Not a lot.

Reddit

Reddit genuinely cannot be trusted. My posts were edited without my consent; I was then banned twice for posts I did not make, and, the cherry on the top of this Shit Sundae™ is that I was permanently suspended for reporting revenge porn that people on a certain subreddit were posting at a woman, with the posters’ intentions of making her kill herself.

As if this were not enough, I was given access to Reddit Pro, a year of Reddit Premium/Gold (I think by an admin, perhaps just to mock me), right after I was permanently banned; then I was invited to an online conference, with the promise that I would receive a Snoo plushie afterwards. When they asked me if I wanted it, and I said yes, they declined. This is perhaps the only thing I’m actually hurt about.

Following that, I contacted Support through Reddit Pro, which was escalated to three people pretty high up in Reddit’s administration, and they just ghosted me after my appeal was denied.

Given that I’m actually going to end up being famous in this worst-case scenario after I give a televised speech (and the better end to this would simply to become rich and not-famous), and given that my words are going to have a certain weight to them for the rest of my life following this speech, Authentication and Trust are prime in my online dealings.

Reddit’s data seems easily-altered and its support is nonexistent and/or hostile to me.

Final verdict: No

Twitch

Functionally it’s probably the best, and I have no real problem with it. It may be useful.

Final verdict: Acceptable

YouTube

Useful. YouTube fucked me out of some money, but, in general, it’s a utility more than anything else. I can’t really hate it.

Final verdict: Yes, Main

Twitter

It’s getting better, but I have no respect for the idea of it. It’s fun, though. I’ve styled it to look like Arcadium. It makes me feel better.

Final verdict: Yes, Main

Facebook

Final verdict: No

Pinterest

Final verdict: No

Bluesky

Increasingly useful.

Final verdict: Yes, Main

TikTok

I’m very angry at its support. The app, however, is fun, but I do not intend on using it for anything until after I’m famous again.

Final verdict: Toy

The post The Social Media First Contact Rundown appeared first on icze4r communication.

For so long, I wanted to do something. That something was First Contact.

The idea was, I would get to do something really amazing, really fun, and then. I would have the spotlight. Everybody would have to see me.

This morning I get woken up and told to google UFO news. So, an ex-CIA operative, or somesuch, confirmed basically everything I’ve been saying. It’s in the news.

And I was happy.

For a second.

Uh oh.

The problem with being right is that people think that you have some sort of moral authority to lead. The closer I get to this, the more I realize that I’m going to be put in charge of something. The more that people realize that I know— I’ll just say it right now, there are people who are starting to realize that I’m telling the truth.

That’s bad.

That’s bad because I don’t want this.

All I wanted was to see a space alien again. One particular space alien.

I didn’t want fame. I didn’t want fortune. I didn’t want to ‘be known’.

Because it fucks your SEO up. It fucks my SERP up. It fucks up everything that I want— I’m this close to having a Wikipedia page. I don’t want that.

I’ve spent so long trying to get Verified that I didn’t realize that the very act of being Verified, not only is the antithesis of who I am (I knew that, but), but that… it places me in a position that I don’t want to be in.

I never wanted ‘power’. I wanted power over the course that my life took, and it had nothing to do with being puppeted by various different human interests.

The day is coming that I’m going to be believed, fully, and the best thing I can do is get the fuck out of the way and dodge before they put a leash on my neck. That leash being responsibility.

Not my circus. Not my monkeys.

There was a time that I wanted to help.

But I ain’t gonna be humanity’s bitch.

The next step is to figure out how to escape.

Escape will make me not God, but it’ll definitely make me happy.

The post Reverse appeared first on icze4r communication.

I have to admit, my feelings are hurt more than I’d like, but less than I expected.

Reddit is all kinds of fucked up. Recently, I got CC’d into an e-mail thread with 3 heavy hitters who work at Reddit, and I asked about my ban. For those still playing at home, I was banned because a drama subreddit mass-reported me (I believe), because I told them that what they were doing, while they were harassing a woman, was a felony.

So Reddit banned me for that.

