#Online-platform

[notmontauk]

i find it pretty interesting that goncharov was a fever dream fueled by creativity, collective effort, and a “yes, and” mentality while zepotha started as a very clever and engaging marketing ploy and has now become a competition to actually make the movie. i’m not exactly sure what that means but it sure feels like it means something

[canisalbus]

Hello, I'm not sure if you're aware, but tumblr is going to start helping midjourney gather data for their AI. You're one of the artists I follow here pretty actively and I wanted to warn you to maybe start nighshading your art before posting it here so it doesn't get swept up!

I've seen a couple of posts about it. Feeling disappointed but not that surprised. Also not excited about having to start nightshading/glazing my pieces but if there isn't going to be any serious regulations regarding data scraping and ai "art", there aren't a lot of choices.

Thank you for taking the time to warn me just in case, it was very thoughtful of you!

[fernsensei]

sorry im on a hiatus again have this silly ass mouse drawn gabriel

original vv

[mugenfinder]

Uploaded Queen Busters to Internet Archive, it's a fangme from 2003 based off Super Smash Bros with Tsukihime and Ragnarok Online characters.

It's pretty rough, but it's a cool thing overall. And it seems like the balance is crazy and the AI tracks your position and just tries to hit you at all times. You unlock characters by beating them in Single-player, weirdly the Tsukihime characters have to fight the others but RO girls just fight one other with multiple stocks.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Someday, we’ll all take comfort in the internet’s “dark corners”

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me on SUNDAY (Mar 24) with LAURA POITRAS in NYC, then Anaheim, and beyond!

Platforms decay. Tech bosses, unconstrained by competition; regulation; ad blockers and other adversarial interoperability; and their own workers, will inevitably hollow out their platforms, using ultraflexible digital technology to siphon value away from end users and business customers, leaving behind the bare minimum of value to keep all those users locked in:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/#ich-bin-ein-bratapfel

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/23/evacuate-the-platforms/#let-the-platforms-burn

Enshittification is the inevitable result of high switching costs. Tech bosses are keenly attuned to opportunities to lock in their customers and users, because the harder is to leave a platform, the worse the platform can treat you – the more value it can rob you of – without risking your departure.

But platform users are a heterogeneous, lumpy mass. Different groups of users have different switching costs. An adult Facebook user of long tenure has more reasons to stay than a younger user: they have more complex social lives, with nonoverlapping social circles from high school, college, various jobs, affinity groups, and family. They are more likely to have a chronic illness, or to be caring for someone with chronic illness, and to be a member of a social media support group they value highly. They are more likely to be connected to practical communities, like little league carpool rotas.

That's the terrible irony of platform decay: the more value you get from a platform, the more cost that platform can extract, a cost denominated in your wellbeing, enjoyment and dignity.

(At this point, someone will pipe up and say, "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product." It's nonsense. Dignity, respect and fairness aren't frequent flier program perks that tech companies dribble out to their best customers. Companies will happily treat their paying customers as "products" if they think those customers can't avoid other forms of rent-extraction, such as "attention rents")

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens

Now, consider the converse proposition: for younger users, platforms deliver less value. Younger users have less complex social lives on average relative to their parents and grandparents, which means that platforms have fewer ways to sink their hooks into those young users. Further: young users tend to want things that the platforms don't want them to have, right from the first day they sign up. In particular, young users often want to conduct their socializing out of eyesight and earshot of adults, especially parents, teachers, and other authority figures. This means that a typical younger user has both more reasons to leave a platform as well as fewer reasons to stay there.

Younger people have an additional reason to bail on platforms early and often: if your online and offline social circles strongly overlap – if you see the same people at school as you do in your feed, it's much easier to reassemble your (smaller, less complex) social circle on a new platform.

And so: on average, young people like platforms less, hate them more, and have both less to lose and more to gain by leaving one platform for another. Sure, some young people are also burning with youth's neophilia. But even without that neophilia, young people are among the first to go when tech bosses start to ratchet up the enshittification.

Beyond young people, there are others who tend to jump ship early, like sex-workers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/21/early-adopters/#sex-tech

Sex-workers' technology changes are only incidentally the result of some novelty-seeking impulse. The real reason to change platforms if you're a sex-worker is that the platforms are either absolutely hostile to sex-workers, or profoundly indifferent to the suffering their policy changes rain down upon them.

The same is broadly true of other disfavored groups, including those with out-of-mainstream political ideologies. Some of these groups hold progressive views, others are out-and-out Nazis, but all of them chafe at the platforms' policies at the best of times, and are far more ready to jump ship when the platforms tighten the noose on all their users.

