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.

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”.

• YouTube test threatens to block viewers if they continue using ad blockers
• How well is uBlock Origin working for you in Chrome Mobile?
• Read up on Manifest V3. They were forced to delay Jan 2023 implementation due to outcry, but it’s still very much on their roadmap.

Are you really certain that Google is trying to eliminate adblocking is just an alarmist assumption?

I think the issue is that Google has both A) a track record of backdooring restrictions on adblocking, and B) an overwhelming motivation to do so seeing as how they generate their revenue from online advertising. They’ve forfeited the benefit of the doubt, especially when they’ve already disclosed that the whole point of the change is to enhance the profitability of online advertising:

Google’s engineers elaborate, “Websites funded by ads require proof that their users are human and not bots…Social websites need to differentiate between real user engagement and fake engagement”

So given that once implemented, this hop and this skip would just require a teensy jump in order to further restrict adblocking, it is reasonable to assume that’s within their desired goals.

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.

I’ve been very happy with Tidal. I prefer the UX to the Spotify app but it is lacking some functionality like Spotify Connect. It’s also nice that they pay artists more, and that none of my subscription fees are feeding into a $200 million contract for Joe Rogan.

If you use Google Home/Assistant, Tidal doesn’t integrate well. It does integrate with Alexa.

As far as audio quality, I’m reasonably certain that I’d be unable to discern between the top tiers of any of the current services in a blind A/B test.

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.

I like the look and feel of Jerboa, but it has a bug on my device where I’ll be typing and it’ll just jump to middle of the post and start deleting/overwriting stuff.

I like how Liftoff can provide a unified All feed with content from all instances, but the feed just looks so noisy and icon-heavy

Connect seems the most well-rounded and the closest to a Relay for Reddit replacement, so I’ve been mainly gravitating toward that.

Thunder just didn’t hit with me for whatever reason.

Welllll, to clarify, we did not close it. The organization that was running it, Central City Concern, closed it. Specifically because it turns out that people on meth behave somewhat differently than people who have had one too many Tecates:

The agency said they received more and more patients in the midst of a mental crisis, agitated from opioid or meth use or a combination of both, leading to increased safety risks.

“More and more, we’re seeing people ending up in the sobering center when they should be in places where they can be given medication and a higher level of monitoring until their crisis subsides,” Dr. Amanda Risser, Central City Concern’s senior medical director of substance use disorder services told The Oregonian/OregonLive in an interview last week. “We don’t have medicine, we don’t have padded safety rooms and we don’t have the resources at the sobering center to do the hands-on intervention that happens in psychiatric centers. It just isn’t an acceptable risk anymore.”

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.

Yes, and after such valuable discussion on Twitter such as “How much do Jews control the world: completely or just excessively?”, a little vapid inanery with a side of brands doesn’t sound so bad.

When I first came to r/Portland, it was the kind of place that made fun of the oLive comment section. Over the last few years, it became functionally indistinguishable from it, with posters stumbling over each other to find the most nihilistic Eeyore take on any given subject.

It’d be awesome if we could avoid the same trap here, and I guess the solution is to consciously try to avoid Nextdooring the place up too hard. Like, how many different homeless camp fire articles do we need in a week to drive meaningful conversation?

I believe that’s a bit of a misleading meme that’s making the rounds. You can deactivate it, which is functionally the same, and they haven’t yet rolled out the feature to delete it because they rushed this thing to market to take advantage of Twitter’s dumpster fire.

I also might be slow here, but I struggle to understand why this is a big deal. There are countless reasons why I would have reservations with Meta, but aww shit I can only deactivate not delete the Threads account associated with my source Instagram account seems like a weirdly esoteric hill to die on.

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