OK, I bothered opening up Spotify on my phone to check out my actual Wrapped. Fun discoveries:
So I’m doing the “let the Spotify DJ walk you through your 2023 Wrapped” thing, and the very first song was… Interpol’s “Leif Erikson”, which I think I would’ve listened to exactly two times all year (when I listened to the whole album) if Spotify didn’t insist on cramming it into every single “songs it goes on to when an album finishes” set.
Also, so far, every other one of my “top songs” this year has been by Interpol too. But maybe that’s just the DJ organising my “top songs” by artist or something. Interpol still isn’t exactly where I’d have started, though (they rank 7th for my year up to 15 Nov, according to Last.fm).
Thought this was an interesting post-mortem of one of the ill-fated Twitter knock-offs that launched in the wake of the aftermath of the Elon Musk takeover late last year. I don’t think it’s such a mystery why it failed to take off, though: there was just no need for it, and nothing that distinguished it from the already-existing and much more fully-featured Twitter alternatives (most notably Mastodon).
Today I got a weird email, which honestly looked like spam, from a company called Zoominfo (no relation to Zoom). The email had the subject “Notice of personal information processing”, and the body text was very similar to that republished on this Brown University blog . Immediately, of course, I wondered: who the fuck are these people, why the fuck do they have …
Came across this new-to-me Wordle-like game, this time with a daily logic puzzle: Murdle . A good bit of fun 😄
Why is that the end goal of blogging? Of writing? Just to make money and grow our followers? To increase our traffic so we can expose our visitors to 300 repetitive ads that take up their entire phone screen? To “convert” our readers into our customers, because them reading and enjoying what we have to say simply isn’t enough? Personally, I want nothing to do with it. I’m sick of everything having to be a hustle now, even something personal like sharing our ramblings with strangers on the internet.
Really enjoyed this post!
Neat retrospective on how the internet grew from a niche communication protocol for academics to a mass medium over the 1990s in Australia. (And, honestly, it seems like the mass growth was in 1995–1996 alone.) Very interesting.
An article about the whole Reddit fiasco, which talks about what made Reddit so valuable in the first place (all the niche knowledge, shared by actual human beings who know what they’re talking about, not regurgitated by a glorified predictive text generator), and concludes:
We are living through the end of the useful internet. The future is informed discussion behind locked doors, in Discords and private fora, with the public-facing web increasingly filled with detritus generated by LLMs, bearing only a stylistic resemblance to useful information. Finding unbiased and independent product reviews, expert tech support, and all manner of helpful advice will now resemble the process by which one now searches for illegal sports streams or pirated journal articles. The decades of real human conversation hosted at places like Reddit will prove useful training material for the mindless bots and deceptive marketers that replace it.
OK, so I’ve been unable to resist the siren call of the “threadiverse” any longer… I’ve made a Kbin account at @jayeless@kbin.social 😊 (I know you can follow communities from a Mastodon account, but I feel like the threaded interface works better for reading them!)
It also looks like Kbin now maps its upvotes to broader Fediverse “likes”, like Lemmy (previously Kbin upvotes were boosts), which I think is a good change 👍
As you may have heard, Reddit’s decided to pull a Twitter and start charging an extortionate amount of money for access to their previously-free API, in order to drive third-party clients like Apollo and RIF into extinction. Under Reddit’s proposed pricing, Apollo’s dev would have to pay USD$20 million a year for continued API access , and while Reddit …
Jessica Smith is a socialist and a feminist who loves animals, books, gaming, and cooking; she’s also interested in linguistics, history, technology and society.