A year and some change later, I managed to somehow become a verified publisher in Reddit’s system. I’m not particularly sure how that happened; I’m also not sure how I was entered into Reddit’s Reddit Pro system and given a year’s worth of Reddit Gold (now Reddit Premium), directly after the ban, but I just figured that was Reddit’s admins fucking with me.

So, interestingly enough, even after being told by 3 people working at Reddit to submit an appeal, it was denied.

This is the end of this road. Obviously, they could still change something— I don’t suspect that this would get escalated to people of their level, without an actual resolution— but if this is it, I accept it.

And I also accept that I will not be doing business with Reddit ever again, in any way, shape, or form. I will not be helping them in the future.

I think it’s actually kind of better that I get to tell this story forever.

God, you people.

What a disgrace.

The post Welp, fuck Reddit. appeared first on icze4r communication.

I used to think that I was going too far when I was complaining about things that happened to me online. Then I talked about it in a therapeutic environment, and the reality is, I’m not keeping grudges. I’m writing a diary entry. I’m talking about something that happened, and it hurt. It really hurt me.

So, after I got permabanned from Reddit for telling people that they were committing a felony (they were harassing a woman by posting revenge porn of her), I got signed up for Reddit Pro. I’m not sure how it happened. (Tonight, also, Reddit gave me the ability to sign up as a verified publisher. What the fuck. I’m still permabanned.)

Then the e-mail came.

I got invited to a Reddit conference.

A stuffed animal was promised after the conference.

So I went.

The conference ended. They sent me an e-mail to place my order for it. I placed my order for it. And I waited.

And they said, cheerfully, no.

No.

In my civilization…

… offering a stuffed animal to someone and then saying no, cheerfully, is akin to a mortal sin. It’s the sort of purposeful hurtfulness that makes you never talk to someone again.

Of course, everyone who’s ever hurt me has some sort of excuse. It’s never anyone’s fault: it’s always just an oopsie woopsie, fucky-wucky, here and there, and nobody ever takes responsibility for anything.

And I get part of that. I get that Reddit’s systems maybe don’t talk to each other. I get that, when I contact various levels of support, that maybe there’s no one person who can solve my problem. I can be understanding.

But I hate you. I really do. I hate that you gave me hope, and that you offered me something that I liked, and I went… oh, that’s nice. I’d like to get that.

And then you just… cheerfully denied it.

There’s a lot of bad shit that social media services have done to me. There’s a history of things, and I’m well-aware that, in a lot of different businesses, there might not be one person who’s fucking everything up. The system itself is woefully incompetent, and people get their feelings hurt.

But I still won’t ever forgive you. Because I’ve already gotten famous 16 or 17 times, and even if I wasn’t about to stumble blindly into it for love again, I’d end up getting famous another time, and I’d have some chucklefuck asking me for an AMA. And the answer is no.

Besides— how could I?

I’m permabanned.

The post The Reddit Stuffed Aminal appeared first on icze4r communication.

A couple of days ago I got invited to a Zoom call / conference with Twitter’s leadership. Or something— lord knows I’m not going to open the e-mail to verify what the fuck it actually said. Oh, hell, let’s avoid libel: it said specifically that ‘the X team’ (whatever the fuck that is) would be headlining the conference.

To my knowledge, there was no audience participation. My read on it was it was a sales call, if I’m using that terminology correctly. The e-mail I received had the salutation of, “Dear Valued Advertiser”. What?

In any case, I went there. They were five minutes late. Shit was boring, so I dipped.

And then, days later, I get an e-mail:

As we mentioned during the session, we’d love your feedback—please send any thoughts to [non-public e-mail].

As a special thank-you for attending, we’ll expedite your application to Premium Business—an exclusive offer just for you.

… Premium Business? That’s the Gold Checkmark.

Huh.

It’s not ‘an exclusive offer’ just for me. That’s bullshit. This is a sales e-mail.

But then I stew in that for a second, and I go, ‘let’s ask if it’s free.’ Because, I know it’s not gonna be free. I also know I’m not going to be ‘accepting’ anything from the Nazi Bar that Twitter has become.

