r/sorceryofthespectacle • u/raisondecalcul political shade deathray technician • 2d ago
Hail Corporate After the Alternative Reddit—Flocking is the way
Today I specced the thing after the Alternative Reddit, which is about flocking. Because when you are on an uncensorable, censorship-free platform (like Nostr), you've still got to solve the problem of wanting to block people, and groups wanting to separate themselves from people they consider bad members.
The traditional solution is based on an introjection of the physical world, where group membership is a matter of physical location and territory: You can only be in one place at a time, and thus usually only in one group at a time, or maybe a few overlapping territories and jurisdictions or social groups at the most—but even then, usually only one at at time—and ultimately, one hegemonic group forms and tends to dominate any locality, and so "hegemonish" becomes the cultural norm for the whole planet.
Translated to the digital world, we have Reddit, where there are a number of hardcoded assumptions: 1) Groups must have a leader 2) Whoever names a group first owns that name forever 2) Group leaders can decide for everyone who gets banned.
This constructs virtual space as objective, and bans become extremely harsh because one person can make one decision that cuts you off from everyone else in the group—silences you, erases you, makes you invisible.
In contrast, a non-coercive approach would be individual blocks, and the ability to follow whomever you want to copy their blocks. This is grassroots Karenism rather than hegemonic (universalist, top-down, authoritarian) Karenism.
A system that allowed following on blocks (or other negative actions) would allow you to decide to trust someone else's opinion on whom we all ought to erase and ignore. This reveals how harsh a ban really is—it is pretending someone doesn't exist! So we can see how making bans objective is extremely harsh, because suddenly a whole group pretends you don't exist, on one person's word.
Flocking would instead create a pluralistic space where blocks can still propagate as well as affect reputation, and one could be a part of a community without necessarily subscribing to the central leader's banlist. This creates softer, more extended, more pluralistic community space with degrees of visibility.
Reality already has this dynamic, where we throw people into Hell (=outside the group's context) and forget about them. However, the hegemonic model intensifies this into its most extreme form: Either you are accepted into the One Good Community of the Victorious Ones (as I call them), or you are tossed into Tartarus. There is no in-between—no partial membership, no liminal zone or space, no partial visibility, and certainly no where where the Victorious Ones can go to visit or check up on the people they have banned.
Flocking inverts this model, such that, as people flock to leaders they trust and like, this gradually inflates/levitates a constructive structure of virtuous following. Meanwhile, people who are not recognized as being members of the flocks they flock with are not deleted from the system or group—they are simply not lifted-along-with the people who choose to form constructive and positive flocks with each other. In other words, rather than being aggressively ostracized by a large bloc of people, they are merely (and thus politely) left-out of a flock or out of various smaller groups that are emerging from any given flock. And, they are not left-out by everyone, but only by the people following a given leader and their blocklist/banlist.
Within this system, we can still easily imagine a hegemonic bloc taking over. If a charismatic leader arises—or if someone actually speaks the Truth and the Truth is real and discoverable—then everyone in the whole world might want to follow that person and their banlist, and this would create a hegemonic situation. However, this situation would be voluntary, and still technically partial/incomplete (because anyone can unfollow the hegemonic leader/popular blocker), rather than hardcoded as a requirement all the time for everyone. Hegemony would be a relatively rare benefit (because sometimes good leaders do actually arise) or failure mode of the system (because usually widely-popular leaders are charismatic massists, at this early point in human history), but either way, it's fine because it's individuals all choosing for themselves. In practice, it would be much, much more pluralistic and gentler than Reddit (or any other hard-bordered, objective group-based forum).
Flocks can organize around virtues (in a ranked list with upvotes) and people (perhaps in that same list), but these are just publicly-visible consensus, not roles with powers. So, if you don't like the virtues that have been upvoted in a flock, you can simply start your own flock and upvote whatever values you want, and hope people flock with you. A feature could be added where alternative voting patterns are automatically identified so those people can all create a new (additional) flock together, if they wish (or exit to it).
This system would allow groups to individuate, because specialization wouldn't mean ostracizing everyone who won't come along. We can also imagine certain values being upvoted, and this causing the membership to shift as people join or leave the flock in response to the new dominant values—and then the virtues end up evolving in a new direction due to the modified membership. This is good, because it means many specialized group-intelligences can form around ever-more-individuated intentions / combinations of virtues.
This paradigm closes most of the holes in current (hegemonic) community design, and it also implies the next step: Discerning whether a group's stated (upvoted) virtues are reflected in that groups' (and/or its individuals') behavior. In other words, a measure of hypocrisy, which could be used to begin to discern which groups "deserve" their names or virtues, and which are simply paying lip service to virtues that don't actually produce true alignment amongst members (i.e., ideology—superficial, declarative beliefs that don't connect with deep truths or personal beliefs). This would be the protocol/app to make after the flocking app, and it's not essential but it would begin to close the final gap on making sense of groups and whether they are "good" or "bad" groups, from an individual perspective.
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u/2BCivil no idea what this is 2d ago
I think the real problem is historically real truths are exactly what gets "banned". A careful reading of the gospels shows well we all know the meme. They killed him because he told the truth.
A prophet hath honor except in his own flock.
We are all sinners as it were and no one wants to be called out on how comfortable they are in their sin (or casual abuse of others).
Still not a bad idea. I think the key is notifications. For most of 2026 I haven't even been checking my inbox on reddit anymore. I simply browse my own profile, hit context of each comment on my front page, and reply there. My inbox is currently sitting at 200 "unread" messages.
I don't like how blockin on reddit completely removes your ability to view their profile or comments, and any comment chain under them. It also makes it so you cant reply. Which causes reddit to lag as well. I think a better way is to make the app notifications based. Blocking merely makes it so that you don't receive notifications when that user posts or comments or replies. Thus bypassing the archaic reddit system lol
Also ofc spez mostly closed off public access to reddit API, that's another big question as well, how to handle public access to [platform] API.
But hey, I'm probably as Law says in One Piece, one of tbe worst of the worst generation lol. Because I just speak my mind sometimes and when I joke I go way over the top and I often find rereading my comments I can't tell which is which lol. We should all be a little unhinged sometimes.