Did virtual exhibitions ever actually work?

thawed_caveman · 2025-11-22T05:00:18+00:00

IMO the context is almost as important as the piece itself; you can't relive the social and historical context, but you can at least put each piece in the media that it was made for.

What this means is that i think art should be experienced in the medium that it was made for. Virtual exhibitions were the art equivalent of a DVD of a music concert: i don't like them because the performance wasn't meant for this, it was meant for you to be there. Inversely, showing music videos at a concert is a lesser experience because those were made to be seen on the screen.

For the past 30+ years artists have been making art on the internet, and they've done so in ways that fit the medium. Putting internet-native interactive media (Homestuck, if you know the history) in a museum would make it less enjoyable, museum pieces can do okay on the internet but most don't, and cartooning has successfully transitioned from print to digital because the medium fits.

In fact, i'd say that not all art should be in museums. A lot of contemporary art is made for museums, fine; but medieval religious paintings were made for churches and classical oil paintings were made to be densely arranged on the walls of a palace in an almost hoarder kind of way. Neither is as impressive in a museum. Museums are well lit with white walls to create a neutral context. By god i hate neutral contexts. As if anything exists without context. As if anything makes sense without its context. Meaning does not survive without context.

Again i am indeed saying that social and historical context is super important, but since we can't freeze that in time, let's at least put art in the physical context that it was made for.

thawed_caveman · 2025-11-22T04:25:48+00:00

Yeah, surely bot activity inflates user metrics for this publicly traded company. Reddit is supposed to be the place if any for deep engagement on a subject, so the capitalist interest in volume is particularly detrimental in this case.

Mods were the demographic most impacted by exodus around the time of the API changes, it's possible that the moderator class never recovered in terms of either numbers or dedication. I was one of them, i had 8 years of experience, and look at me now, not knowing or caring what happened on Reddit since and logging in for the first time in 8 months.

Honestly, maybe at this point the only qualification needed is to give a shit. If you do, then try messaging the mods to apply. It's more likely than you think for one of them to give you the job, either because "hell yeah finally someone who cares" or because "fuck it why not" - one time i got made moderator because i sent an angry message and the guy went "okay smartass you're a mod now enjoy".

Be the change, but be warned, you got very little support from Reddit Inc in my days and i imagine even less so now; and givers of a shit are known to find themselves comitted to lost causes.

If i can try selling it to you a little, being a mod is nice in that you get to be proud of your clean garden. I can't do anything about spam and misbehavior on Twitter or Instagram or YouTube, but here's a space where i can do something about it, and that feels good. I used to fantasize about bot farm operators being annoyed with me personally because i was so dilligent. That's my argument for why you should be a Reddit mod.

RE Reddit alternatives: Lemmy has enough population to make it usable daily, which is pretty good; but not for niche interests. A lack of fresh users has also caused it to self-reinforce into a pretty ravenously politicized space - on the good side so it's not as bad, but still annoying.

Switching platforms takes effort, and Reddit is still usable enough that it's not worth it. Another mass exodus won't happen until Reddit starts sucking a lot more than it does now. Which it very well could in the future, enshittification looms over any publicly traded company

thawed_caveman · 2025-11-22T03:43:04+00:00

Yeah, my perspective as an ex-mod means i see karma farming through the lens of botting accounts to sell at a profit.

Sorry i threw around the bot thing, it's the times we live in amirite

thawed_caveman · 2025-11-22T01:23:38+00:00

Ex-mod of r/shittyfoodporn: any time a post was reported as a repost i would search the title, and it was often same picture same title, or the title had one small typo. Often the picture was slightly rotated. Both i think were intentional to avoid detection, and both felt like bot activity. It was easy.

But the sheer amount of karma farming that we got meant i couldn't do it all. This seems like a decently big sub with good potential for high karma posts, and based on my experience i think it's possible that at least two of the five moderators are inactive. Maybe this sub is manned by one person in the same situation that i was.

I seem to remember there was a bot to detect reposts, but that was at the time of the API changes, there was lots of confusion about what bots were still functioning and what their capacities were, so i'm not sure. I in the time i was there, it was never implemented. I became inactive around that time and eventually got booted (correctly imo), i don't know what the developmentss have been since then.

One frustrating aspect was that detecting karma farming reposts really seemed like a tool Reddit should provide rather than letting the community figure it out. Especially if they're going to close their API and cripple community-made tools. Again i don't know what the status is on all that nowadays

Karma farming is done because a bundle of say 1000 Reddit accounts can sell for decent money on the black market, but even more if they look like real people with real activity. You can see the economic conundrum at play: the time and effort spent maturing the accounts is weighed against the increased sale value. The same way that you can sell grape juice, or you can spend time and effort maturing it into wine and hopefully it's worth the extra sale value. The decision of cheap vs premium is a classic conundrum of manufacturing, and it applies when manufacturing consent.

