#Apps for twitter

[spongebobssquarepants]

[tazuransi]

doodles of a loidyor fanchild i made a while back… never gave him a name but james is a strong contender because i am NOT naming him ludwig

[artsekey]

Thinking about the time I lost a game of Overwatch and I was so mad about it that I genuinely considered getting into shit with the other team in chat and then realized that it was a colossal waste of my living breathing Human Time and uninstalled Overwatch instead because it was only making me angry.

And then thought about the OTHER time when I was on TikTok and realized I was Not Enjoying Myself and was, in fact, seeing so many sad videos and fake influencer ads that I felt Truly Despondent and then just…Deleted it.

Imo I want my social media /general media experience to be a pleasant break from real world and I get to decide what I get to cull to make that a reality for myself. I highly reccomended it! Life has improved considerably!

[shrewdbunny-art]

Believe it or not, I know TWO DIFFERENT people whose gay awakening was Che Guevara.

Also If you want me to tag you in future posts in this series, lmk (ask, reply, tags, w/e works for you) and I'll add you to the tag list

First /// prev /// next

Masterpost

[go-learn-esperanto]

I see so many people starting to use Threads as a way to escape Twitter and yes, it's owned by Facebook's CEO and giving Facebook the monopoly of social media is bad but I think we should also talk about the fact that, you know, Threads isn't avalibe in the EU for privacy reasons????? That should be concerning to EVERYONE

[kirbyfigure]

pongebob

[mostlysignssomeportents]

How lock-in hurts design

Berliners: Otherland has added a second date (Jan 28) for my book-talk after the first one sold out - book now!

If you've ever read about design, you've probably encountered the idea of "paving the desire path." A "desire path" is an erosion path created by people departing from the official walkway and taking their own route. The story goes that smart campus planners don't fight the desire paths laid down by students; they pave them, formalizing the route that their constituents have voted for with their feet.

Desire paths aren't always great (Wikipedia notes that "desire paths sometimes cut through sensitive habitats and exclusion zones, threatening wildlife and park security"), but in the context of design, a desire path is a way that users communicate with designers, creating a feedback loop between those two groups. The designers make a product, the users use it in ways that surprise the designer, and the designer integrates all that into a new revision of the product.

This method is widely heralded as a means of "co-innovating" between users and companies. Designers who practice the method are lauded for their humility, their willingness to learn from their users. Tech history is strewn with examples of successful paved desire-paths.

Take John Deere. While today the company is notorious for its war on its customers (via its opposition to right to repair), Deere was once a leader in co-innovation, dispatching roving field engineers to visit farms and learn how farmers had modified their tractors. The best of these modifications would then be worked into the next round of tractor designs, in a virtuous cycle:

https://securityledger.com/2019/03/opinion-my-grandfathers-john-deere-would-support-our-right-to-repair/

But this pattern is even more pronounced in the digital world, because it's much easier to update a digital service than it is to update all the tractors in the field, especially if that service is cloud-based, meaning you can modify the back-end everyone is instantly updated. The most celebrated example of this co-creation is Twitter, whose users created a host of its core features.

Retweets, for example, were a user creation. Users who saw something they liked on the service would type "RT" and paste the text and the link into a new tweet composition window. Same for quote-tweets: users copied the URL for a tweet and pasted it in below their own commentary. Twitter designers observed this user innovation and formalized it, turning it into part of Twitter's core feature-set.

Companies are obsessed with discovering digital desire paths. They pay fortunes for analytics software to produce maps of how their users interact with their services, run focus groups, even embed sneaky screen-recording software into their web-pages:

https://www.wired.com/story/the-dark-side-of-replay-sessions-that-record-your-every-move-online/

This relentless surveillance of users is pursued in the name of making things better for them: let us spy on you and we'll figure out where your pain-points and friction are coming from, and remove those. We all win!

But this impulse is a world apart from the humility and respect implied by co-innovation. The constant, nonconsensual observation of users has more to do with controlling users than learning from them.

That is, after all, the ethos of modern technology: the more control a company can exert over its users ,the more value it can transfer from those users to its shareholders. That's the key to enshittification, the ubiquitous platform decay that has degraded virtually all the technology we use, making it worse every day:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

When you are seeking to control users, the desire paths they create are all too frequently a means to wrestling control back from you. Take advertising: every time a service makes its ads more obnoxious and invasive, it creates an incentive for its users to search for "how do I install an ad-blocker":

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah

More than half of all web-users have installed ad-blockers. It's the largest consumer boycott in human history:

https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/

But zero app users have installed ad-blockers, because reverse-engineering an app requires that you bypass its encryption, triggering liability under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This law provides for a $500,000 fine and a 5-year prison sentence for "circumvention" of access controls:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/12/youre-holding-it-wrong/#if-dishwashers-were-iphones

Beyond that, modifying an app creates liability under copyright, trademark, patent, trade secrets, noncompete, nondisclosure and so on. It's what Jay Freeman calls "felony contempt of business model":

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

This is why services are so horny to drive you to install their app rather using their websites: they are trying to get you to do something that, given your druthers, you would prefer not to do. They want to force you to exit through the gift shop, you want to carve a desire path straight to the parking lot. Apps let them mobilize the law to literally criminalize those desire paths.

