic person, I actively despise the idea of an app where a significant number of videos are either someone shouting directly "at" me, or outright sensory overload. Hell, a whole term was coined to describe the proliferation of these sensory overload videos, and that term is "sludge content". That is not something we should be celebrating.

A common pro-TikTok argument that people make is that "some people were reliant on it for income". If your sole employable skill is yelling incoherently into a camera, you should probably spend some time working on employable skills other than yelling incoherently into a camera. If you were using TikTok as a means of selling things, you should perhaps consider selling your things via a platform you actually have control over, like people had been doing for years before TikTok, and like people will continue to do for years from hereon. And if you really want to make money from videos, there are plenty of other means of doing so.

But then there's also the fact that people place a vast overemphasis on "monetising their content" online these days anyway. It's one of the major factors in the gradual degradation of social media as an actual means of socialising over the last decade and a half. A significant proportion of users are no longer interested in having conversations — you know, being social — on social media these days. Instead, they want to "create content" for others to "consume". How about you stop seeing dollar signs in everything you do and just do something because it's enjoyable, and because you might make some friends in the process? No?

"But you can watch sexy girls dancing on TikTok!" Brother, I'm not sure how to tell you this, but there are myriad ways to watch sexy girls dancing — and doing a lot more than that — on the Internet, and there has been pretty much since its inception. If your argument for Why TikTok is Good, Actually is that you can mindlessly dribble over something that makes your peepee hard, you are not providing a convincing argument.

"But what about BookTok?" What about all the myriad book-centric blogs that have been destroyed by the collective destruction of the world's attention span via shit like TikTok and YouTube Shorts? What about the fact that your average TikTok user almost certainly doesn't have the patience or brain power to sit down and read a book if they won't read a blog post? What about the fact that authors don't want to have to waste their fucking time yelling at their phone camera when they would much rather be writing something worthwhile?

TikTok is shit, and while I see and appreciate the arguments against the US banning it, I will be shedding precisely zero tears for it. It is one of the absolute worst examples of the enshittification of the modern Internet and people in general, and nothing you can say will ever make me change my mind on that fact. I just wish the fucking thing would go away here, too.

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#oneaday Day 223: The Old Internet

As the rot economy continues apace, more and more people are starting to recognise the modern Web for what it is: an unpleasant place, in which commercial interests and venture capitalists come first, and making an actually pleasant, enjoyable and educational place for the actual users is far, far down the list. As a result, "the old Internet" is often romanticised, perhaps to an overly nostalgic, rose-tinted degree, but I have to kind of concur; things did used to be much more enjoyable online before our daily routine was nothing but scrolling through the only two or three websites that actually exist to most people.

I think about this a lot when I'm writing on here or MoeGamer. I used to get fairly decent numbers on both blogs, even though I was just posting daily nonsense on this one. Now, I get maybe double figures daily on here, if that. MoeGamer still pulls in about a thousand views a day, which is nice, but a lot of those views are for things I wrote about several years ago at this point, and rarely for things I've written about recently.

Now, I don't do either this blog or MoeGamer for the views, but I feel the trajectory this site has taken in terms of numbers is symptomatic of the way the Web has changed over the years. People just don't do blogs any more, either as writers or readers. Part of this is down to the fact that RSS readers just aren't a part of people's daily online routine any more (though I'm aware they still exist) — and even those "magazine-style" apps that were never really a good replacement for Google Reader seem to have died a bit of a death. Not only that, but the usefulness of search engines has declined considerably, too.

Instead, it is, of course, all about social media. It's all about having a presence on the "important" social networks — though even that has seen something of an upset over the last few years, and particularly in the last few months. Twitter was already circling the drain in terms of usefulness for sharing stuff even before Elon took over and did… whatever the fuck he's doing there; Facebook has been such a horrible experience to use for so long now that I question the sanity of anyone who is still using it — to say nothing of the frankly quite disturbing policy changes they've had recently; and the less said about TikTok, the better.

So what, exactly, is someone looking to express themselves online to do today? If you want to get seen, you seemingly have little choice but to sign your soul over to one of these companies and plunge your data into the mire that is "The Algorithm". Telling people that they should start their own website is a noble and proper goal, and one I stand behind, but the fact is… a lot of folks just don't and won't leave social media — and many of the social media companies are doing their best to keep those folks on their platform as much as possible.

Look at Twitter (no, I'm not calling it "X") and how Elon is desperate for people to "post content" on it, completely failing to see that it is a platform woefully ill-equipped for anything other than that which it was originally designed for: microblogging. No-one in their right mind is going to set up a video-centric Twitter account instead of a YouTube channel, even if the site wasn't infested with the worst bigots the Internet has to offer. And no writer is ever going to use Twitter as their primary means of posting their work.

Everyone knows this. And yet it's so difficult to get people to notice you if you're not spending all day "building your personal brand" or some such bullshit. Artists struggle to get commissions without social media. Writers struggle to get publishers without social media. Video makers struggle to get views on their videos without social media. It all sucks, and it feels far too late to be able to do anything about it.

