brothershamus

No app better defines the changing nature of social media than Instagram. The app started as a digital scrapbook — a place to keep up with real-world connections, close friends, and family. While other networks had more users (Facebook) or generated more news (Twitter), Instagram seemed to define the ideal form of this era of social media. Instagram became a verb, an aesthetic, and a generational signifier.

huUURP! BLAAaahhriifgghhh. . .

Garbage marketing platform dies horribly. Thousands of clueless “journalists” bereft.

It doesn’t need to be more complex than “more votes = shows up first when sorted by ‘hot’”?

What’s a “trade-based ads-socials”?

Love it. I was wondering the other day when we’d see a return to “simple” games like pool. Can you imagine the graphics power of today’s games applied to “just” pool? Instead of 1000 things exploding, you could have a true ambient scene that was ever-changing and create different locales etc. Someday?

February, 2019:

Michael Cohen, the man who infamously said he would take a bullet for Donald Trump, has raised the spectre of political chaos and even violence if the man he once served failed to win re-election in 2020, telling Congress he feared there would never be a “peaceful transition of power”.

Fascism has arrived waving a flag and a bible. As the legends foretold.

Money and the fact that C-suite still has no f*%! clue about technology. They can tweet now. yay.

Note that this does not apply to Microsoft. Like, at all. :)

Seriously, they screwed themselves with bad decisons.

Make use of your blocks early, folks

The problem was, and is, that Twitter was always a private for-profit company whose business model was tracking users and mining their private data. Yes, it could do good things, and in the hands of some of those opressive regimes it could do some bad things and in between it was built to do some skeezy things because that was how they attracted the venture capital.

Not to mention it was never innovative in what it was offering, there were and are many different avenues to connect people (that is the fundamental feature of the internet) it just created a platform that became popular for various reasons. Earthquake victims and rescuers, anti-government protestors and so on could always use Signal or another app for talking to each other - and should.

One of the real impacts of the cancer of Twitter came when journalists reached a critical mass and decided if something was tweeted about it counted as a primary source and they could write an article about it without having to get out of their chair. It was always lazy journalism and often totally irresponsible journalism and it’s no coincidence that the apex of Twitter journalism was the rise of an orange demented sociopathic rapist. All of which was part of the promise of a service that sold views and news by secret algorithm and cash.

Are you suggesting a Murdoch-owned press might have printed something misleading?!?!

When I entered the journalism program at the University of Texas in 2010, I was instructed by one of the first professors I ever had to start a Twitter account. This was during the glorious dawn of the Web 2.0 revolution—an era of unbridled Obama-era optimism—and as the media made its digitized transition, conventional wisdom said that reporters needed to develop their own bespoke personal brands. Ever since that day, I’ve consistently correlated success with the fluctuating number in my follower count.

Wow. First of all, who starts college in 2010?! Let me tie an onion to my belt before we go further. Okay, secondly, that a professor required them to have a Twitter account is hilarious and makes perfect sense. What most people don’t know is “journalism” as is taught in University of Texas and other broadminded institutions of higher learning, is essentially public relations. How to talk like a newscaster. How to write like an advertiser. Why all those studies that television is bad for people are bunk. Etc. Anyway, that’s where our author is coming from.

I think that’s why Elon’s reign of terror has been so bitterly ironic: Everything we’ve been taught about Twitter—and, frankly, social media in general—has proven to be an enormous lie.

Well . . . yeah. Poor kid, never even had the chance to see what a sucker deal Twitter was from the outset.

I’m not sure what the curriculum for the University of Texas’ journalism program is today, but I doubt a compulsory X account is still mandated.

I wouldn’t be too sure. The journalism program at UT is probably the same as it was in the 80s. In many ways, quite literally.

So what does this mean for the countless people who bought the hype? Who ground away at their Twitter accounts—triangulating pockets of virality until their followers doubled and tripled—putting the almighty bird at the center of their professional and personal aspirations? After all of their years stoking the algorithm, they’re the ones left holding the bag.

Aye, there’s the rub. What does it mean for people who bought the hype? Who found out it’s a bunch of flaming bullshit? After pouring years into feeding their lives into it?

So as far as the article goes: Pros - well written. Cons - some people never knew twitter was bullshit? What? Ugh.

But there’s an interesting implied question - what do Trump people do when they find out everything the guy’s ever said is utter bullshit? Well, we know they don’t do anything. Sometimes they double-down. But that’s part and parcel of modern republiQanism. What do ostensible liberals do when they discover something they believed in is bullshit? Like Twitter?

Indeed.

Doooooooooooommm!!!

Private Access Tokens are powerful tools that prove when HTTP requests are coming from legitimate devices without disclosing someone’s identity.

So I don’t know the details, but it makes a couple of points that either mean this isn’t the same thing as the google thing, or “attestation on the web” isn’t DRM, or something else. So far as I can interpret the article, it seems to suggest the feature is “is this a safari device on ios, if yes then skip captcha” but that seems to be up to the website’s discretion.

laughs maniacally in money

Firefox and ublock origin to start. Site requires Chromium? Buh bye now.

Digital Rights Management. Code that prevents you from doing what you want with the information you have.

Lol. As soon as I heard someone upload their contacts to Google I thought “welp, I’m out.” And yeah, no one listened then either.

Still, we got diaspora working finally. May the force be with you.

Elon Musk has taken over the @x Twitter account without paying its owner as part of the social network’s ongoing rebrand.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but a “rebrand” should not be “ongoing” for any reason. That’s like saying your surgery is ongoing. That’s bad, mmmkay.