Moving Away from Centralized Social Media

Those of you who have followed me for a while know that I’ve done quite a lot of moving around on social media. I’ve always had my Twitter account, but I started branching out to blogging on Medium, streaming on Twitch and producing on YouTube. I’ve had my reasons for each of these moves and I’ve enjoyed them to varying extents, but I think it’s about time we all became part of a less centralized social media landscape.

Facebook has proven, at the very least, to be entirely inept at policing their platform with an even hand, at most intentionally favoring one side over another. Today was the day that a 17 year old man killed two people and grievously wounded another after a Facebook group he was associated with advertised a need for “patriots willing to take up arms and defend our city tonight from the evil thugs.” This comes after Facebook banned several militia and antifascist groups from the platform, calling them dangerous groups and implicitly stating that antifascists and fascists are equal.

YouTube has a tendency to rob creators of their income at a whim while continuing to monetize far-right propagandists who abuse the platform to spread hate and harass innocent people. They allow their DMCA system to be abused by bad actors and malicious copyright troll companies that will rob creators of their income for a couple of seconds of copyrighted material in an hours-long video. They have done very little to acknowledge or fix their algorithm promoting dangerous, extremist content.

Twitch is showing willingness to be weaponized for the same DMCA abuse and have created a questionable oversight board to police content, despite members of the board outright admitting they will abuse their position for personal vendettas.

Medium does not properly allow for fair monetization of content and has built a pretty bad reputation for it. Their monetization strategy is also horrible and I don’t really see it being a good strategy going forward.

So, this site is my solution! Blogging is a lot of fun and fits rather well into my rather busy schedule. I can work on articles from anywhere in the world and can stop and start way easier than a stream or video. It also is my way of supporting the decentralization of social media and media in general.

So, what to expect?

Right Wing Extremism Research

I’ve started doing a lot of research into right-wing extremism recently for fairly obvious reasons. Honestly, it’s one of the reasons I thought about starting this blog: I wanted an outlet to publish research and videos/streams didn’t seem like the best way to do that. So, I’ll be publishing right-wing extremism research on this blog in its own category.

Information Security News and Research

I’ll be publishing information security news as it comes up, likely in an ad-hoc “current events discussion” type of manner. I’ll also be doing random information security and general tech research that I’ll post under this category as well, as it comes up. This will include things like my ongoing research into threat hunting, reverse engineering, etc. If necessary, I’ll break this up into more specific categories, but at the moment I’ll keep it broad.

Development Logs

Devlogs for SketchyReq and other projects will continue as well. I think this will be a better avenue for it versus videos, so there will likely be a fair bit of this.

Politics and Current Events

I know, I know, you’re all tired of the politics from my Twitter feed already… well, now you get more, in longer form! I’m a political person, and Twitter is a horrible avenue for talking about anything political, so this blog will naturally contain political and current events commentary. Don’t worry, I will make it relatively easy to filter that out if you’re just here for the tech and China talk.

Speaking of which…

China Stuff

I will be talking China on the blog, intermittently. It will have its own category but it very well may veer into politics, tech, etc. as well.

Are you done with YouTube and Twitter?

Short answer: no.

Long answer: YouTube will likely see even less love than it has gotten with my intermittent schedule. If a project/topic makes more sense as a video, I’ll consider doing a video and a blog post. I’m likely going to default to blog posts from now on

Twitter isn’t going anywhere, though. I just might refrain from hot takes that would make better blog posts.