The following post is a cross-posted blog post. It is a satire of a certain behavior type, and is meant to be taken with humor. This post is a philosophical angle on the concept of people being negative towards similar sites/things in the old social media space, and in general.

Let's make something informative. A phenomenon that intrigues me (for all the wrong reasons), is people hating on alternatives to a service that they already use. If you're in the SpaceHey community, you've seen it first hand; the drama about Napoleonite fuelling people to fight each other over a website. People being blatantly and openly hostile to Napoleonite for no reason. And now that I mentioned that, people will line up to drop hate over it in this comment section, because people are people.

This blog is not about that, but it does make a nice example to say what I mean; people being hostile to a site similar to what they use. Be it a new alternative that is aggressively advertised, to another site they just do not want to try, at all.

However, this behavior is very hypocritical... Hear me out, I swear that this is going to be funny.

Some of the websites these people (as well as you and I) use today are alternatives and competitors to things that came before it! Everything we use, be it our computers or our favorite websites, come from other websites and computers. Which technically means, that you're hating on something that you're doing yourself...

Why?

Your go-to search engine, is an alternative to a search engine!

You know Google, right? A big company with a search website, that gets you what you want when you type magic words? Everybody is familiar with Google or have at least heard of it, as it's a big corner store of the internet, whether for data collection or for just being the website you use to find what you want. Or to learn, of course!

Except, that you also are hypocritical for using Google, because Google itself wasn't the first search engine! You are using an alternative, and being hostile about it! Let's meet the site that came before Google now, shall we?

Yahoo!

Yahoo is the first popular Search Engine on the internet, coming before Google by about 3 years, launching in March 1995. While it was far from the first (with suggestions that even earlier places being from as soon as the early 90s!), it was still first before Google, and was used by a lot of people long before Google ever came along and practically turned the entire scene into a monopoly.

While Yahoo's modern presence is, for a lack of better word... right off the face of the earth, with mostly elders using it now, Yahoo used to have a big presence on the internet! From the Yahoo! Messenger app that many may have recently come to know (especially if you're from the Old Internet scene), to the popular indie site craze Geocities (which still has a small impact today), there was a lot for almost anybody to enjoy.

For anybody curious, some of these can be kind of browsed today! While the OG search engine is not quite browsable (read: dead, bloated), many of the offshoots are! From some blokes making Yahoo messenger work with other apps from the time, to browsable Geocities archives, you could really look if you wanted. While Neocities definitely is much better than Geocities (especially considering Neocities is still alive), Geocities was interesting.

But that's not why I brought up Yahoo. I brought up Yahoo because in 1995, their search is all that mattered. And now that you use Google, you're using an alternative to Yahoo, that took the rest of the market.

So doesn't that make you a hypocrite, in theory?

Even if you use another search engine, that too is an alternative!

Okay, well even if you're not using Google or Yahoo, you're still a technical hypocrite. Any search engine you can think of, that you use, from Ask (RIP BTW), to Bing, it launched after Yahoo, therefore being an "alternative".

If you don't believe me, here's a bunch of search engines, and their rough launch date: Bing -> June 2009 DuckDuckGo -> September 2008 Yandex -> September 1997 Startpage -> ~2006, allegedly (Rebooted in July 2009) Ecosia -> December 2009 Qwant -> Februrary 2013 SearX(NG) -> January 2014 / March 2021

Note how all of them were created after 1995? You know, after Yahoo, the site that all of these are an alternative to? No? No clapping?

You're still a hypocrite, because your operating system is a derivative

Now this one will be a shocker, but your phone and laptops are all also powered on alternatives. Whether you are team Apple or team Everybody Else, unless you use an old Nokia, I have some fun news for you!

If you're team Android, you lose

If you use an Android phone (i.e: Samsung, LG), I can happily say Apple beat you to the chase, as iOS 1.0 (also known as iPhone OS) released in June 2007 with the launch of the original iPhone. So Apple has officially beat you by about a year.

If you're team Apple, you lose

Except that if you use an iPhone, Android also beat you to the chase!

In August 2005, this article came out of Bloomberg Businessweek that reveals that Google bought Android, which was still in development at the time. So, if you want to count development over official release, you can say that Android beat the apple people to the-

If you're in either camp, you also lose!

Actually, no you can't, because that doesn't matter! Because PDAs and Mobile phones (specifically ones before smart phones) exist!

If you are unaware, we're referring to a Mobile phone, which can include smart phones, but is more than that. Whether you want to argue if a Cordless phone counts, or if it must be a 3310 is up to you. However, we don't just have the old phones to talk about.

A PDA, also usually called a "Personal Digital Assistant" is a type of tech that you can take anywhere, to manage many things from contacts to emails. They were very popular in the 90s, before being killed in the 2000s to 2010s with the rise of... You guessed it, computers and smartphones.

You can technically say that PDAs are the thing that an iPhone is an alternative to. From the Apple Newton, an Apple device even older than iPhones (around the same time as the VERY early macintoshes, for the nerds!), to the newer Palm TX. Modern phones replaced them... Which obviously means, you're using a device that replaced a PDA! Hypocritical, right?

And if you think a PDA doesn't count... Please look no further, than the IBM Simon, the PDA that also had a touch screen, allowed you to make phone calls and write emails, and it even ran a modified version of MS-DOS!

Even sites you use regularly are derivatives

But if you don't fancy the tech world, and would like to take another angle: I'm sorry to say that SpaceHey and FriendRewind, are, in fact, alternatives to MySpace by technicality. You know how SpaceHey feels weird? It's based on MySpace, the 2003 social media site that ate shit by 2013! And if MySpace didn't eat shit and die, you wouldn't have SpaceHey to spew your hate on. Cool, right?

Or maybe nowadays, you use a lot of Instagram. No worries, because Instagram is owned by Meta, the company that runs Facebook. And if you use Facebook to contact your family, you're also a hypocrite, because Facebook is a MySpace alternative! So gotcha there, right?

But really, why so hostile?

I don't understand why people are so bitter to "alternatives", be it a website they don't want to move to, or hostility to a community that they perceive as inferior to them. It's a weird effect. I can continue to point fingers at many stuff like this, if I really tried! And it's weird, because people seem to spew hate without giving it a second thought that what they use, is the very thing they hate!

And it's interesting, because I have been thinking for a while. And I realized, after thinking about it, is that I can comedically say that they're hypocrites off a bunch of loose stuff. And it's weird, because, well, you can apply this to anything!

You like shooters? They're all the same and alternatives of each other! You like PaRappa? Yeah, well Friday Night Funkin, Dance Dance Revolution and Piano Tiles are the same thing.

It's so weird...

Yes, this is a satire

So, there you go, that is why you are a hypocrite if you hate on a SpaceHey alternative, in long form.

Well, not quite. I wanted to actually form together the thoughts I had, and that thought was that you could kind of reach and say that people who hate on similar sites are hypocritical, because everything they use is similar to something that already exists!

So try not to take any of this too seriously. Maybe you even learned a little about the things we use every day!