#LHS witters

[lhs3020b]

I'm amused that tonight, we're all celebrating the upcoming demise of Tumblr Live :)

[bloojayoolie]

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[lhs3020b]

So apparently my Tumblr is 10 now ... ?

*looks at calendar*

Oh gawd. It is 2024, isn't it?

Well, if you're still here and reading this, even in its half-ghost-town current state, thank you!

[lhs3020b]

An observation concerning the current aliens/UFO craze: it's fascinating that it's popping up right on cue.

What do I mean by that? Simple: popular culture seems to go through a phase with being UFO-obsessed about every 20-25 years. There was, of course, the original outburst in the late '40s/early '50s (fn. 1). There was another big eruption in the late-’60s/early '70s. Then there was the first one I was personally around for, which was the late '90s UFO craze. (Full disclosure: kid!me was obsessed with this stuff.) Looking at the time-pattern here, you'd predict that the next wave would hit sometime around 2021-2024.

Oh. Bingo. Right on cue.

In a way, I find this pattern more interesting than the thing itself. (Honestly? The overwhelming majority sightings really do fall under the categories called "most normies have never heard of the planet Venus" [fn.2] and "actually that was an aircraft", though yes, in fairness there are some more-enigmatic ones like the now-famous US Navy tic-tac-toe footage and so on.) It fascinates me that this pop-culture craze pops up, regularly as clockwork, apparently about once a generation. What are we looking at here, a genuine cohort effect? (Most supposed cohort effects are actually nonsense, when you look closely at real data.) Why, of all things, is there an actual generational thing going on here, of all places?

I have no answers, but I do find this fascinating.

---------

Footnote 1: I'm leaving aside the various bits of possible "prior art" such as the "ghost airship" thing from the 1890s, and the various pre-20th Century accounts that have been suggested as UFO sightings (there's a surprisingly-long pre-history to all this stuff, though obviously all of it falls under the category of "please keep your skeptical hat on" for it).

Also, interestingly, if there was a rolling phenomenon going on, there should have been another burst of it around the mid-1920s, though to my knowledge there’s nothing in that time-period that really fits. Whatever this pattern is, the evidence does seem to suggest that it started around the late ‘40s.

Footnote 2: as an ex-astronomer I really can't wrap my brain around it, but it genuinely does seem to be true that most people have no idea about what's in the night sky, even just the planets of the solar system? Most people have heard the names of the planets at some point and do vaguely-recognise them, but they have no idea at all which object they are in the sky, even though the inner planets are some of the brightest and most-recognisable things up there. Maybe my perspective's an odd one - I guess it is? - but I just find it so weird. Does anyone know anything about anything?

[lhs3020b]

Having just had to snooze it, again, I'm left with a question: does anyone have any idea what Tumblr Live is supposed to be for?

I'm genuinely-baffled by it. What is the point of this? They've presumably massively driven up their data costs - video ain't cheap, by all accounts! - to firehose content out that no-one seems to want. Do they think they're going to be the new Twitch, or something? Do they have any idea why anyone comes to this site in the first place?

I suppose, on the other hand, should I be surprised? I mean, these are the same people who were seemingly running an undisclosed beta group in 2014-15 (the best way to get rid of dysfunctional behaviour on this site was to complain about it publicly!), then shut down commenting for months to roll out a chat feature no-one wanted, spent 2015, 2016 and 2017 doing nothing about a whole raft of problematic content on the site (did they ever do anything about N*zi-blr?), and then went full-Strikethrough in 2018 (which apparently did them enough damage that they eventually had to walk it back) while also basically lying about the reasons why. (As I recall at the time there was a sense that it was something to do with FOSTA and SESTA; it actually turned out they were trying to do self-dealing around their crappy mobile app and the Apple Store, and the self-dealing didn't even work.)

So I suppose from that point of view, "stepping on a rake" is 100% on-brand.

But still, Tumblr!Live. An enormous amount of effort, bandwidth and hosting money going toward something that appears to be both unwanted and useless.