But let’s ask.

I e-mail them.

It bounces.

They fucking forgot to make the e-mail account, the exclusive e-mail account, just for Kuzco, that they sent in this fucking e-mail.

I reply to the message. It’s a no-reply.

Okay.

I check the web form. Can’t ask questions.

Okay.

I have now e-mailed a third e-mail, a fourth method.

I know that there’s nobody at the wheel. I know that Twitter is a thing now that’s wearing something else’s skin. I’m well-aware of what I’m talking to.

And I’m not even seeking closure.

Now, at this point, I’m poking a slime mold with a stick and seeing if it starts spelling ‘fuck you’ back at me in the shapes of its many cells.

What the fuck am I doing?

There was a feeling I had. When I was denied Verification, even though I didn’t want the checkmark (I detest these things), I wanted to win the game. I’m eligible: give it to me. Give me the badge so I can throw it on the floor and break it. That was the original goal.

But then, as the years passed, I started asking myself… am I doing something wrong? Am I not good enough?

And that doesn’t matter to me. not anymore.

Soon, the question became, how does this system work? I want to win it. I win to win at it.

And then.

And now.

It’s not even that anymore.

Twitter is such a broken husk of itself, so dysfunctional, as Claude said, that the game I was playing cannot even be played with it.

Old Twitter is gone. I didn’t respect it, or its ways. I don’t respect Bluesky’s checkmark, and I don’t want to win that one, either. (I would seriously make a separate account if I got that one. Eww.)

But now… there’s no closure. There is no closure to this ‘game’ I’ve been playing.

Because Twitter isn’t even able to play it with me anymore.

They can’t even make a fucking e-mail account.

This feels like trying to play Chess with your grandmother, and she starts sobbing and you have to keep her from eating the pieces.

God damn you, Elon.

The post Gold Checkmark appeared first on icze4r communication.

Last night, I got another e-mail from Pinterest, in which they stated that they had removed a pin about the Amazing Digital Circus, because it involved self-harm. Given that I hadn’t used Pinterest much since that show came out, I was perplexed; I was puzzled. I was bewildered. What pin?

They wouldn’t show me. They gave me the URL, which resolves to nothing, and has no backups I can find online. My photographic memory tells me one thing: I know which image it was, and I remember saving it, thinking, ‘I wonder if Pinterest’s bullshit A.I. is going to pick this completely harmless image and say that there’s something wrong with it.’

And it did.

Fuck me, Freddy.

A Separation from Pinterest

I’m going to work to remove most of my saved pins from Pinterest. Of course, having comparatively little free time these days (I used to have all day; now I have maybe five hours a day to do goofy shit, which is contemptably small for my purposes), this will take some time. Undoubtedly, I will still get some e-mails from Pinterest’s A.I. measuring its own ballsack and finding something I didn’t even post lacking.

The real reason I’m not going to be using Pinterest anymore is because you don’t have the right to send me e-mails in the middle of the night that scare me. For the longest, I tip-toed through social media services, afraid of what I would feel if I got permanently banned. Then Reddit decided to permaban me for telling people not to commit the crime of posting revenge porn, and I was confused.

A year and some change later, I’ve realized something: I don’t want to be on Reddit anymore, because I cannot fucking trust it.

And I don’t want to be bothered by Pinterest anymore, because they pulled this shit:

Would you like to appeal?

Appeal what, I thought. They showed me nothing; if I hadn’t a photographic memory, it would have been impossible to know what they were talking about. Given that their userbase probably has an average of slightly higher than 200 different pins at any given time, one has to imagine that if you played ‘guess the pin we banned’ with any of them, they’d lose.

But still, I clicked the link to appeal… and it showed me a screen: “Appeal submitted!”, or somesuch nonsense. I expected a form. No form.

What the fuck?

24 hours later, the appeal— for whatever the fuck it could even be— has been denied.

Okay, great! Good chat, team!

What the fuck are you dipshits doing over there?

Whatever it is, I don’t want any part of it.

Stop e-mailing me.

If your A.I. doesn’t manage to kick me out first as it trips over its own dick, I’ll be leaving, thanks.

