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.

Well shucks the core definition of the word “mercenary” means one who is acting out of self-interest rather than loyalty. The only thing these MFs are going to do now is look for work.

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?

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”.

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.

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.

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.