[lhs3020b]

Mildly-irritating that although they'll be getting rid of it soon, I still have to hit "snooze Tumblr!Live", again.

[lhs3020b]

Regarding the ongoing uBlock-vs-YouTube arms race, it's interesting how, in a way, it showcases Google/Doubleclick/whatever-they-call-themselves-now's slow downfall.

It's hard to remember now, but in the 2000s, people actually non-ironically liked Google. Even as late as 2014, you could still see pro-Google takes even in Leftist and semi-Left spaces. In 2014-19, for all its flaws you could still say Google services were useful, so they had that very-practical point in their favour.

Then the 2020s began and search became increasingly-useless.

(These days, I bookmark anything I need on the web, because goodness knows if I'll be able to find it twice).

YouTube's slide appears to be well under way. It's not new, certainly they've had problems for a while - crap moderation, reams of problematic content, an algorithm that pushes far-Right influencers apparently over all other videos, and then there is the sheer propensity of YT content-creators for scandal. (Just to think of a few recent examples of the latter, let's see ... there's the 8Passengers case, there's the ongoing illuminaughtii situation, and now there's the Sssniperwolf [just how many "S"'s does she need?] debacle. And they're not the only examples I can think of, just off the top of my head. If you dug, you could certainly find many, many more. Youtuber implosions aren't rare.)

Now the platform iself is going to war with its users.

That ... rarely ends well for platforms. (*cough* LiveJournal *cough*)

As to what's going on in the background, obviously I don't know for a fact, but we can take some guesses. They may involve the words "money", "managers" and possibly "venture capital". The venture capital model that supported many internet endeavours in the 2010s seems to have gone pop, likely as a side-effect of the pandemic-rebound inflation surge. Previously, with interest rates sat up against the zero lower bound for an entire decade, VC types could borrow huge amounts of money at little-to-no cost, and they would only need a handful of investments to pay off to recoup their costs elsewhere. Now, that's no longer true. Suddenly, the VC types can quickly find themselves dangerously overextended on debt, hence some of the desperation to claw back any pennies they can.

Though, it should be noted, this point perhaps doesn't fit YouTube so well. Google/Doubleclick have no shortage of money, and were apparently quite happy to run YT as a loss-leader throughout the late 2000s and all of the 2010s. Why did they suddenly panic this year?

I have a suspicion that the answer may lie in the word "management".

As for managers, both platform and business, one thing I've noticed is that managerial culture seems to have fallen off a cliff during and "after" (insofar as there is an "after") the pandemic. Lockdown seems to have messed them up; it does appear that a lot of them fear and resent the loss of minute-to-minute control over their staf that they had when everything was default-in-the-office-full-time. (One thing I've wondered about is what is the true ratio between people who go into management for the money and people who do it because actually, they don't care about the cash and are just a control freak acting out?) The authoritarian, hierarchical nature of the modern corporate internal structure means these people are incentivised to kick down at every opportunity.

Certainly, purely from personal experience, my own workplace has got a lot worse during and after the pandemic, and most of that seems to be coming down from the top.

Viewed in the light of this model, YouTube's platform dictats make slightly more sense - basically, managers seeing users doing something they don't like, and said managers then having a tantrum. Probably they're using the VC business model issue as their justification for their behaviour, and who knows, maybe some of them even believe it.

Anyway, we'll see how this all plays out, but perhaps this is a sign we all need less Google in our lives.

[lhs3020b]

So, it’s actually gone.

I got an email the other day, confirming that my old LiveJournal is now both deleted and purged from their system - well, at least insofar as they say. Given the migration of the servers to Russia a few years ago, who knows if they’re telling the truth? And at the risk of sounding paranoiac, I wouldn’t be totally surprised if all of English-speaking LJ was quietly archived somewhere on some FSB server or something.