Idiots.

The post Pinterest appeared first on icze4r communication.

I did it.

In the interest of not trusting LinkedIn with my legal name, I’m not turning the checkmark on. But I took a picture of it.

Don’t believe me?

Pfft. I dun’ care. I done it.

Onto the next!

How do you get Verified on LinkedIn?

Go through CLEAR. Give them your face. Give them your ID.

If your ID’s name doesn’t match your display name, they’ll put it as an addendum, in parentheses. Can’t keep the badge on unless you agree to this.

Given that someone’s already tried to kill my parents before, I’m not giving any sort of ‘be able to find me in the real world’ information. It’s not happenin’.

KEEP IN MIND THIS SHIT WILL NOT WORK IF YOUR E-MAIL ON LINKEDIN DOES NOT EXACTLY MATCH THE E-MAIL YOU USED FOR CLEAR

There it is. My first Verification solution!

This was a fun game. :>

The post LinkedIn conquered. appeared first on icze4r communication.

I didn’t like the checkmark. I didn’t want it.

I just… wanted to prove, at least to myself, that the fairness, the rules that they said applied to everyone, applied to me.

And they just fucking didn’t.

I didn’t even care about the harassment.

I thought it was funny.

At one point I had about 33-34 people stalking me. These people were not subtle about it. They weren’t smart. It was some Internet troll bullshit that made me smile, because, I had people I had said one thing to, and they fucking got so angry that they tracked me and tried to hurt me for a decade.
Yeesh.

But then, they were gone. They were gone, and I had won.

But they’d fucked around for about 11 goddamned years.

And Twitter did nothing.

Unfairness

This is the feeling that I want to get out of my chest.

I was lied to. People told me: if you do the work, and meet the criteria, then you’ll get it.

No you won’t. It’s fucking bullshit. I always knew that it was a carrot on a stick, but, the reality is, there’s no fairness.

The thing that pisses me off is not that they were lying; but that they think that they’re smart enough to lie to me. That I’m dumb enough that they can just tell me fucking anything, and I’ll fall for that bullshit.

That is the reason why I started testing this, all those years ago.

They’re fucking liars.

I feel better.

The post Unpacking the Trauma of this appeared first on icze4r communication.

So I finally figured out what Verification was/is, and how it works.

And, sadly, I figured something out.

I was born wrong, so I will never get it.

Verification does not account for being trans.

My entire public persona is based on my chosen trans name. Honestly, you would think, that at this point in time, people would just have put trans people into the same Verification pipeline as, say, people with stage names; people with pen names. I’m really open with this: Margaret is my chosen name. I have, in fact, been using it most of my life. I’m not shy about the fact that my legal name differs, and practically every social media platform’s governance actually knows, and has proof, of my legal name. Even Steam knows who I am: they’ve got my social security number, for example. (By the way: I don’t even really consider it my ‘dead name’— my mom, my family, even my step-family, and my wife call me by my birth name— though my wife occasionally calls me “Margaret”, given certain situations. I just don’t want to be called anything but ‘Margaret’ by weird Internet people.)

When I was trying to get Verified on Facebook, I kept getting it kicked back instantly— “the names don’t match.” Okay, that’s weird. How do celebrities get verified?

Well, the answer is, they have someone submit for them through backroom mechanisms that normal people don’t have access to. So it’s never a problem.

Verification doesn’t have any sort of mechanism— or does not want to create any sort of mechanism— wherein trans people are accommodated. And I get that the whole thing is a unique situation. But I’m not parading around with my legal name on the Internet. I’ve had enough of people trying to take harassing me from online to offline, and I’m not giving them any ammunition (esp. given that, at one point, someone tried to kill my parents by SWATting them).

The emotional reason behind why I wanted this is simple: I qualified, and I felt left out. I didn’t like the checkmark; I didn’t want it next to my name. But I wanted to see why I kept getting denied. I wanted to make them give me what I actually was eligible for.

It’s not going to happen. Or, at the very least, I don’t feel like taking it past this point.

