Yes, the generic names make it a nightmare to search for things relating to them.

Thank you for making this post. The number of times I’ve seen the term used here lately has been bothering me.

I’m not responding to any more comments on this, but it’s evident that a lot of you have never lived through a wildfire. All of the resources you need get centralized on local news sites (like Castanet for Kelowna) in a way that makes it easy to figure out what’s happening. Many of the updates that local officials broadcast daily never get transcribed or posted anywhere except for local news sites such as that.

No, but it acted as a way for people to share links to legitimate news in times of crisis if that was where they normally communicated, and now they can’t. Similarly, people got used to accessing Twitter to find realtime information on local events, and now that’s also largely cut off.

I’m not defending the companies. I’m not defending people’s dependence on them. I’m pointing out that the need exists in this moment, and that this isn’t the moment to be shaming people who are actively fleeing a wildfire for decrying the fact that governments’ and corporations’ choices are impacting their ability to share information in a crisis.

I don’t use Facebook, but many affected by the wildfires do.

It’s very hard to find the resources. The government sites are not SEO optimized, the URLs change, sometimes there’s better info on local news websites. People are trying to share these vital resources with one another on social networks that already exist, and are finding that they cannot. In a time of crisis, you can’t quickly set up another network on a different platform. Many people don’t even know about better platforms.

At least where I am, they are pushed based on which cell tower you are connected to. My old phone did not even have functional GPS and I still got emergency alerts.

And it’s not even just a few of them. I recently looked at the Wikipedia page for Stephen Harper (former Conservative PM) and he’s been on Ben Shapiro lately, and started ranting about “woke culture.” It’s become pervasive.

Time for Ban 2!

I moderated two subreddits over 1m users, one over 250k users, and a handful over 10k users.

Every. single. one. of my team members has left, except for one on one of the tiny subreddits.