Update (9/11/23): A TikTok spokesperson told Media Matters that “WGA has been inadvertently blocked as part of the platforms' protections against QAnon conspiracy theories.” Searches for “WGA” and related terms now appear to function normally.

take a cold shower

Well umm, that's kinda the trick. In Phoenix in summertime, "cold" water is cold in name only. It's more tepid than anything. That's just another part of what makes it so oppressive living there in summer.

Well shucks the core definition of the word "mercenary" means one who is acting out of self-interest rather than loyalty. The only thing these MFs are going to do now is look for work.

You can have it fast, good, or cheap: pick two, and unless you're bankrolling the developer you've already chosen cheap.

They're paying Joe Rogan $200M to be the exclusive home of his conspiracy disinformation bullshit, and they're more concerned about forest_stream_with_gentle_rain_3.mp3?

Kudos to them for rolling out support more widely, but it's a bit misleading as Firefox nightly/Fennec has supported extensions for years (albeit via a cumbersome process), and Kiwi Browser is also a thing.

I can't understand how folks out there are just rawdogging the Internet out there without ublock or at least a DNS ad filter. Admittedly, Chrome runs a hair more smoothly, but the ability to use extensions like uBlock / DarkReader / Consent-O-Matic make the Firefox experience a tier above.

I just hope this makes it possible to install the Bypass Paywalls extension again so I don't have to hop over to Kiwi for that.

Spotify is also paying Rogan $200 million for the honor of being the exclusive platform used to spread his disinformation, which is one of the reasons I prefer to avoid it. It's bad enough they distribute it, but the fact that my subscriber dollars would directly be funding his bullshit just sticks in my craw too much.

It was a community built by a former Reddit backend developer, Deimos. He also built the subredditsimulator subs and automoderator, and is looking to purposefully cultivate an online community that avoids some of the common pitfalls, mainly:

• Gravitating over time towards low-effort, lowest common denominator clickbait.
• A culture of lawful-evil trolls who "follow the rules" but are ultimately assholes who ruin the vibe.

Personally I love what he's done with the place. It's small, but it's big enough and I find that the quality of comments is far better than what you might find in most corners of the internet. I've also got a few invites if anyone wants to check it out.

Also the Tildes app is astoundingly good for what the developer is calling an "alpha".

Yeah, uhh we had that in the 1990s and it sucked:

Why do one thing poorly when you can do a whole bunch of different things even worse.

Ayep. It's a clever move to get a July traffic bump to offset any losses from the unpopular API etcetera decisions. Then they can point to the overall numbers and say hey, our average visits per user actually went up after we closed the API, so this is proof our users actually love all our shitty recent decisions.

Makes sense. People are thirsty for a something along the lines of "Twitter, but fewer nazis", so tons of people checked it out, but it still lacks feature parity with Twitter since it was a rushed-to-market MVP.

I think once it adds on a handful of new features, it's only a matter of time before audiences gravitate to Threads over a platform whose owner is bragging about funnelling money to human traffickers.

I wonder how much of that are Reddit-specific problems vs just plain old humans online in a pseudo-anonymous setting problem.