(I’ve heard some rumours, to the effect that the Russian government’s troll farms, you know at places like the infamous Internet Research Agency and probably others we haven’t heard of, may have been trained using data gleaned from LJ and other places. Hard to know if any of this is true, obviously, but it does get you to wondering, doesn’t it? And a lot of their interventions in the past were suspiciously well-targeted at various wedge issues and social ruptures - almost like how you might decide to do things after spectating on various repeated drama-events on particularly-volatile online communities, you know what I mean?)

Anyway I belatedly hit the delete button on my LJ late in February last year, after You-Know-What started happening. Honestly I probably should have deleted it long ago, but there was the usual problem of the two or three people who just wouldn’t move to Dreamwidth or Twitter, and one or two old communities that I didn’t really want to leave. There’s also the issue that I didn’t really want to - honestly, too much of our post-2008 cringe-dystopia budget-hellscape lives have consisted of “I don’t want to do this thing, but I’m being forced into it by things that should be nothing to do with me and are completely beyond my ability to control”.

It turns out deleting an LJ is a slow process; they wait for a year before finally purging it. But anyway, it’s now gone, or as “gone” as I’m personally able to make it.

It feels weird. It was a big part of my life from 2003 onwards. Lots of things happened there, both good, bad and somewhere in the middle. And now there’s not even a ghost of it left, except what I have archived on Dreamwidth and what I carry around inside my own meatware.

Anyway, there’s no real point to this post; I just felt I couldn’t let this pass without some sort of comment.

[lhs3020b]

If anyone else is also over there, I'm now LHS3020b over on BlueSky as well:

(I was going to use my icon from here, but it seems I've lost the original WISE 3-colour image somewhere along the way, so instead we'll go with Neptune)

[lhs3020b]

Is anyone else suddenly getting wave after wave of pr0n spambots following them, again? It’s like a bad flashback to 2015. (Also, the timing - roughly correlated with the ongoing curtain-fall over on Twitter - feels suspicious.)

Also yes, hi, Not Dead. Apologies for my near-total absence lately - I seem to have near-zero internet energy at the moment.

[lhs3020b]

A PSA for anyone who might find it useful: Tumblr’s 2FA might be broken, again.

As some of you know, I recently bought a new desktop PC (and it is good - such an improvement in every way on the old one!).

Anyway, I just got round to trying to log into Tumblr on the new!box earlier. And I got to the 2FA screen. And nothing happened. No 2FA text ever arrived (it’s now been over four hours, and still no sign of it, so it’s clearly not coming). It did work previously, so the phone number is correct, it’s not going to the wrong place or anything like that.

Anyway, fortunately, it turned out that the login cookies on my old desktop box were still valid, so I was able to basically backdoor myself into my account that way ... but if I hadn’t been able to do that, I would have been locked out of my account.

A quick Google suggests this problem isn’t recent; I found posts describing the same thing going back to 2017. It sounds like Tumblr support are at-best-inconsistent and often downright-unhelpful about this problem, too.

So, it’s worth being aware that 2FA dysfunction is apparently “a thing” now...

[lhs3020b]

It’s been another weird day. (Just what is it with this week?)

(Also hi. Not dead, just seem to have zero posting energy at the moment. Not sure why.)

Anyway I’m no fan of the monarchy as an institution - if there somehow ever was a referendum, I’d vote for a republic without a second thought. A) republics are objectively a better system and b) it would be funny as hell to do a Brexit back to Tories. Also I’m not a fan of having to do things like my emergency run to the shops earlier today, just in case the Tories go with some of the nuttier “Operation London Bridge” plans and decide to shut the entire country down for a week or two - not to protect public health or anything like that, but instead to enforce Grief Fest 2022.

Still, I do find it mildly amusing that she hung on long enough to see Boris out.

[lhs3020b]

2023

Happy New Year everyone!

[lhs3020b]

Oh goody, more Christmas pr0n bots. Sigh.

[lhs3020b]

Well, that explains why I feel so rubbish today, then...

[lhs3020b]

I never imagined that this blue hellsite would outlive the Blue Birdsite. But based on tonight’s sudden chaos, it’s looking distinctly-possible, isn’t it?