Between the collapse of the advertiser model, record high interest rates, and generative AI content farming, the next decade isn't looking great for the free and open internet.
I'm a big fan of social media platforms that let you delete comments on your own posts. I get so many where people are going out of their way to call me out for something that was neither said, implied, or even existed in the near vicinity of my post. It's just like "nah, ur comment priveledged are revoked. Come back when you've worked out some issues lol"
I do wonder how many people are staying on Twitter due to follower count alone. Having had an account for over a decade, I'd have previously estimated about 20% of my followers were dead accounts. Based on now leaving and making new accounts on other platforms, my estimate is closer to 90%.
As a blogger I've always known only like 1% of people who retweet/like a post actually clicked the link and read the article, but I assumed that was just a social media thing. Having experimented with basically every other platform, I learned it's more likely that a significant number of Twitter engagements are fake, and those that aren't don't really care enough to read your work, they'll just give you a retweet/like for appearances.
@malwaretech I am not active on Twitter any more but I did keep my account in small part because of the follower count, yes, even though engagement has been shit. But two more important reasons are the people who are still there and that I have yet to figure out if my tweet archive still works when I delete my tweets. I used a parser that supposedly downloaded everything in HTML and MD format but I dunno if it's easily searchable like the archive that still connects to Twitter 😕
I'm living the free-market libertarian dream right now. Some random no-name ISP has negotiated an exclusive deal with my apartment complex, so they've cut off all other service and forced everyone to pay for the same garbage internet.
@jerry@malwaretech everybody loves free markets… until they’re a big player in a market, then they do everything they can to break free markets and do regulatory capture to make sure they don’t have to compete in a free market against new competitors
Twitter made a new ad for the platform that features a phone scrolling through Twitter. They ended up pulling it and remaking it after people noticed it contained a tweet mocking Elon for trying to blame Twitter's advertiser exodus on the jews. The second version of the ad, which is still online, contains a tweet about creampieing a rotisserie chicken.
An interesting fact I learned is that internal combustion engines are so inefficient that you could charge an average electric vehicle using a coal powerplant, and even with all the energy lost to transformers, power lines, charging, etc, it'd still be more efficient than an average gas powered car, even if you ignore the entire petroleum refinement and distribution process.
@malwaretech two stroke motors in ideal situations are more efficient than regular four stroke engines. However it is almost impossible to get a two stroke engine into that ideal situation and anything outside of ideal they do horribly. Even when in the ideal situations they pollute horribly, and unlike four strokes it is much harder to clean that pollution up.
@malwaretech Off the line with the throttle near the floor is the most efficient, but you can only do that for a couple seconds before you are at speed. And if you don't shift right you will get to high RPMs which are far worse (all automatics assume you make max power and will use high RPMs, but a manual driver might shift right if they are careful)
My favorite quantum physics explanations was from someone who responded to the question "what is electron spin" with "Imagine a ball and it's spinning, except its not a ball and its not spinning". It seems like a shitpost, but pretty much sums up all of quantum physics philosophy.
@malwaretech like quantum chromodynamics - think of colors but there are really no colors, it just makes it so we don’t go insane trying to think about it
FML. My apartment management just showed up to install the new internet package, which sounded pretty good (Symmetrical Gbit). Dude comes in to set it up and is trying to install a wifi access point behind my couch. I told him I don't need an access point because I have my own mesh network, I just need to connect the new modem to my network rack. He starts trying to explain that the internet doesn't require a modem, so I'm like confused af.
After like 10 minutes of trying to figure out wtf this guy is talking about, I realized they've installed an apartment complex wide wifi mesh network, so there is no individual internet packages anymore. Everyone in the entire apartment complex is just connected to one big wifi network. They claim all the users are segmented by VLAN, but I genuinely don't think I've ever wanted something less in my life.
The LinkedIn meta of creating fake Tweets from yourself, photoshopping in a verified badge, then quoting yourself by posting screenshots makes me want to kms.
I genuinely did not think it was possible to be more cringe than chronically online Twitter users until I learned about LinkeInfluencers.
Translations: "our ad business is dying so we're forcing you to put more and unskippable ads on your videos so we can boost our earnings for the quarterly report"
@malwaretech it translated for me as “We know you seldom come to YouTube (website), and rarely open the YouTube app, so we are making it easier for you to stop all together”. Thanks, Alphabet!
Outsourcing US defense capabilities to any corporation has always been a national security trade-off, but SpaceX specifically is a private company where a single extremely unhinged pro-Russia troll controls more voting shares than the entire rest of the shareholders combined. Anyone who doesn't see the national security issue with putting a nation's defense capabilities in the hands of a Wish.com Lex Luthor knock-off has actual soup for a brain.