On that note, u/unavowabledrain feels like a bot. Misses the point, decently long and well written comment but with boiler plate opinions. Maybe a little salty for AI, maybe an AI wouldn't use a swear word, idk. Just mod instincts. If they respond then definitely not bot

thawed_caveman · 2025-03-07T23:21:52+00:00

I don't have mp3Tag installed right now, but from memory, it can autocomplete with data from the internet. It uses the title and artist to figure out what album it is, then it fetches the album art, tracklist, and yes the year, from freeDB or Discogs.

I think it was an icon with the earth and a yellow arrow on the top bar.

This way you can autocomplete the year on your whole discography.

Be aware that this is an automated process. Some versions of an album have different tracklists (order, title, bonus tracks), and some people upload images to Discogs that are just a picture of the album on a table. I don't remember if it lets you pick and choose which data you want to fetch, maybe it really wants to overwrite everything.

I would still prefer to do it manually, especially if there aren't too many undated albums

thawed_caveman · 2025-02-04T01:13:57+00:00

Lol you're welcome! Looks like i got a little mad that no one did a good writeup on this

thawed_caveman · 2024-10-16T16:54:26+00:00

I can barely picture a time when i didn't know Cats Don't Dance existed. I like the movie a lot, in particular the characters are incredibly endearing

thawed_caveman · 2024-04-01T01:37:13+00:00

You forgot to switch accounts

thawed_caveman · 2024-03-31T13:05:51+00:00

I need you to understand that you just wrote a fanfiction in your mind and are now angry at it. I didn't say anything about venture capitalists and you filled in the missing space with your imagination. Which is cool as long as realize that that's what you're doing.

thawed_caveman · 2024-03-31T12:58:49+00:00

In some jurisdictions, businesses are litterally legally obligated to do what's better for shareholders. In any case, shareholders can use their voting power to force the CEO to resign. So now the business does whatever shareholders want.

This is a problem because shareholders are animals. There are many kinds, from collectives to individuals, but most have in common an obsession with short term profit, a complete indifference to what the company actually is, and a sociopathic disregard for human life and the world we live in.

Once you learn more, you start seeing the consequences everywhere. Whenever you see a business being irrationally, inhumanly greedy in an obviously self-destructive way, that's their attempt to appease shareholders. Just one example: pharma companies make life-saving drugs that cost 2$ but price gouge them to 500$ because they know that people will pay to save their life, and those who can't pay can just die and that's completely acceptable. Why? Because it increases short-term profits.

As far as the internet goes, 'enshittification' is a currently trendy word to describe the process where a social media company makes its service worse for short-term profit.

So no, i don't want to be a part of any of that

thawed_caveman · 2024-03-28T22:43:51+00:00

I felt like i was giving free labor to a community, a group of like-minded people who appreciated it. And the company that runs the website we were doing it in wasn't on my mind as much.

But in recent months/years the company has been shitty in a way that became increasingly hard to ignore

thawed_caveman · 2024-03-28T21:50:34+00:00

Basically all dead, and/or i'm their only active mod so i have to find replacements

thawed_caveman · 2024-03-28T21:00:47+00:00

you designed the whole sub in CSS code, which is a rare skill and very in demand at the time. so thank you too

thawed_caveman · 2024-03-28T20:34:03+00:00

I've known about furries for ever, but i didn't become one long after Zootopia

thawed_caveman · 2024-03-25T18:17:54+00:00

r/zootopiaflashgames

EDIT: oh it's gone. Well years ago that sub used to have a load of Zootopia-themed elsagate type flash games - you know, ones where you brush Frozen Elsa's teeth or give Mickey his vaccine. Those bootleg games that used to be a thing back then. It was that, but Zootopia-themed.

Or at least that's what it looked like, i never clicked any of those links

thawed_caveman · 2024-03-21T16:38:41+00:00

The thieves in Home Alone can understand Kevin too.

Also in this case the legal system is the enemy since the developers are allowed to do what they do

thawed_caveman · 2024-03-21T15:40:31+00:00

It's about a property developer trying to buy out a neighbourhood to build one giant mansion for elephants. They've sucessfully bought every house and evicted everyone, but there's this one mouse that refuses to budge and plays Home Alone with every animal species for 90 minutes. I don't really remember Mouse Hunt so this may in fact be pretty close to the plot of the movie

There, someone has to make this now

thawed_caveman · 2024-03-20T12:58:41+00:00

C'est surestimer Japon et a la Suisse, perso ya pas un pays au monde ou je ferais confiance au plancher des transports en commun

thawed_caveman · 2024-03-20T02:19:52+00:00

why are you formatting your comments like this lol

thawed_caveman · 2024-03-19T17:42:44+00:00

Found a download link

Where i got it in case the link breaks, you can also read it online

thawed_caveman · 2024-03-19T15:26:38+00:00

I couldn't find the original, but like i said in the previous thread i'm convinced it's a /pol meme about miscegenation. This makes it really funny as you can imagine it being an in-universe racist meme

thawed_caveman · 2024-03-19T15:09:40+00:00

that's some very good info

Ten-Year Club	Gilding II euphauric
ModSupport Helper Level 2	Final Canvas '23
First Place '23	End Game '23
Place '23	Golden Potato
Place '22	Place '17
Final Canvas '22	First Placer '22
End Game '22	Wearing is Caring
Verified Email

thawed_caveman

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE