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rivkae-winters · 1 month

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Edit: the app launched and Is down- I have the initial apology video in a post here and I’m working on getting a full archive of their TikTok up ASAP. I’m letting the rest of this post remain since I do still stand by most of it and also don’t like altering things already in circulation.

Warning for criticism and what I’d consider some harsh to outright mean words:

So I’ve just been made aware of the project known of as ‘lore.fm’ and I’m not a fan for multiple reasons. For one this ‘accessibility’ tool complicates the process of essentially just using a screen reader (something native to all I phones specifically because this is a proposed IOS app) in utterly needless and inaccessible ways. From what I have been seeing on Reddit they have been shielding themselves (or fans of the project have been defending them) with this claim of being an accessibility tool as well to which is infuriating for so many reasons.

I plan to make a longer post explaining why this is a terrible idea later but I’ll keep it short for tonight with my main three criticisms and a few extras:

1. Your service requires people to copy a url for a fic then open your app then paste it into your app and click a button then wait for your audio to be prepared to use. This is needlessly complicating a process that exists on IOS already and can be done IN BROWSER using an overlay that you can fully control the placement of.

2. This is potentially killing your own fandom if it catches on with the proposed target market of xreader smut enjoyers because of only needing the link as mentioned above. You don’t have to open a fic to get a link this the author may potentially not even get any hits much less any other feedback. At least when you download a pdf you leave a hit: the download button is on the page with the fic for a reason. Fandom is a self sustaining eco system and many authors get discouraged and post less/even stop writing all together if they get low interaction.

3. Maybe we shouldn’t put something marketed as turning smut fanfic into audio books on the IOS App Store right now. Maybe with KOSA that’s a bad idea? Just maybe? Sarcasm aside we could see fan fiction be under even more legal threat if minors use this to listen to the content we know they all consume via sites like ao3 (even if we ask them not to) and are caught with it. Auditory content has historically been considered much more obscene/inappropriate than written content: this is a recipe for a disaster and more internet regulations we are trying to avoid.

I also have many issues with the fact that this is obviously redistributing fanfiction (thus violating the copyright we hold over our words and our plots) and removing control the author should have over their content and digital footprint. Then there is the fact that even though the creator on TikTok SAYS you can email to have your fic ‘excluded’ based on the way the demo works (pasting a link) I’m gonna assume that’s just to cover her ass/is utter bullshit. I know that’s harsh but if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck it’s probably a duck.

I am all for women in stem- I’ve BEEN a woman in Stem- but this is not a cool girl boss moment. This is someone naive enough to think this will go over well at best or many other things (security risks especially) at worst.

In conclusion for tonight: I hope this person is a troll but there is enough hype and enough paid for web domains that I don’t think that’s the case. There are a litany of reasons every fanfic reader and writer should be against something like this existing and I’ll outline them all in several other posts later.

Do not email their opt out email address there is no saying what is actually happening with that data and it is simply not worth the risks it could bring up. I hate treating seemingly well meaning people like potential cyber criminals but I’ve seen enough shit by now that it’s better to be safe than sorry. You’re much safer just locking all your fics to account only. I haven’t yet but I may in the future if that is the only option.

If anyone wants a screen reader tutorial and a walk through of my free favorites as well as the native IOS screen reader I can post that later as well. Sorry for the heavy content I know it’s not my normal fare.

#it’s especially insulting the way this is marketed as solving a problem when the solution already exists #ableism #lore.fm #terrible app ideas that shouldn’t happen #serious #accessibility #screen readers #lore.fm should not launch #accessibility tools that are inherently ableist in design #I wish I was making this up

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mostlysignssomeportents · 3 months

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Why Millennials aren’t leaving Tiktok

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TOMORROW NIGHT (Mar 22) in TORONTO, then SUNDAY (Mar 24) with LAURA POITRAS in NYC, then Anaheim, and more!

The news that Gen Z users have abandoned Tiktok in such numbers that the median Tiktoker is a Millennial (or someone even older) prompted commentators to dunk on Tiktok as uncool by dint of having lost its youthful sheen:

https://www.garbageday.email/p/tiktok-millennials-turns

But "why are Gen Z kids leaving Tiktok?" is the wrong question. The right question is, why aren't Millennials leaving Tiktok? After all, we are living through the enshittocene, the great enshittening, in which every platform gets monotonically, irreversibly worse over time, and Tiktok is no exception:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

To understand why older users are stuck to Tiktok, we need to start with why younger users relentlessly seek out new platforms. To some extent, it's just down to youth's appetite for novelty, but that's only part of the story. To really understand why people come to – and leave – platforms, you have to understand switching costs.

