Social Media Thread of Social Media Drama

[benji]

Lolcowing is an apparatus that turns a person into a renewable source of entertainment. It refers to an ongoing *relationship* rather than an individual, I think. The relationship is extractive and one-directional; the "cow" doesn't consent, doesn't benefit, and isn't a participant in the exchange.
...
Also, "has the person we're mining for content and laughs done shitty stuff" can't be the thing either. Someone can genuinely suck, the charges can be 100% true And Yet that doesn't justify an extractive relationship which is necessarily abusive and corrosive to victim and perpetrator.

For one, ordinary criticism aims at a correction and can be satisfied. Lolcowing aims at a supply, and a supply is satisfied only by continued production. It doesn't want the "cow" to change; it wants them to keep producing. There's no stopping condition.

This seems to be an argument that it's more ethical to endlessly harass the person into changing?

A couple things distinguish it from ordinary mockery. One is context collapse as a production requirement: you have to strip out like, any audience they wrote for, any body of work, their tone because all of that is what made the thing sayable, and so all of it gets in the way of making it laughable

Almost all these people write for an audience of one: themselves.