Posts categorised ‘Internet’
Liked “Text Adventures: How Twine remade gaming”
This was an interesting piece. I certainly enjoyed playing around with Twine (and other CYOA generators) back in the day. Safe to say I wasn’t doing the elaborate scripting some of the people mentioned here were 😄
Liked “How Facebook will benefit from its massive breach” by Cory Doctorow
Facebook has such a sweet racket. First, they used the Roach Motel model – data checks in, but it doesn't check out – to trap you and all your friends in a mutual hostage-taking situation, where you can't leave because they're there, and they can't leave because you're there.
All those address books they imported, the data they gathered from publishers' websites through the Like buttons (which gather data whether or not you click them), the data they bought or snaffled up through free mobile SDKs is now permanently siloed inside of FB.
Using Taxonomies to Create Monthly Archives in Hugo
By default, Hugo doesn’t create date-based archive pages for you. And while it’s relatively straightforward to create an archive page that lists all the posts you’ve ever made (which is fine if you’re an infrequent blogger), it’s a fair bit trickier to make individual pages for each year or month of posts, as platforms like Wordpress create by default.
Since this …
Today I found out that if you use the “Responsive Design” mode in your web browser’s developer tools, you can upload photos to Instagram directly from your computer! I’ve long found it such a pain opening up my phone just for that; this’ll save me some real hassle.
While I was at it, I also uninstalled Instagram from my phone, and instead added the mobile webpage to my home page. It’s a lot more pleasant a viewing experience than using the app, I tell ya 🙏
Bookmarked “How Facebook got addicted to spreading misinformation”
An interesting piece on how Facebook has always prioritised engagement over taking on misinformation. Also noticeable is how they nobbled one anti-misinformation project they did have, because it affected conservatives more than anyone else, and punishing conservatives for being much greater liars than anyone else would be “unfair” 🙄
Bookmarked “Why I built LibreLingo” by Daniel Kantor
It’s still in very early stages, but LibreLingo looks like an intriguing open-source alternative to sites like Duolingo. This is an article by the project’s founder on how and why he got it underway. I’ll be keeping an eye on it, for sure.
Liked “Google Analytics: Stop feeding the beast” by Caspar Wrede
Google is an advertising platform. Everything it does, all of its products, are geared towards selling advertising. Most of its products are free, many of them are useful, and a few are even great. But they all exist to suck up more data so that it can become even better at selling advertising. […] It’s called surveillance capitalism and it’s certainly not about giving you a great user experience, it’s about making money.
The Online Firehose
FYI: This post is a rewritten and expanded version of this post that I published on Dreamwidth two years ago.
I’ve long been a pretty avid user of Twitter. I first made an account towards the end of 2007, but it was 2010–2011 that was really “peak Twitter” for me. That was when I had lots of friends on the platform, and we could use Twitter basically like a big group chat. I …
Liked “WhatsApp and the domestication of users” by Rohan Kumar
Whether it happens on purpose or by accident, user domestication almost always follows the same three steps:
- A high level of dependence given from users to a software vendor
- An inability for users to control their software, through at least one of the following methods:
- Preventing modification of the software
- Preventing migration onto a different platform
- The exploitation of now-captive users who are unable to resist
The completion of the first two steps left WhatsApp users vulnerable to user domestication. With investors to answer to, they had every incentive to implement user-hostile features without consequence.
So, of course, they did.
Jessica Smith is a left-wing feminist who loves animals, books, gaming, and cooking; she’s also very interested in linguistics, history, technology and society.