"Switching costs" is the economists' term for everything you have to give up when you change products or services. Switching from Ios to Android probably means giving up a bunch of your apps and purchased media. Switching from an airline where you're a high-status frequent flier to another carrier means giving up on free checked bags and early boarding.

In an open market, rivals have lots of ways to lower these switching costs (it's an open secret that you can call an airline and say, "Hi, I'm a 33rd Order Mason on American Airlines, will you make me a Triple Platinum Diamond Sky-Baron if I switch to Delta?"). Of course, big incumbents hate this, and do everything they can to increase their switching costs, finding ways to impose high switching costs that punish disloyal consumers who have the temerity to go elsewhere.

With social media, lock-in comes for free, thanks to the "collective action problem." Getting people to agree on a given course of action is hard, and as you add more people to the picture, the problem gets harder. It's hard enough to get half a dozen people in your group-chat to agree on where to go for dinner or what board-game to play. But once you're reliant on a social media service to stay in touch with friends, relatives around the world, customers, communities (say, rare disease support groups), and coordination (like organizing your kid's little league car-pool), the problem becomes nearly insoluble. Maybe you can convince your overseas relatives to switch to a Signal group, but can you do the same for your small business's customers, or your old high-school pals?

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/29/how-to-leave-dying-social-media-platforms/

Taken together, switching costs and collective action problems make platforms "sticky," and sticky platforms inevitably enshittify.

Platforms, after all, generate value. They connect end-users with each other (say, little league parents) and they connect end-users to business customers (you and your small business's customers). That value needs to be parceled out among end users, business customers, and the platform's shareholders. A platform can make life better for business customers at its end users' expense by increasing the number of ads (hello, Youtube!), and it can make life better for its shareholders at its business customers' expense by decreasing the share of ad revenue given to publishers or performers (oh, hello again, Youtube!).

From a platform's perspective, the ideal state is one in which end users and business customers get no value from the platform, because it's all being captured by the platform's shareholders. But if Youtube interrupted every 30 seconds of video for ten minutes of ads and paid the video creators nothing, both users and creators would ditch the platform – and advertisers would follow:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dab8sKg8Ko8

So platforms seek an equilibrium: "what is the least value we apportion to end-users and business customers without triggering their departure?" Maybe that means giving more value to end-users (for example, keeping Uber fares low by suppressing wages), or to business-customers (crowding more ads into your social media feed).

Every business – including brick-and-mortar, non-digitized ones – wants to find some kind of equilibrium between the value going to its suppliers, its customers and its owners, but digital businesses have an advantage here: digital systems are flexible in ways that analog, hard-goods businesses are not. Digital businesses can alter pricing, payouts and other dynamics from moment to moment – second to second – and make a different offer to every supplier and customer. They have a bunch of knobs, and they can twiddle them at will:

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

Well, not quite at will. Businesses face constraints on their twiddling. If they get too greedy, users or business customers might weigh the cost of staying against the switching costs and decide it's not worth it. But the more expensive – the more painful – a platform can make leaving, the more pain they can inflict on the people who stay.

In other words, there's two ways to keep a customer or supplier's business: you can make a better service so they won't want to leave, or you can make leaving the service so painful that they stay even if you mistreat them.

There's three ways a digital company can make things worse for their customers and users without losing their business.

First, they can eliminate competition (think of Mark Zuckerberg buying Instagram to recapture the users who'd fled Facebook to escape his poor management):

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

Second, they can capture their regulators and avoid punishment for trampling their suppliers' or users' legal rights (think of how Amazon has raised the price of everything we buy, both on- and off Amazon, through its "most favored nation" deals):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/25/greedflation/#commissar-bezos

Third, they can use IP law to prevent competitors from modifying their services to claw back some of that value (think of how Apple used legal threats to block an Android version of Imessage, blocking Apple customers from having private conversations that included non-Apple customers:

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

Companies can't just use this tricks at will, of course. Antitrust laws can block companies from making anticompetitve acquisitions or mergers. Regulators can punish companies for cheating their customers, workers and users. Technologists can come up with clever ways of modding or reconfiguring existing services with "interoperable" add-ons that let users bargain for better treatment by refusing to accept worse:

