#breakup apps

[twentyfivemiceinatrenchcoat]

one thing about suguru geto is he will love you and treat you like no one else forever . even if you ever broke up with him you would simply never be able to date another man because no one treats you nearly as well . he permanently raises your standards

[nocteurns]

[queenie-ofthe-void]

For the wip game: disappointed

💜 thanks!

Really weird that I didn't have disappointed anywhere! But I worked it in 💖 I actually just started this WIP last night!

Tainted Blood

A small metal contraption Steve managed to create all on his own, lost in the worst of his depression when Eddie first left. It looks back at him, disappointed, the same as it does every year.

Two mouth guards wired together at the back, molded just big enough for Steve to slip his fingers into the teeth-shaped grooves. He rubs the pads of his fingers over the needle heads poking through the plastic, tips pierced through the other side. He tries to remember it's not real.

They're not his fangs. There's no swipe of a tongue across his skin or lips suckling at his neck. It's not Eddie. But he can pretend it is, just for tonight.

Thank you for asking 💖🥰

[thoughts-and-vibes]

a girl said she wants to get to know me but in a gay way

what even is life

[diah-the-demon]

Ok im gonna try a dating app me thinks

[bleedingheats]

A sad notes app. I came across a text that should have never been composed. He is gone I’m glad I let go.

I ask you if you like me is not because I think that you don’t it’s because I wasnt feeling likable or beautiful In that moment . It’s not all the time but it’s definitely a struggle I have. Only reason I say it is for reassurance. I know I don’t feel that way but the little voice in the back of my head is trying to convince me. She’s mostly always wrong and I know that. I just have to say it out loud so i can hear how crazy it sounds . Usually these feeling arise when I’m anxious or having a bad day and today was one of those days. I just wanted some support. I wasn’t trying to bother you I was honestly just trying to connect on an emotional level because I was feeling sad and wanted to feel wanted and cuddled and loved. Sometime I feel it’s better to tell you when I’m having those thoughts so I can move past them and not internalize them. I honestly didn’t expect for you to get so upset and say u were going to stop doing nice things for me. I appreciate all that you do but when you weapons actions that should be of love and threaten to take that away when you’riie mad. That hurts my feelings. Anyway I’m messaging you this so I don’t wake I up and I can sleep knowing I explained myself but that really did make me sad. I never say things to purposely hurt u.

[prisonixfairytale]

02-08-25

I'll be better. I promise. I'll listen and think about how it makes you feel and I wont brush you off. I'm sorry. I'll learn how to communicate for you to stay. It just feels like there is this pit in my stomach. You cant just expect me to let go like that, I need you.

I can hardly sleep without my stuffed animal wearing your shirt and cologne. An attempt at replicating your gentle, caring grasp on me, contrasting the tight hold you have on my heart. Me as a person, it has always been me and you. You didn't let me grow on my own and I don't know who I am without you. I can't do this. Who will hold me close so tenderly and kiss me with everything?

It won't be the same, nothing replicates the past and the lingering sentiments keep the present feeling inferior. How easy must it be to listen to me cry and beg, my voice meek and tight with the sobs desperate to escape, and leave? For me to tell you I love you one more time just for you to reply with a similar statement. I say my words don't match my actions, I guess I know better how it feels now.

As i write out all my thoughts, I'm on delivered for an iMessage game. So desperate to talk to you I settle for bits of banter in between rounds. You're right, I need more self respect. I was desperate for you to stay a bit longer.

I wanted to keep that hope alive, that all those things you said about our future would come to fruition. Maybe that you would change your mind. I think if there was less distance, it would've been different. You could've held out a bit, we all have our ups and downs. Am I that bad of a girlfriend that you couldn't hold out a bit? I'm sorry, really.

I'm sorry you had to put up with me and my inability to express my emotions, my aversion to sexual contact. You made it seem like it was a you thing, I can hardly look in the mirror these days. I'm disgusted with myself, but you made me feel pretty. I'm really sorry you wasted your time on me.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

How to save the new from Big Tech

This Saturday (May 20), I’ll be at the GAITHERSBURG Book Festival with my novel Red Team Blues; then on May 22, I’m keynoting Public Knowledge’s Emerging Tech conference in DC.

On May 23, I’ll be in TORONTO for a book launch that’s part of WEPFest, a benefit for the West End Phoenix, onstage with Dave Bidini (The Rheostatics), Ron Diebert (Citizen Lab) and the whistleblower Dr Nancy Olivieri.

It’s no longer controversial to claim that Big Tech is a parasite on the news business. But there’s still a raging controversy over the nature of the parasitism, and, much more importantly, what to do about it.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/18/stealing-money-not-content/#beyond-link-taxes

This week on EFF’s Deeplinks blog, I kick off a new series on the abusive relationship between Big Tech and the news, analyzing four different dirty practices and proposing policy answers to all four:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/saving-news-big-tech

The context here is that various governments around the world have taken notice of the tech/news problem, and are chasing a counterproductive “solution” — the “link tax,” where tech firms are required to pay for the links and short snippets their users or news search-tools make to news-stories. In some cases, the “tax” is indirect: tech is required to negotiate a payment to make up for other misdeeds (like ripping publishers off with ad fraud).

