Author Topic: All Things Dull and Likeable

All Things Dull and Likeable
« on: March 27, 2019 »
Joan of Cycling Related writes:

Quote
Do we want Likes added?

I - um - like the idea, but I know it can be used negatively. Do we want it?

An administrator of a forum seeking a consensus view is admirable, or at least an honourable survival technique, but you really need to make a stand here. As the fall of civilisation continues apace, Likes are a particularly insidious rot worth rousing myself from long slumber.

Although individually they appear cheerful and innocuous, in the aggregate they are a tool of conformity, defining acceptable taste. This may be desirable administratively as a self-policing mechanism, but it's just more dopamine in the system: drug dealers Facebook will even notify you when other people's posts have been liked. They nurture herd instinct by rewarding the social animal in all of us.

Indiscriminately heaped as they are upon the anodyne and the inspired, they’re meaningless even as they portend the eclipse of Enlightenment. If the centre cannot hold, it's because it's fat with such empty calories.

Do your members a favour. Don’t offer up yet another platter of sweet nothings.






Auntie weighs in on “social approval distilled into its purest form.”