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

Day in, day out, the decision-makers at tech companies test these constraints, twisting the knobs that shift value away from users to shareholders. Their bosses and boards motivate them with "KPIs" that dangle the promise of huge bonuses and promotions for any manager who successfully enshittifies part of the company's products:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

Decades of pro-corporate, pro-monopoly policy has loosened those knobs. 40 years of lax antitrust meant that companies had a lot of leeway to buy or merge with rivals – that's changing today, but it's tough sledding:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/14/making-good-trouble/#the-peoples-champion

As sectors grew more concentrated, they found it easier to capture their regulators, so that they no longer fear punishment for price-gouging, spying, or wage-theft, so applying the same amount of torque to the "break the law" knob cranks it a lot further:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

Once you've captured your regulators, you can aim them at your competitors. A monopoly-friendly policy environment has transformed IP law into a bully's charter, allowing powerful companies to strangle would-be competitors who dare to offer their customers tools to shield themselves from enshittification, like scrapers, ad-blockers and alternative clients. Big companies can crank the enshittification knob all the way over and know that smaller rivals knobs won't turn at all:

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

At one point, bosses faced one more constraint on knob-twiddling: their workforce. Many tech workers genuinely cared about their users' welfare, something bosses encouraged as a sneaky trick to get techies to put in long hours without exercising their leverage by quitting rather than destroying their lives to meet arbitrary deadlines. These workers would fearlessly slap their bosses' hands when they reached for the enshittification knob, threatening to quit rather than allowing the products they'd given so much for to be enshittified. Today, after hundreds of thousands of tech layoffs, tech workers are far less like to challenge their bosses' right to twiddle, and far more likely to get fired if they try:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/10/the-proletarianization-of-tech-workers/

All this means that tech bosses don't have to change their approach at all, and yet, their services will grow steadily worse. The boss who twiddles the enshittification knob in exactly the same way as he did a year or a decade ago will find it turning much further, because his customers are locked into his platform, his regulators won't protect them, the same regulators will stop his competitors' attempts at countertwiddling, and his workers fear losing their jobs too much to speak up for their users.

That's the contagion that produced the enshittocene: the forces that constrained companies (competition, regulation, self-help and labor – all melted away, allowing every company's MBA-poisoned knob-twiddling leaders to shamelessly caress their knobs with every hour that God sends:

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

Which is why people want to leave platforms. When a platform loses its users, those users have weighed the switching costs against the pain of staying and decided that it's better to bear those costs than to stay.

So why have Tiktok's younger users found the costs too high to bear, and why have their elders remained stuck to the platform?

For that, we have to look at the unique characteristics of young people – characteristics that transcend the lazy cliche that kids are easily bored, fickle novelty-seekers who hop from one service to another with unquenchable restlessness.

Whether or not kids are novelty-seekers, they are, fundamentally, a disfavored minority. They want to do things that the platforms don't want them to do – like converse without being overheard by authority figures, including their parents and their schools (also: cops and future employers, though kids may not be thinking about them as much).

In other words, kids pay intrinsically lower switching costs than adults, because a platform will always do less for them than it will for grownups. This is a characteristic kids share with other supposedly technophilic, novelty-seeking "early adopters," from sex-workers to terrorists, from sexual minorities to trolls, from political dissidents to fascists. For those groups, the cost of mastering a new technology and assembling a community around it is always more likely to be worth bearing than it would be for people who are well-served by existing tools:

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

Pornographers didn't jump on home video because of its superiority as a medium for capturing flesh-tones. Home video was a good porn medium because it was easier to discreetly get into the hands of porn consumers, who could, in turn, discreetly view it. The audience for porn in the privacy of your living room is larger than the audience for porn that you can only watch if you're willing to be seen marching into a dirty movie theater.

Every new technology is popularized by a mix of disfavored groups and neophiles, who normalize and refine it – and yes, infuse it with their countercultural coolth – until it becomes easy enough to use to become mainstream. As more normies drift into the new system, the switching costs associated with leaving the old system declines. It gets easier and easier to find the people and services you want in the new realm, and harder and harder to find them in the old one.

This is why tech platforms have historically experienced sudden collapse: the platform that gets more valuable and harder to leave as it accumulates users gets less valuable and easier to leave as users depart:

https://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2022/12/05/what-if-failure-is-the-plan.html

If you're a Gen Z kid on Tiktok, you experience the same enshittification as your Millennial elders. But you also experience an additional cost to staying: as late-arriving adult authority figures become more fluent in the platform, they are more able to observe your use of it, and punish you for conduct that you used to get away with.

