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 🥴

Blog post about some of the design decisions Mastodon has made which reduce toxicity on the platform.

[Y]ou can write as many polite letters to advertisers as you want, but you cannot reasonably expect to collect any meaningful advertising revenue if you do not promise those advertisers “brand safety.” That means you have to ban racism, sexism, transphobia, and all kinds of other speech that is totally legal in the United States but reveals people to be total assholes. So you can make all the promises about “free speech” you want, but the dull reality is that you still have to ban a bunch of legal speech if you want to make money. […]

[I]t turns out that most people do not want to participate in horrible unmoderated internet spaces full of shitty racists and not-all-men fedora bullies.

Good article that does not hold back.