You can argue that this isn’t a link tax, it’s just pressure to bargain, but because these rules typically ban platforms from simply blocking publishers’ content if they can’t reach an agreement, they become link taxes: “You must carry links, and you must pay the sites you link to” isn’t meaningfully different from “You must pay for linking to those sites.”

This ��must-carry” dimension — requiring tech firms to publish links to sites they don’t want to link to — has lots of things wrong with it, but in the US, must-carry has a showstopper bug: it contravenes the First Amendment and any law with a must-carry provision is unlikely to survive a court challenge. So people who care about protecting the news from Big Tech predators — like me — need to try other approaches.

But no matter where you are, requiring tech to pay fees to news is the wrong approach. For one thing, it’s a solution that only works for so long as Big Tech stays big: that means that efforts to break up Big Tech, force it to pay taxes and fines, and limit its profits (say, through privacy laws that end surviellance ads) are incompatible with link taxes and adjacent proposals.

The big risk here is that news outlets will become partisans in the fight against shrinking Big Tech, because news companies’ destinies will be linked to the tech giants’ own fate. More immediately, there’s the risk that news companies that depend on negotiating payments from Big Tech will not act as the effective watchdogs we need them to be.

That’s not just a hypothetical risk: in Canada, Big Tech entered into negotiations with the Toronto Star — the country’s widest-circulating paper — ahead of a proposed “news bargaining code” that was working its way through Parliament. Once that settlement was reached, the Star abruptly killed “Defanging Tech” its excellent critical series on the tech giants it had just climbed into bed with:

https://www.thestar.com/news/big-tech.html

Another important risk from “bargaining codes” and link taxes is that they tend to favor the largest and/or most sensationalist news companies, who have the leverage to bargain for the highest sums. In Australia, Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp bargained for a sizable payment from the tech sector — but then it laid off its news workers. Merely transferring money to media giants doesn’t mean an increase in investment in news. That’s especially true in the Canadian context, where a US vulture-capitalist fund bought out the National Post and its nationwide affiliates and then loaded the chain up with debt, while hacking newsroom staff to the bone and beyond. There’s no reason to think that tech payments to the Post will go anywhere except to the financial speculators who are its major creditors.

Meanwhile, the proposed US version, JCPA, has a payout schedule based on the number of clicks a news outlet generates for each platform — a metric that will see the lion’s share of money going to the far-right clickbait sites that push conspiracy theories, disinformation, and culture-war nonsense — and see floods of social media traffic as a result.

Any solution to the tech/news conflict should benefit the news, and the workers who produce it — not the shareholders of the giant companies whose short-sighted consolidation, mass firings, and sell-offs of physical plant created the hyper-concentrated, brittle news sector of today:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/16/sociopathic-monsters/#all-the-news-thats-fit-to-print

Luckily for the news, there’s a whole bushel of policy levers we can yank on to make the news better, stronger, and more sustainable, even as tech monopolies and the surveillance they rely on are consigned to the scrapheap of history.

In this series — which will publish weekly over the next four weeks — I’ll dig into four policy prescriptions for making a better news that is free of Big Tech, not dependent on it:

I. Break up ad-tech: Following the lead of Senator Mike Lee’s AMERICA Act, we must end the ad-tech sector’s self-dealing. Ad-tech scoops up 51% of every ad-dollar. That’s thanks to the ad-tech companies practice of offering marketplaces in which they represent both advertisers and publishers: that’s like a game where the referee pays the salaries of the head coaches for both teams. If we pare back the ad-tech tax to, say 10% and split the difference between advertisers and publishers, then every publisher will see an immediate 20% increase in their top-line revenue, without having to “bargain” for a “voluntary” payment from tech companies.

II. Ban surveillance ads: America is long overdue for a federal privacy law with a private right of action. When we finally get such a law, surveillance advertising is dead. Ad-tech has long argued that people like ads, so long as they’re “relevant,” a state that can only be attained through continuous, invasive surveillance. In reality, no one consents to surveillance — which is why, when Apple gave its users a one-click opt-out from spying, 94% blocked spying (unfortunately, Apple only blocks its competitors from spying on Apple customers; even if you opt out of spying on your Apple device, Apple will continue to spy on you).

The natural successor to surveillance ads is context ads: ads based on the content you’re looking at, not the surveillance data an ad-tech platform amassed on you without your consent. Context ads are intrinsically better for publishers: no publisher will ever know as much about a reader’s behavior than a spying ad-tech platform, but no ad-tech platform will ever know as much about a publisher’s own content than the publisher does.

That means that the benefits of a ban on surveillance ads wouldn’t just be an end to creepy internet spying — it would also transfer power from tech companies to news companies, online performers and other creative workers.

III. Open up app stores: 30% of every dollar spent on app-based digital subscriptions is claimed by two companies, Google and Apple, the mobile duopoly. This app store tax is a pure transfer from news to tech. The EU’s Digital Markets Act and the proposed US Open App Markets Act are both designed to kill the app store tax. Dropping mobile payment processing fees from 30% to the industry standard 2–5% will instantaneously make increase the revenue from every subscriber by 25% or more.