An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to block ads in it (or do anything else that wrestles value back from a company). Apps are web-pages where everything not forbidden is mandatory.

Seen in this light, an app is a way to wage war on desire paths, to abandon the cooperative model for co-innovation in favor of the adversarial model of user control and extraction.

Corporate apologists like to claim that the proliferation of apps proves that users like them. Neoliberal economists love the idea that business as usual represents a "revealed preference." This is an intellectually unserious tautology: "you do this, so you must like it":

https://boingboing.net/2024/01/22/hp-ceo-says-customers-are-a-bad-investment-unless-they-can-be-made-to-buy-companys-drm-ink-cartridges.html

Calling an action where no alternatives are permissible a "preference" or a "choice" is a cheap trick – especially when considered against the "preferences" that reveal themselves when a real choice is possible. Take commercial surveillance: when Apple gave Ios users a choice about being spied on – a one-click opt of of app-based surveillance – 96% of users choice no spying:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/96-of-us-users-opt-out-of-app-tracking-in-ios-14-5-analytics-find/

But then Apple started spying on those very same users that had opted out of spying by Facebook and other Apple competitors:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Neoclassical economists aren't just obsessed with revealed preferences – they also love to bandy about the idea of "moral hazard": economic arrangements that tempt people to be dishonest. This is typically applied to the public ("consumers" in the contemptuous parlance of econospeak). But apps are pure moral hazard – for corporations. The ability to prohibit desire paths – and literally imprison rivals who help your users thwart those prohibitions – is too tempting for companies to resist.

The fact that the majority of web users block ads reveals a strong preference for not being spied on ("users just want relevant ads" is such an obvious lie that doesn't merit any serious discussion):

https://www.iccl.ie/news/82-of-the-irish-public-wants-big-techs-toxic-algorithms-switched-off/

Giant companies attained their scale by learning from their users, not by thwarting them. The person using technology always knows something about what they need to do and how they want to do it that the designers can never anticipate. This is especially true of people who are unlike those designers – people who live on the other side of the world, or the other side of the economic divide, or whose bodies don't work the way that the designers' bodies do:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/20/benevolent-dictators/#felony-contempt-of-business-model

Apps – and other technologies that are locked down so their users can be locked in – are the height of technological arrogance. They embody a belief that users are to be told, not heard. If a user wants to do something that the designer didn't anticipate, that's the user's fault:

https://www.wired.com/2010/06/iphone-4-holding-it-wrong/

Corporate enthusiasm for prohibiting you from reconfiguring the tools you use to suit your needs is a declaration of the end of history. "Sure," John Deere execs say, "we once learned from farmers by observing how they modified their tractors. But today's farmers are so much stupider and we are so much smarter that we have nothing to learn from them anymore."

Spying on your users to control them is a poor substitute asking your users their permission to learn from them. Without technological self-determination, preferences can't be revealed. Without the right to seize the means of computation, the desire paths never emerge, leaving designers in the dark about what users really want.

Our policymakers swear loyalty to "innovation" but when corporations ask for the right to decide who can innovate and how, they fall all over themselves to create laws that let companies punish users for the crime of contempt of business-model.

I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/24/everything-not-mandatory/#is-prohibited

Image: Belem (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Desire_path_%2819811581366%29.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[inkedscript]

get taht away from me

Original Under cut:

[samglyph]

Happy holidays folks, please have this little (longest animatic I’ve ever made) something I’ve been cooking up for the last month. It was a fun little personal project and I’m pretty happy with it, so I hope you enjoy!

CW: comic style gore, implied violence, death, blood, and a bit of eldritch body horror. Canon typical scary activities.

Commissions and Tip Jar

[i6corais]

⠀⠀ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶ ̶⠀⠀nicknames⠀;

⠀⠀[ longos . . ]

⠀⠀🍴⠀⠀ ִㅤ⠀❆⠀ㅤׄ⠀⠀𝚗𝚒𝚌𝚔⠀⠀⎯⎯⎯ ⠀𝟸𝟸:𝟷𝟾⠀⠀𝄒𝄒.⠀⠀﹢⠀⠀𝗒𝗈𝗎𝗋⠀⠀𝘀𝙬𝗲𝗲𝘁 .

