TV Addiction? What TV Addiction?

Actual bill name: Stop the Sexualization of Children Act.

Purported purpose: "to protect children from being exposed to explicit material in the classroom".

How it's sold in the press: "Ban strippers and porn from classrooms!"

Actual text of the bill: Expands the meaning of "sexually explicit content" to include the words "or involves gender dysphoria or transgenderism".

Not and. Or. Meaning "involves gender dysphoria or transgenderism" is in and of itself enough to be classified as sexually explicit.

If you want to fight:

A pun post crossed my dash, and I reblogged it with an equally bad pun in return. A couple of my followers find it funny, it's a good day for everyone.

That was on July 7th.

Virality on Reddit was entirely algorithmic. You could garner a couple crossposts, but the success of a post was entirely dependent on whether or not it hit r/all--the main page of Reddit. If your post does that, it's immediately exposed to 10x the number of people and immediately gets upvoted.

On my pun post, I get a couple reblogs. And those reblogs get a couple reblogs--nobody really adds any content to the post, it just gets a couple reblogs here and there.

There's a specific chain of reblogs that I'd like to focus on. The most popular post on this chain has about 25 reblogs on it. Half the posts have three reblogs or fewer. Five posts in this chain have just one reblog total.

But the reblog chain keeps going. And going. It breaches containment many times over. And finally, after a chain THIRTY SIX posts long, at 9:30 AM, July 22nd this morning, it hits a popular account.

99% percent of the people who have seen the post--virtually unchanged from how it left my dash--have seen it because it was curated by 36 different people. That's insane to me.

None of those 36 people know that they're part of this chain. They saw a post, reblogged it, and moved on. If any one of these people had not reblogged, the post would have a fraction of the impact it has.

And yet, after two weeks, the post has effectively hit the main page of tumblr. It was picked up, only because people liked it enough to show it to their followers. There were no algorithms necessary.

But when one of the women needed help packing a large house worth of boxes into a big moving truck, the other was there with the rest of us, moving boxes. Because that's what you did. Personal dislike and rivalry were trumped by the social obligations of being part of the community. Mutual aid trumped mutual hatred.

Now, I have no desire to go back to the cult, but I do think they were on to something here. Community can't be about who we are friends with or get along with easily. If you won't go to bat for people you hate then this is not a community, it's a popularity contest.