All you can do, really, is just be stubborn. Keep plugging away at your own personal passion projects, and do those projects for the passion, not for the potential of monetising them. I keep doing this blog because I like writing and it's good therapy for me — nothing more. It's always a thoroughly welcome sight when I see someone I recognise in the comments, but that's becoming an increasingly rare occurrence these days. Family and friends who used to read on a regular basis just… don't any more, and the worst thing is, I completely understand why. The modern Web simply isn't built to support personal sites any more, and that's a real shame. It feels like we're very much at risk of losing an important part of our collective culture — because what happens to everyone's "content" (ugh) when one of these social media companies eventually implodes?

Anyway, close your Meta accounts, get off Twitter and read more blogs. That's my advice for surviving online today.

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#oneaday Day 219: Getting it done

I finally managed to muster up the motivation to make some YouTube videos today. Three of them, in fact; they'll be up on the channel over the course of the next week or so.

To be clear, I wasn't putting off making these videos because I didn't want to make them; I was primarily putting them off because I had a cold in mid-December, and it's left me with a really annoying cough but no other symptoms. (I went to the doctor to see if it was an infection or anything, and it seems there's nothing to be concerned about; I just Have A Cough for a bit, frustratingly.)

I didn't want to start recording videos and collapse into a coughing fit partway through, so I'd been putting it off, particularly as a couple of weekends ago I started trying to record a The Dagger of Amon Ra playthrough and had to stop because my throat wasn't up to it.

My cough is still here — mostly in the evenings, and especially annoyingly when I lie down to go to sleep — but I managed to hold it at bay for the duration of three videos earlier, which is nice. Those three videos are kicking off something I want to be doing throughout this year: exploring a variety of home computer stuff, including Spectrum, Amiga and C64 stuff as well as the Atari 8-bit and ST stuff I've primarily built my channel on.

It felt good to finally get them done. While I have no real "obligations" towards my YouTube channel and could just… stop making videos at any point with no real consequence, it would feel like a great shame to do so. I have somehow made 1,303 videos so far since I created my channel in 2007 (but didn't start Being A Creator until to any vaguely serious degree until 2017) and my channel has shown very slow but steady growth, particularly over the course of the last five years or so. I don't have any grand designs on Being A YouTuber as a career, particularly since the sort of stuff I do isn't exactly algorithm-baiting, but it is nice to be able to sit down, play some games, talk about them to an empty room and feel like at least a few people will, eventually, listen.

In some respects, being able to do that with YouTube has almost been a substitute for being able to spend time with friends talking about this stuff. Pretty much all of my friends who used to be into gaming to any degree have drifted away for one reason or another, and it really sucks to be enthusiastic about things and have no-one to share that with. So by handling my YouTube videos the way I do — as if I'm sitting playing it with the viewer there as a friend beside me — it at least helps a bit with that side of things, if not all of the loneliness I feel at times.

Anyway, like I say, those videos will be coming out over the next week or so. There's one Spectrum one, one C64 one and one Atari 8-bit one; I'm not necessarily going to do all that every week (at least partly because I want to do some ST and Amiga stuff in there too) but it's a nice spread to start the year with. And it's onwards to a whole new year of exploring classic home computers and the myriad weird and wonderful games they played host to!

If you're not yet subscribed, stop by my channel, watch a few vids and hit the dang subscribe button already. Here's a link. Go on, click it.

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#oneaday Day 217: Fuck Facebook, and fuck Meta

I don't know if you've been following the recent news about Meta, Facebook's parent company, but if you still have an account over there for any reason, I thought you might be interested to learn the following.

A few days ago, Meta (which covers Facebook, Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp Messenger) published some substantial changes to its Hateful Conduct policy, ostensibly a policy that was devised in order to, among other things, help marginalised groups feel safe using their services as a means of online socialisation. You can see the changelog at this link (click the "7 Jan 2025" link on the left of that page to see the changes highlighted), but here are some notable parts for your convenience:

The green highlighted stuff is newly added, the red strikethrough stuff has been removed. Note that the banning of "dehumanising speech in the form of comparisons to or generalisations about animals, pathogens or other sub-human life forms, including women as household objects or property or objects in general; black people as farm equipment; transgender or non-binary people as 'it'" has been removed. This was previously a "Tier 1" violation, among the most serious on the platform, and yet now it is A-OK.

Elsewhere:

In this section, you will see that Meta now "allows allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like 'weird'."

Elsewhere still:

So you're cool to, like, blame the Chinese or whatever group of Johnny Foreigners you think created COVID, if you even believe COVID existed at all in the first place because you're a nutcase who believes vaccination programmes are about Bill Gates trying to fit you with a microtransmitter.

I shouldn't have to point out that these changes are Bad, regardless of whether or not you fall into one of the "protected" categories. It's particularly telling that amid the parts people are mostly focusing on — the stuff about homosexual and transgender people — they snuck in a bit about regarding women as objects and black people as farm equipment. You know, just to make sure everyone except white straight cis men gets their own share of a kicking. On top of that, they have deleted the trans and non-binary themes for Facebook Messenger, as well as the blog post announcing them.

