Andy

That’s very cool.

Yeah but that’s just marketing and free agents expressing their ideas in the marketplace of ideas! This is propaganda! /S

Not to brag, not I encountered “Spiralism” over a decade ago.

I was in grad school studying biochemistry and stumbled across a crank article in a lower tier scientific journal by some weirdo with a pseudo-spiritual philosophical belief that life was fundamentally and intrinsically developed out of the concept of a spiral. It was hilariously vague low-quality stoner nonsense that I couldn’t believe he got published anywhere. I remember it because I sent it on to friends to laugh about.

My impression now is that ‘it’s all spirals, mannn!’ is apparently one of the most popular valleys you wind up in if you follow every dumb thought further down to its lowest conclusion. So of course a machine that churns out the most vapid, generic human output in a concentrated slop inevitably keeps arriving at this destination.

It’s a parasocial dopamine hit. It’s like commenting on a Twitch stream. There’s a fantasy that they’ll notice and reply to you, and suddenly you’ll be having a conversation with a famous attractive person.

I’m also curious. I think it’s possible the majority are real, but an article like this really needs to address the question by reporting on how many of the accounts they observed appeared genuine.

Why? I don’t understand this comment. Are you unfamiliar with these terms?

I can speak from experience here, because this actually happened to me!

My partner (born female) and I married in our late 20s. He was already casually gender non-confirming before we married, and I described myself as hetero-flexible. His transition was rather gradual, with no strict coming-out event, but it was something we discussed openly. After he began presenting as male on work settings, I began identifying myself as bisexual.

It worked out very well. As the person above noted, you can really call yourself whatever. If you wanted to, you could identify as straight with an exception made for a single person. Although I would advise against it, as your partner might take some offense, and it confuses people if you identify in a way that conflicts with your long term partnership. Most co-workers assume I’m gay because I’m married to a man, and I don’t bother to correct them.

Sometimes it comes up, because my husband and I have a biological son together, which isn’t a secret. Sometimes when taking about him and genetics, it leads me to explaining all of this. But as you can see, it’s unusual, but not that hard to explain.

I don’t think so. I think that if you were blind and a screen reader have you those instructions, you’d likely ask a sighted friend to check if the screen reader glitched out message the professor for clarification.

I also wouldn’t be surprised if some blind students immediately understood what they were hearing.

I don’t want to diminish the experiences of the people who used this site, but it doesn’t sound surprising. It sounds like a marketplace for softcore, romance-based sex work.

I would imagine that if you were in a long-term serious remote relationship, at some point you’d transition off the pay-per-action dating site onto email and WhatsApp videocalls.

I’m saddened that people get exploited, though.