This is where "dark corners" come in. The worst people on the internet have relocated to its so-called dark corners – privately hosted servers, groupchats, message-boards, etc. Some of these are notorious: Kiwi Farms, 4chan, 8kun, sprawling Telegram groupchats. Others only breach when they are implicated in waves of unthinkably cruel and grotesque crimes:

https://www.wired.com/story/764-com-child-predator-network/

The answer to crimes committed in the internet's dark corners is the same as for crimes committed anywhere: catch the criminals, prosecute the crimes. But a distressing number of well-meaning people observe the nexus between dark corners and the crimes that fester there, and conclude that the problem is with the dark corners, themselves.

These people observe that social media platforms like Facebook, and intermediaries like Cloudflare, DNS providers, and domain registrars constitute a "nexus of control" – chokepoints that trap the online lives of billions of people – and conclude that these gigantic corporations can and should be made "responsible" for their users:

https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referred-here-because-youre-wrong-about-section-230-communications-decency-act/

From there, it's a short leap to conclude that anyone who isn't in a position to be controlled by these too big to jail, too big to fail, relentlessly enshittifying corporations must be pushed into their demesne.

This is a deal with the devil. In the name of preventing small groups of terrible people from gathering in private, beyond the control of the world's insufferable and cruel tech barons, we risk dooming everyone else to being permanently within those unworthy billionaires' thumbs.

This is why people like Mark Zuckerberg are so eager to see an increase in "intermediary liability" rules like Section 230. Zuckerberg's greatest fear isn't having to spend more on moderators or algorithms that suppress controversial subjects:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/03/instagram-users-outraged-by-app-limiting-political-content-ahead-of-elections/

The thing he fears the most is losing control over his users. That's why he bought Instagram: to recapture the young users who were fleeing his mismanaged, enshittified platform in droves:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/03/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself/

A legal mandate for Zuckerberg to police his users is a legal requirement that he surveil and control those users. It's fundamentally incompatible with the new drive in competition circles to force Zuckerberg and his fellow tech barons to offer gateways that make it easier to escape their grasp, by allowing users to depart Facebook and continue to socialize with the users who stay behind:

https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook

Remember: the more locked-in a platform user is, the harder that platform will squeeze that user, safe in the knowledge that the cost of leaving is higher than the cost of staying and tolerating the platform's abuse.

This is the problem with "feudal security" – the warlord who lures you into his castle fortress with the promise of protection from external threats is, in reality, operating a prison where no one can protect you from him:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/08/leona-helmsley-was-a-pioneer/#manorialism

Rather than fighting to abolish dark corners because only the worst people on the internet use them today, we should be normalizing dark corners, making it easier for every kind of user to find a cozy nook that is shaded from the baleful glare of Zuck and his fellow, eminently guillotineable tech warlords:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/15/normalize-dark-corners/

Enshittification is relentless. The collapse of the restraints that penalized tech companies who abused their users – competition, regulation, interoperability and their own workers' consciences – has inculcated every tech boss with an incurable enshittification imperative.

Efforts to make the platforms safer for their users can only take us so far. Fundamentally, these vast, centralized systems that vest authority with flawed and mediocre and frail human dictators (who fancy themselves noble, brilliant and infallible) will never be safe for human habitation. Rather than focusing on improving the platforms, we should be evacuating them:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/09/let-the-platforms-burn/

Online communities that control their own moderation policies won't always get it right. But there is a whole host of difficult moderation calls that can never be adequately handled by outsiders overseeing vast, sprawling platforms. Distinguishing friendly banter from harassment requires the context that only an insider can hope to possess.

We all deserve dark corners where we stand a chance of finding well-managed communities that can deliver the value that keeps us stuck to our decaying giant platforms. Eventually, the enshittification will chase every user off these platforms – not just kids or sex-workers or political radicals. When that happens, it sure would be nice if everyone could set up in a dark corner of their own.

Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.

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/2024/03/23/evacuate-the-platforms/#let-the-platforms-burn

[orangeno]

oh shit almost forgot to reveal this to tumblr

big things are coming...

[willgrahamscock]

YOU WERE RUINEDCHILDHOOD?

I was being reblogged by them a lot back in 2015 to the point where I made friends with one of the people who was in it, and he added me. I wasn’t there for very long, because I left the internet for quite some time before my inevitable return in summer of 2022.

Maybe some of you remember me as lonelystiles.