This is not a "freedom of speech" thing; this is deliberately courting the worst people in the world and giving them carte blanche to be as sexist, racist, homophobic and transphobic as they desire with zero consequences. And you all know exactly why this has happened: because of the election result in the US.

The world's billionaires have been flocking to kiss Trump's ringpiece ever since the election, and of course Mark Zuckerberg is at the head of the queue. Social media is a veritable breeding ground for the worst kind of right-wing attitudes and has been for a while; all Zuck is doing is making it explicitly okay for this sort of thing to go on, much like Elon Musk has done with Twitter, destroying its value as social media in the process.

This isn't the only thing wrong with Facebook, of course. If you're still using it (again, I ask, why?) you have almost certainly seen how the News Feed or whatever it is called has declined over the years. Chances are yours has multiple "Suggested" posts (i.e. ads) in a row before you see anything from someone you actually care about, and many of those posts will be filled with AI-generated garbage slop like the infamous "Shrimp Jesus" and the many, many images of crying multiple amputee soldiers who don't exist saying it's their birthday. And rather than Facebook seeing this as a problem, it is being encouraged.

In fact, Meta announced plans to introduce AI-driven profiles to both Facebook and Instagram, presumably in an attempt to hide the fact that users are (correctly) leaving their services in droves. People stumbled across one of these AI-powered profiles on Instagram recently, discovering it to be, of course, full of images that never happened and hosting a chatbot that was little more than racial stereotyping. Meta were quick to say that this was an experiment from a few years back, but this is exactly the sort of shit they want to introduce.

Along the same lines, some Instagram users have found themselves presented with AI-generated images of themselves in their own feed, without having asked for them. In most cases, this is because Instagram's AI features count "using them once" as "perpetual consent to use your likeness", even if you don't want or need AI-generated images of yourself. Which no-one does.

Facebook is a shithole, and it's only going to get worse. If I haven't convinced you enough, I urge you to read at least some of the following links (plus the ones I've peppered throughout the above) for more on the story, because these folks report on this stuff for a living and can provide a lot more detail on what is going on.

Never Forgive Them by Ed Zitron – a comprehensive breakdown of how, over the last 10-15 years in particular, big tech has been systematically making life worse for everyone online under the guise of "growth". And it seeps into all areas of life, be it Facebook, Twitter and other forms of social media, or a cheap laptop you buy from Amazon.

AI Powered Buzzfeed Ads Suggest You Buy Hat of Man Who Died by Suicide by Emanuel Maiberg, 404 Media. Not directly related to Meta, though it is a tale of why AI-powered anything relating to advertising (a category which Meta stuff firmly falls into) is a pile of shit. I will say 404 Media has been doing some of the absolute best reporting on all this for quite some time now.

Zuckerberg: The AI Slop Will Continue Until Morale Improves by Jason Koebler, 404 Media. About how Zuckerberg doesn't believe the AI sludge that is taking over Facebook is a problem, and how he actually wants to encourage it.

Where Facebook's AI Slop Comes From by Jason Koebler, 404 Media. Self-explanatory, though you may be surprised at the answer to the headline and the reasons why.

Mark Zuckerberg, Recipient of World's First Rat Penis Transplant, Announces Meta Will Stop Fact-Checking by Matt Husser, The Hard Times. Also self-explanatory. The fact-checking thing is actually where all this started; Zuck is putting this side of things in the hands of the users via a Twitter-style "Community Notes" system, rather than having fact-checkers to combat disinformation on staff. Things just got worse from there.

Meta has 'heard the message' from Trump, says whistleblower Frances Haugen by Dan Milmo and Robert Booth, The Guardian. Some insider knowledge on the situation and how it's happening exactly because of the reasons you thought.

Look, I get it. I appreciate that some of you might not be able to delete your Facebook accounts because it's the only means you have of getting in touch with some people. I can't really delete mine either, because I have to use it for work, though I haven't used Facebook "personally" for years now because I saw it enshittifying a long time ago and jumped ship. The only Meta service I use these days — and that's irregularly — is WhatsApp.

But I would urge you to look over all of the above, and consider whether that is a company you still want to have any involvement with. Not only are the policy changes above actively harmful, the service as a whole has, as Zitron explains in his piece linked above, gradually been getting worse and worse, abusing its users in the name of profit and growth, for years at this point.

There are always alternatives. You can email people, just like in the good old days, or alternative messaging solutions like Discord, Zoom and Skype exist. They all have their issues, yes, but they're not actively being harmful like Meta is now. You can build a website to share your photos. Hell, if you're hooked on social media, there are plenty of better alternatives to Facebook now. (Just don't join TikTok.)

Online is a garbage fire right now, and it's only getting worse. One day, we might be able to look back on this whole sorry situation and laugh, but right now it's getting to a point where it's outright dangerous for some folks online. And I would hope that you, dear reader, don't want to be part of making that problem any worse.

If you didn't know anything about any of this prior to today, I hope you feel a little better informed now. And if you did, I'd urge you to take that step and move well away from Meta as soon as you are able.

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