IV. Make social media end-to-end: Tech platforms’ predictable enshittification strategy always ends with publishers no longer being able to reach their subscribers unless they pay to “boost” their content. Social media companies claim to be facilitators of the connection between publishers and audiences, but in reality, they take those audiences hostage and ransom them off to publishers. An end-to-end rule for social media would require platforms to reliably deliver material published by accounts to their own followers, who asked to see that material.

The debate over news and tech starts from the erroneous — and dangerous — assumption that the platforms are stealing the news media’s content, by letting their users talk about, quote and link to the news. This isn’t theft: if you’re not allowed to talk about the news, then it’s not the news — it’s a secret.

The platforms are stealing from news, though: they’re not stealing content, they’re stealing money. Between sky-high ad-tech rakes, app store taxes, and ransom demands to reach your own subscribers, the tech companies have grabbed the majority of money generated by news workers and the companies they work for.

Ending this theft will produce a more sustainable and robust source of funding for the news — without compromising news companies’ ability to aggressively hold tech to account, and without propping up financialized, hollowed-out media monopolies at the expense of an independent press.

Catch me on tour with Red Team Blues in Toronto, DC, Gaithersburg, Oxford, Hay, Manchester, Nottingham, London, and Berlin!

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/2023/05/18/stealing-money-not-content/#beyond-link-taxes

[Image ID: EFF's banner for the save news series; the word 'NEWS' appears in pixelated, gothic script in the style of a newspaper masthead. Beneath it in four entwined circles are logos for breaking up ad-tech, ending surveillance ads, opening app stores, and end-to-end delivery.]

Image: EFF https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/saving-news-big-tech

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

[bibiana112]

Downloaded dating app again immediately matched with childhood friend that was also my gay awakening

[sweetunfinishedsymphony]

"maybe in some universe i've been braver and we're married,

in this one i wasn't and i prefer it that way.

i miss you less than i love him."

[dtacaraya]

i’m leaving tonight

you can meet me on the coast,

just like we did before.

was the wind too much

or did you feel attacked

when i said i wanted more?

can we try again or is it too late to say

i’ve taken pieces of you and made them my own

[unrequitedloveletters]

The way I feel about love// 2024

[danakatscullys]

Trying to track down a fic! See tags

[doecrossing]

also i thought i would be fine being celibate for my first semester here but im... not

[everythingeverywherenothere]

NVM lyrics by Jeiel:

“Used to say I love you like Joey from Friends

Used to say I love you now we’re not even friends

Don’t know what to say, I guess it’s best to leave

But I’d be lying if I say I wasn’t peeved

Thought that it was serious but it wasn’t though

Usually I’m savage, I’ll just let it go

Switch my phone to flight mode, save my energy

Some decision aren’t up to me

Oh so you changed your mind, took you long to decide

I guess it wasn’t right, never mind, never mind

Oh so you changed your mind, thanks for wasting my time

If you have to think twice, never mind, never mind

Never mind, never mind, never mind, never mind

Am I colour blind or did red look so green?

He said he’s 25 when he is 33

Gargantuan signs right in front of me

But the first red flag were the skinny jeans

Think I felt something but it wasn’t hope

Should’ve gone on Grindr if you just want to hoe

Could’ve sworn, t’was those goddamn Negronis

How I’m seeing things differently

Oh so you changed your mind, took you long to decide

I guess it wasn’t right, never mind, never mind

Oh so you changed your mind, thanks for wasting my time

If you have to think twice, never mind, never mind

Never mind, never mind, never mind, never mind

Never mind, never mind, never mind, never mind

Must have had one too many Negronis

Must have had one too many Negronis

I didn’t read the signs, oh well never mind

I didn’t read the signs, oh well never mind

I didn’t read the signs, oh well never mind

I didn’t read oh read the signs oh well

Oh so you changed your mind, took you long to decide

I guess it wasn’t right, never mind, never mind

Oh so you changed your mind, thanks for wasting my time

If you have to think twice, never mind, never mind

Never mind, never mind, never mind, never mind

Never mind, never mind, never mind, never mind, mind”

Wrote a song expressing my feelings about a situationship ending I thought it was serious. I must have read it wrong. He chose his ex over me. How can one compete with history. I refer to our relationship as a situationship as a way to word how I was lead on. But for him, it probably didn’t mean anything. I had feelings for him, but if he doesn’t reciprocate that back, what can I do? Some decisions aren’t up to me, so never mind.

[letitgogo]

Your Ex Baiting You Into Breaking No Contact ?– How to Avoid Falling Into the Trap.

It’s been days since your breakup. You’re minding your own business, healing in peace, even starting to enjoy your coffee again. And then…Bam! A “I miss us” text. A song they know reminds you of them posted on their story. Or worse, they message your best friend asking if you’re okay. Let’s be real: this isn’t a coincidence. This is bait. Some exes don’t want to get back together—they just want…