⠀⠀🇧🇷ུ⠀⠀𝗇𝗂𝖼𝗄.⠀⠀ೄ݀𝟮𝟮:𝟮𝟯.⠀⠀۪⠀⠀𝗅✿𝗏𝖾𝗌.⠀⠀🪵⠀⠀𝗕𝗿𝗮𝘀𝙞𝗹⠀⠀ꮺ⠀⠀⡣𝗩𝗦𝗖𝗢.⠀⠀𝗉𝗋𝗂𝗇𝖼𝖾𝗌𝗌⠀⠀⎯

⠀⠀𝗇𝗂𝖼𝗄⠀⠀𝖾⍺𝗍𝗂𝗇𝗀⠀⠀ ִᜓ ⠀⠀👙🌃⠀⠀𝗯𝗿𝗼𝙬𝗻𝙞𝗲⠀⠀𝙬𝙞𝘁𝗵⠀⠀ ྄ִ⠀⠀𝗆𝗒⠀⠀𝗅𝗈𝗏𝖾.⠀⠀

⠀⠀[ curtos . . ]

⠀⠀ᔑ⠀⠀𝗇𝗂𝖼𝗄⠀⠀⫑⠀⠀𝗒𝗈𝗎𝗋⠀⠀𝗆𝖾𝗅𝗈𝖽𝗒.

⠀⠀⣾𝟭𝟯𝟬𝟳⠀⠀.ೃ࿔⠀⠀𝗂է𝗌⠀⠀𝗇𝗂𝖼𝗄⠀⠀🕰⊹

⠀⠀ㅠㅠ⠀⠀ഒ⠀⠀›꯭🎧⠀⠀؎ُ⠀⠀𝗇𝗂𝖼𝗄⠀,⠀𝟣𝟣.

[ao3demographicssurvey2024]

In the AO3 Demographics Survey 2024 - an unofficial demographics survey of 16,131 AO3 users - the most popular write-ins for fandom websites or apps were Bluesky, Mastodon and Pillowfort.

To see more analysis, including discussion of how well these results relate to fandom as a whole, please view the full results on AO3.

[that-guest-named-pie]

I got really bored so I made an ISAT characters on Twitter shitpost *skitters away like a creature*

[katherinemckay]

for good trailer really has me thinking about how excited i am to see act 2 glinda fully explored in a deeper and more up-close way like think of the material. being kinda forced into a regime role because you didn't have what it takes to be a fugitive and then settling into the comfort and praise of that role but still coming to the realization it's not what you Really want. and you regret what you've lost but you have to keep up the facade because your status is your only asset. and you're losing faith in a system you once believed in while still having hope that you can do good from the inside, but you're wondering how much good you're actually doing. and things keep spiraling further out of control and you know you're complicit in everything and hurting the one person you truly love. but you still feel like you have to play your part because there are people who look to you for comfort, and your entire life you've believed image and reputation are everything and you just can't give that up yet. and when you finally Are ready to really throw it all away for what's right, you realize you can't because you can only actually help by staying in a position of power. so now you'll live the rest of your life trying to actually make that change, but you can't tell the truth about anything you've learned, and you're doomed to be alone because you could never truly leave it all behind. you'll always regret that first choice, and yet you never could have chosen differently because it's who you are. save me ariana grande as adult glinda save me

[shrewdbunny-art]

Jason bullying hours

Honestly I'm not super happy w this one, but fuck it we ball

Also sorry for the long hiatus - had a crazy few months lmao

First // prev // next

Masterpost

Tag list is below + 1st reblog

@desicanary // @thegayseance // @soaring-through-the-stars // @thebat-musicman // @percyyeuss // @pathofglory // @andreaissy // @themiraculousec // @gnomewithalaptop // @viola-cola // @milotic109 // @kamala-msmarvel-khan // @suffer-my-beloved-mutuals // @arcadianico // @your-dead-european-ancestor // @asmodeusmustdiexo // @max-volume // @itsmeevie01 // @leagueofbats // @catostrofiqu // @amillionandonefandoms // @shykitten28 // @atlasaurelius // @ihavenohotcocoa // @kai-antreas // @living-on-borrowed-time // @o-i-have-too // @aroaceass // @silverwolf1249 // @cannimochi // @lesbianbooknerd // @twinningglass // @1n0sss // @craptastico // @lovethewitchofendor // @insomniacweebqueen16 // @fashionstatement-deathwish // @brieftimetravelwhispers // @crabs-brencil // @universal-travel-er // @royal-illusion-loves-his-fandoms // @blankliferain // @p1xel-1mp // @kades-stuff // @theweevilofsweetreef // @fablehaven-rulez // @justahoomanbeing // @frosty--giants // @you-are-valid-and-deserve-love // @slitherynchiken //

@imjustanawkwardfellow

[spongebobssquarepants]

[catchymemes]