Because I’ve understood it, and I think that will have to be the end to that story.

The Secrets of Verification

We’ve been workshopping this over the past few weeks. Probably a month’s worth of time. Here’s the secret to getting Verified on every platform:

Bluesky
It’s too young to tell. The teams are too small. It seems to be a combination of luck, but you should be able to do it if you’re a government official, a company with supporting documentation (even small companies have gotten verified), or, you are a warlock.

I’m not fucking around with that last part. That one worked for that person.

Twitter
2,000 verified followers or subscribers, or pay for it. It is useless now.

Instagram (and Meta in general)
Pay for it, or, be a musician with press (2-3 news articles). Instagram’s got no fucking clue what’s actually a good music press site, so you can just ask some dipshit to rate your beats. It does not matter to them. It’s assumed that your name has to match: they might go easier on you because musicians don’t usually publish things under their own names, but it seems to be an easy pipeline.

Facebook
Name has to match; be a journalist or a writer. This is the simplest pipeline. They have (had?) a special journalist pipeline that’s publicly accessible, where you just submit bylines. (‘Bylines’ are slang for ‘articles you wrote’.) They don’t accept every single publication, so you’ll have to check that and get a job there if that’s the route you want to go.

TikTok
I succeeded but failed here.

Your name has to match your ID. It would seem that every single person who isn’t using their real name— or isn’t proudly displaying it— is gonna be jolly well fucked here.

I submitted with an interview I did in a major news outlet, my book on Barnes and Noble, articles where I was listed alongside legendary musicians and actors (I was also quoted); and then, I added my verified(?) Official Artist Channel account on YouTube. The creme de la creme was showing them my Google Knowledge Panel, which is, hysterically, the fucking hardest ‘checkmark’ to get.

Google Knowledge Panel
I’m not gonna tell you.

I researched this heavily. However, throughout my 40 year existence, I’ve been getting nothing but fucked for helping others.

I raised $5 million USD for other people, to help them in their time of need. And when my mother got cancer and needed their help, nobody came.

You, the reader, have nothing to do with that. But I’m not going to tell anyone how I got it. I got it fair and square; I figured it out.

The hardest checkmark.

If you’d like to know how to get an official artist channel, please Google “how to get an official artist channel”. There are steps. You can do it! c(◕ᴗ◕✿)

For additional help

Ask an A.I.

I’m serious. Present the A.I. with the things you have that you think are verifiable, or ask it what you will need. It will help you in real time, something that I cannot do.

The End of an Era

I bet my Dad that I could get Verified on Twitter.

He told me that it wasn’t worth it. That it didn’t mean anything.

And that was true.

But I still wish that I could’ve done it.

The fact of the matter is, though, while I absolutely was eligible for it . . .

. . . if the name on your driver’s license doesn’t match, it seems you won’t get it.

Which is strange. I’ve seen trans people get Verified on Old Twitter; get Verified on LinkedIn…

. . . but I guess it just isn’t going to be something I’ll be getting.

I’m going to resent you for this, by the way.

The post A Farewell to Verification appeared first on icze4r communication.

The Internet stopped being good for me at about 1997. 1999, maybe, at the latest. There were always portions of it that was deleterious— there were things that I wished would change, but I largely ignored them, thinking that a better world was possible.

Oh, yes— a better world is possible.

It’s just not possible with human beings.

There are a lot of things that human beings have said to me. The base impulse that human beings have, when I point out that something that the species is doing is disgusting, repulsive, or otherwise amoral, is that I was the one with the problem.

But really, the problem is that human beings do so many horrible things, and they operate on the basis of human primacy— this idea that the ends always justify the means, if human beings like the ends.

One cannot convince a monster that it is a monster. Not in this circumstance, anyways.

The year is 2026, and I have been perseverating on here, for nearly 30 full years. Arcadium has been gone for longer than the lifespans of most people reading this.

And, furthermore, I have won.

So there’s no reason to stay here anymore.

I’ll do my work to improve my web presence. But that’s it.

There is nothing left to do here.

Goodbye.

The post A Change appeared first on icze4r communication.