We all know they’re insufferable, but they’re also making the world worse.

This is the story of the showdown between Elon Musk and Twitter and how the richest man on earth suddenly came to control one of the most powerful media platforms in the world. In Character Limit, award-winning reporters Kate Conger and Ryan Mac draw on exclusive interviews, unreported documents and internal Twitter recordings to provide a revelatory, three-dimensional, and definitive account of what really happened when Musk showed up to takeover Twitter, spoiling for a brawl and intent on revolution, with his merciless, sycophantic cadre of lawyers, investors, and bankers.

Agency accuses Meta, Google, TikTok and other companies of sharing troves of user information with third-parties

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is everywhere, yet it causes damage to society in ways that can’t be fixed. Calling for the restructuring of AI, Dan McQuillan sets out an anti-fascist approach that replaces exclusions with caring and outlines new mechanisms that support collective freedom.

Compact discs provided the soundtrack to his life. Then came streaming and he couldn’t get rid of them fast enough. As CDs enjoy a renaissance, our writer looks back at what he lost

The proliferation of Quick Response codes has created a cybersecurity nightmare, but public vigilance can help

We should just admit that internet-wide search is dead and return to human curated internet directories.

Personal website manifestos

Lately I've been checking out Misskey-based instances, specifically misskey.io and a fork of misskey called firefish.social. They're a microblog system but with additional features such as 4K character limit, 16 images per post, emoji reactions with even additional custom reactions per instance, a gallery feature that is unique, not just a media tab of all your media posts, built in custom color themes with the ability to make your own, and the choice of 3 layouts that are full screen with customizable widgets, a twitter-like layout, and a tweetdeck/mastodon-like layout with the multi-column view. It's one of the few services that doesn't just try to make twitter again but tries to do something its own and I very much appreciate that for it. I almost want to use it despite my aversion to microblogs.

Oh shit did I almost forget to do this again?

Okay, so I have Opinions about AI and I know they are not 100% shared by all of my friends and AI controversies caused drama in at least one Discord I'm in, so I'm going to put this under a cut and you can read/engage with it if this is a thing that's interesting to you, or not. It also deals a little bit with bad things happening to kids in a weird, hard-to-define way that makes me uncomfortable and may make you uncomfortable as well.

I had the chance to go to a very interesting talk recently by a guy named Cory Doctorow who is mainly a sci-fi writer but has an interest in tech and the place of tech in society -- what I would call "broadly Electronic Frontier Foundation-type issues." He talked about a kind of typical lifecycle of tech/social media giants (a kind of preview, I guess, of his upcoming book), where benefits originally offered to users are gradually withdrawn in favor of being given to advertisers which are then gradually withdrawn in order to accrue to the company itself and its shareholders, a process he calls the "enshittificaton" of social media. Given that, uh, two major social media sites have had meltdowns in the last month (Reddit's CEO implementing new policies regarding third party apps leading to a protest and exodus, plus Twitter's extended ongoing shitshow, the latest development being that Twitter started capping how many tweets a user can load, possibly due to a shoddy code rollout or because Twitter refuses to pay its cloud computing bills (either way, some kind of cost-cutting measure no doubt led to this situation)) and that I generally like ranting about the sad state of modern social media, I thought I would write a DW post summarizing the talk / his points because it seems relevant!

Someone just linked to this in the eight thousandth discussion of static site generators or something like them for simple, basic websites and this just completely clarified my feelings about every single goddamn time I try to install and set up a static site generator.

I'm more grateful than ever for my commitment against the cloud. The cloud is just somebody else's computer. The death of forums and blogs and the centralising towards a single platform trades off control for convenience - and it's so collectively detrimental.

Lately, I've found myself thinking a lot about an online interaction I had about twenty years ago, which really shaped my approach to online interactions in general.

I liked and mostly agreed with this article on "the enshittification" of TikTok, Twitter, Amazon shopping, and other web services.

The prompt here focused on the Twitter explosion, so I guess I'll talk about platforms in a kind of rambling, disorganized sort of way.

I used to really like taking personality/sorting quizzes and sharing the results on LJ/DW (I've got a quizzes tag (all f-locked)) but I feel like personality quizzes have really gone downhill since their heyday on... (looks at the quiz site I shared my results from the most) ...Blogthings.com? I don't actually know much about that site, but this post I found when Googling the site name just now suggests that it was one woman's project and that all the quizzes were written by her... Which I guess would explain the consistently high quality of the quizzes!

Are you a member of a small, marginalized identity-based community of Tumblr bloggers, looking to advocate for yourselves, support each other, have meaningful discussions, build, and grow? Then Tumblr itself is standing in your way.