And if you're a Millennial who isn't leaving Tiktok, it's not just that you experience the same enshittification as those departing Gen Z kids – you also face higher switching costs if you go. The older you get, the more complex your social connections grow. A Gen Z kid in middle school doesn't have to worry about losing touch with their high-school buddies if they switch platforms (they haven't gone to high school yet – and they see their middle school friends in person all the time, giving them a side-channel to share information about who's leaving Tiktok and where they're headed to next). Middle-schoolers don't have to worry about coordinating little league car-pools or losing access to a rare disease support group.

In other words: younger people leave old platforms earlier because they have more to gain by leaving; and older people leave old platforms later because they have more to lose by leaving.

This is why Facebook is filled with Boomers. Yes, their kids bolted for the exits to avoid having their parents (or grandparents) wading into their sexual, social and professional lives. But the reason the Boomers were late joining younger users' Facebook exodus – or the reason they never joined it – is that they stand to lose more by going. Facebook deliberately cultivated this dynamic, for example, by creating a photo hosting service designed to entice users into uploading their family photos while disguising how hard it would be to take those photos with them if they left:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

The irony here is that tech has intrinsically low switching costs. All other things being equal, a new platform can always build a bridge to ease the passage of users from the old one. There's no (technical) reason that moving to Mastodon, or Bluesky, or any other platform should mean cutting ties with the people who stayed behind.

A combination of voluntary interoperability (where old platforms offer APIs to allow new services to connect with them), mandatory interop (where governments force tech companies to offer APIs) and adversarial interop (where new companies hack together their own API with reverse-engineering, scraping, bots, and other guerrilla tactics) would hypothetically allow users to hop between networks as easily as you change phone carriers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/19/better-failure/#let-my-tweeters-go

Tech platforms tend to offer APIs when they're getting started (to ease the inward passage of new users) then shut them down after they attain dominance (locking the door behind those users). The EU is tinkering with mandatory APIs through the Digital Markets Act (though bafflingly, they're starting with encrypted messaging rather than social media). Restoring adversarial interoperability will require extensive legal reform, which is getting started through Right to Repair laws:

https://www.techdirt.com/2024/03/13/oregon-passes-right-to-repair-law-apple-lobbied-to-kill/

The people who are stranded on social media platforms shouldn't be mistaken for uncool, aging technophobes. They're not stubborn, they're stranded. Like the elders who can't afford to leave a dying town after the factory shuts down and the young people move away, these people are locked in. They need help evacuating – a place to go and a path to get there.

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/2024/03/21/involuntary-die-hards/#evacuate-the-platformsr

#pluralistic

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freeweb2app · 1 year

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Simply create ios app from website by using Web2appz Visit: https://web2appz.com/createapp/

#create ios app from website #ios app creator #create ios app #make ios app from website #web2appz #web2app #web to app #website to ios app #convert website into ios app #free website to ios app

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dawtheken321 · 5 months

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#make money #blogger #blogging #content creator #influencer #tumblr milestone #nicki minaj #app #barbz #ios #spotify

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all-the-fish · 5 months

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Oh, you know, just the usual internet browsing experience in the year of 2024

Some links and explanations since I figured it might be useful to some people, and writing down stuff is nice.

First of all, get Firefox. Yes, it has apps for Android/iOS too. It allows more extensions and customization (except the iOS version), it tracks less, the company has a less shitty attitude about things. Currently all the other alternatives are variations of Chromium, which means no matter how degoogled they supposedly are, Google has almost a monopoly on web browsing and that's not great. Basically they can introduce extremely user unfriendly updates and there's nothing forcing them to not do it, and nowhere for people to escape to. Current examples of their suggested updates are disabling/severly limiting adblocks in June 2024, and this great suggestion to force sites to verify "web environment integrity" ("oh you don't run a version of chromium we approve, such as the one that runs working adblocks? no web for you.").

uBlockOrigin - barely needs any explanation but yes, it works. You can whitelist whatever you want to support through displaying ads. You can also easily "adblock" site elements that annoy you. "Please log in" notice that won't go away? Important news tm sidebar that gives you sensory overload? Bye.

Dark Reader - a site you use has no dark mode? Now it has. Fairly customizable, also has some basic options for visually impaired people.

