Null Signal Games is leaving Twitter and Facebook. They will be using Mastodon and BlueSky for their communication going forward. You can also just bookmark their official website or subscribe to this blog as I will relay most important information to you, dear reader.
This is a non-trivial decision for any organization that is trying to communicate effectively with its customer/fan base. Facebook and Twitter are “the default” by virtue of having leveraged large network effects to make “defecting” away from them immensely costly. I’ll spare you the Game Theory 101.
Why is NSG doing this? Well, I I think it’s easiest to just copy and paste the official response from the Facebook announcement.
Basically, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk and their advisors have decided that it is more profitable and high-EV to ally itself with the current US administration, and they are making visible changes to their respective domains to align with the incoming ideology. That included the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, performing a “heil Hitler”1 salute less than 100 year after the Auschwitz concentration was shut down and Mark Zuckerberg doing… whatever the fuck it is that Mark is doing these days. Drugs should be handled with care kids.
So, yeah, NSG (a non-nationally aligned organization with many LGBT, non-neurotypical volunteers and employees) decided that maybe they’d rather not participate on platforms where that’s the behavioral profile of their CEOs.
Is this the correct decision?
From a moral/ethical standpoint, I think it makes sense given NSG’s personnel composition.
From a business point of view, it will certainly hamper communication and possibly cause (limited) fracture/friction in the community. I think most of the people that decided to keep playing Netrunner after NSG took over were already on-board with the inclusivity mission, or at least decided not to let it bother them.
What I’m not going to do here is discuss my own political position about any of this because:
You don’t care.
I’m not going to convince you of anything.
Your attention is your most precious commodity and if you want to fight the power, there are better things you could be doing right now.
I am going to address one thing that I see happen on social media a lot, and that I think we can all strive to correct in ourselves and our social circle:
This is the social media equivalent of getting Account Siphoned over and over again because you fail to ice HQ. And the worst people in the world really are winning again and again with this simple tactic. The Null Signal announcement on FB showed a somewhat similar pattern.
-NSG takes a position.
-Person A chimes in saying they disagree or state a dissenting opinion.
-Someone else chimes in that by disagreeing they are THE WORST.
-Person A is now put in a fork, where they either shift their viewpoint closer to that of the person criticizing them publicly, OR they get shifted further away. Which do you think is more likely?
The third step is a form of sanctimony, and sanctimony alienates and disconnects. The “worst people in the world” understand this dynamic on a very deep level and are willing to leverage all of their technological prowess (is that FB account a real person or a bot?2) to hit YOU with this tactic over and over again. Are you still falling for it?
Ice HQ.
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Criticism/comments/feedback can be addressed to rapanui via the GLC Discord or Stimhack Slack. Engage respectfully. I am a person.
I don’t know/care if this was “performative” or a form of attention capture. It was an extremely stupid thing to do for someone in his position.
If you are unaware of how far down the Phillip K. Dick dystopian schizo hellhole we have gone down, I highly suggest using NotebookLLM’s “generate a podcast feature” from anything whatsoever and see exactly how much fake reality can be generated now at the push of a button.