[juniepops]

This post wasn’t supposed to get notes and the main focus was on the tags so I’m leaving those intact in case anyone clicks through to the original

[steveharrington]

just saw a tweet saying stranger things has “killed television as a medium” in response to maya hawke saying the s5 episodes will be movie length and that is just. such an embarrassingly dramatic thing to say that just kinda implies you don’t watch any other tv. yes stranger things influences other shows with its binge release model (although that would arguably be a feature of netflix with or without st) and yes tv production time is becoming longer and longer, but to say it’s KILLED TV is so insane when we have shows like the bear, severance, interview with the vampire, the white lotus, abbott elementary, succession, ted lasso etc that have seen massive success and acclaim in the last couple years without adapting to stranger things’ new model of blockbuster type production. you can criticize what st is becoming without acting like it’s just obliterating all other shows and forcing you to only watch hour and a half long episodes. just…. change the channel ?

[kuromi-hoemie]

thank you 🏴‍☠️ streaming site admins for seeing a wave of domains get taken down and stepping up to make more instead of leaving it as is. the harder it's cracked down on and the more gets taken away, the more i refuse to pay for legitimate services. like.. lol. at least TRY to fix the many reasons people turn to piracy or deal with this happening forever idc.

free market mfs when the market decides you're not working out as an option

[newestcool]

Rick Owens f/w 2022 rtw Creative Director Rick Owens Fashion Editor/Stylist Tyrone Dylan Photographer Armando Grillo  Newest Cool

[dsabian]

Australia is planning on banning under 16s from using social media.

So so many reasons this is a stupid idea but the main one is actually, counter-intuitively, ppl's online safety.

Grown ups know how to cross the road safely because they are taught as children. They get to practice with parental supervision when they're kids.

You keep kids off social media then give them unlimited access at 16 and they'll have no frame of reference, no supervision, no working knowledge of how to fact check etc. If you actually want ppl to be safe online, make it part of education.

When discussing Animal Farm in English, talk about how to analyse ideas that sound good but actually result in inequality in practice and then pull up some questionable tweets.

When teaching kids how to research for their next essay, give them a fb rant and show them how to verify the info.

And then whoever is teaching them about personal responsibility should introduce them to tag blocking on tumblr. Show them how to curate their own experience.

Chat gtp should be its own module titled "ai can and will lie to you please for the love of god learn to think for yourself"

[ettawritesnstudies]

Assume you are interested in the book in question, and you could get which ever format you wanted in either situation. (Ebook, paperback, hardcover).

For the preorder: Everyone gets the same rewards regardless of what you order. There might be a larger giveaway that would be won by lottery.

For the kickstarter: You can pick your tier + rewards going up in value for larger items.

In general, the merch itself would be the same for both campaigns, for example, everyone in the preorder gets stickers, and everyone in the lowest tier on kickstarter gets stickers. The rewards would be exclusive to either the preorder or the kickstarter, so you wouldn't be able to get them afterwards, except at special events like book signings or something.

please boost!

[ellsieee]

I said Blue Canvas of Youthful Days was going to be good and I was right! As usual, I'm in love with the side cp already.

Tan Yin is going to have a rough time because Mingyang literally sees him as his dead younger brother. He's going to have to suffer for his love.

When Tan Yin is scared, he immediately calls Mingyang. Mingyang is there for him, comforting, and calming him down. ❤️

UwU! Who can blame Tan Yin for falling for Mingyang? This kind of "friendly" affection would have driven me nuts. Tan Yin is strong.

Tan Yin is such a cutie patootie. Mingyang agrees. He looks at Tan Yin with such fondness.

AHHHHH! The help put on your seatbelt trope! Tan Yin was about to faint having Mingyang so close. He wanted to kiss him so bad.

This looks like a proposal, except with a hearing aid instead of a ring. I have to think that this scene was intentionally shot this way. For Tan Yin, a hearing aid from Mingyang is more precious than any ring.

So sensual and heartbreaking at the same time. Tan Yin is mesmerized by Mingyang's voice and his hand on Mingyan's adam's apple, while Mingyang wants to hear Tan Yin call him gege because he sees him as his dead brother.

He's so cute hugging his gift box, wishing it was Mingyang hehehe.

OUCH. Tan Yin drawing up the courage to confess, only to be indirectly rejected hurts. It's going to take a lot of work to get over the brother hurdle. Sigh.

After side stepping Tan Yin's confession, Mingyang takes Tan Yin on a date... ??? He needs to stop being so nice to Tan Yin. This is too many mixed signals for our cutie. The gif doesn't do this scene justice. It's so playful and cute. I love the last part where Mingyang tells Tan Yin to blow bubbles like a fish, and Tan Yin brushes him off, but then does the blub blub blub sound and Mingyang finds it so adorable.

It's heartbreaking that both Tan Yin and Mingyang share a similar past with being rejected by their family for being gay. I like that this scene explicitly establishes that Tan Yin and Mingyang are gay. They've liked other men. No gay for you here.

These two are going to be the death of me. I love them so much.

[gunbeeing]

I FUCKED UP.