Oh man, wtf is all this! I knew the “full stops at the end of messages sound hostile” one and also that there are certain emojis Gen Z doesn’t like (including, yes, the humble 🙂) but the rest of it is a wild ride. TIL I’ve violated so much Instagram etiquette due to not even knowing how the Stories feature works because I started using Insta before it had a Stories feature and always saw it as an extraneous add-on. And also the “literally never read a message (or Insta Story) without replying” one. I do that aaaaaall the time.

I’m also surprised by “haha is insincere, use lol/lmao for real laughing” because my Millennial interpretation is the exact opposite. Haha is sincere (although for real laughing you need to go up to hahaha or maybe even hahahahaha), lol/lmao is “wry smirk” at the very best. You guys are crazy, Gen Z

The circumstantial evidence seems pretty clear that Telegram is now compromised, and working with the Russian authorities to give them access to dissidents’ supposedly-private conversations.

Seemingly everyone has shared this link already, but I’mma do it anyway. This article is a pretty insightful analysis of how economic imperatives compel big social media companies to “enshittify” their service – basically once they lock users in, they tweak the algorithms to put in more and more “sponsored content” so they can get more money. It also explains that once they’ve locked in the brands/advertisers (who give up their ability to reach customers outside these tech giants’ platforms), their next step is to also squeeze the brands – e.g. Amazon cannibalises sales that could’ve gone to independent businesses by releasing their own, cheaper knock-offs; and Facebook limits the “reach” of brands’ posts to only minuscule numbers of their own followers unless they cough up loads of money. Apparently, TikTok is heading down this same path.

This was a fun post. How to recreate quintessentially late 90s stuff (like animated trails following the cursor, WordArt, guestbooks) with modern web technologies.

Interesting piece about some of the history of fan creators and authors/actors colliding – for example, Anne Rice’s infamous opposition to fanfic, “Morangate”, and a clueless university professor who picked a “fanfiction of the week” and assigned all their undergraduate students to review it 🥴