SponsorBlock for YouTube - highlights/skips (you choose) sponsored bits in the videos based on user submissions, and a few other things people often skip ("pls like and subscribe!"). A bit more controversial than normal adblock since the creators get some decent money from this, but also a lot of the big sponsors are kinda scummy and offer inferior product for superior price (or try to sell you a star jpg land ownership in Scotland to become a lord), so hearing an ad for that for the 20th time is kinda annoying. But also some creators make their sponsored segments hilarious.

Privacy Badger (and Ghostery I suppose) - I'm not actually sure how needed these are with uBlock and Firefox set to block any tracking it can, but that's basically what it does. Find someone more educated on this topic than me for more info.

Https Everywhere - I... can't actually find the extension anymore, also Firefox has this as an option in its settings now, so this is probably obsolete, whoops.

Facebook Container - also comes with Firefox by default I think. Keeps FB from snooping around outside of FB. It does that a lot, even if you don't have an account.

WebP / Avif image converter - have you ever saved an image and then discovered you can't view it, because it's WebP/Avif? You can now save it as a jpg.

YouTube Search Fixer - have you noticed that youtube search has been even worse than usual lately, with inserting all those unrelated videos into your search results? This fixes that. Also has an option to force shorts to play in the normal video window.

Consent-O-Matic - automatically rejects cookies/gdpr consent forms. While automated, you might still get a second or two of flashing popups being yeeted.

XKit Rewritten - current most up to date "variation "fork" of XKit I think? Has settings in extension settings instead of an extra tumblr button. As long as you get over the new dash layout current tumblr is kinda fine tbh, so this isn't as important as in the past, but still nice. I mostly use it to hide some visual bloat and mark posts on the dash I've already seen.

YouTube NonStop - do you want to punch youtube every time it pauses a video to check if you're still there? This saves your fists.

uBlacklist - blacklists sites from your search results. Obviously has a lot of different uses, but I use it to hide ai generated stuff from image search results. Here's a site list for that.

Redirect AMP to HTML - redirects links from their amp version to the normal version. Amp link is a version of a site made faster and more accessible for phones by Bing/Google. Good in theory, but lets search engines prefer some pages to others (that don't have an amp version), and afaik takes traffic from the original page too. Here's some more reading about why it's an issue, I don't think I can make a good tl;dr on this.

Also since I used this in the tags, here's some reading about enshittification and why the current mainstream internet/services kinda suck.

#modern internet is great #enshittification #internet browsing #idk how to tag this #but i hope it will help someone #personal #question mark

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ms-demeanor · 2 months

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got a question I was hoping you could answer!

why do all apps have to go through an app store? why doesn't anywhere have their app downloadable from the internet or something?

was wondering this because lots of issues with apps seem to stem from having to comply with app store guidelines and whatnot. So why not avoid that problem and make the app available off the appstore? And if part of it is because they're easier to find in the appstore, why not do both? why not also offer the download on a website or something?

there's gotta be some reason why there's afaik no one who offers a download for their app without the appstore right?

There are absolutely other ways to get apps, and the one that springs immediately to mind is the F-Droid App Repository.

Sideloading is the process of loading an app that doesn't come from your phone's OS-approved app store. It's really easy on Android (basically just a couple of clicks) but requires jailbreaking on an iphone.

The reason more USERS don't sideload apps is risk: app stores put apps through at least nominal security checks to ensure that they aren't hosting malware. If you get an app from the app store that is malware, you can report it and it will get taken down, but nobody is forcing some random developer who developed his own app to remove it from his site if it installs malware on your phone unless you get law enforcement involved.

The reason more developers don't go outside of the app store or don't WANT to go outside of the app store is money. The number of users who are going to sideload apps is *tiny* compared to the number of users who will go through the app store; that makes a HUGE difference in terms of income, so most developers try to keep it app-store friendly. Like, if tumblr were to say "fuck the app store" and just release their own app that you could download from the sidebar a few things would happen:

Downloads would drop to a fraction of their prior numbers instantly

iOS users would largely be locked out of using tumblr unless they fuck with their phones in a way that violates Apple's TOS and could get them booted out of their iOS ecosystem if they piss off the wrong people.

Ad revenue would collapse because not a lot of advertisers want to work with companies that are app-store unfriendly

They'd be kicked off of the main app marketplaces

So most people who develop apps don't want to put the time and effort and money into developing an app that people might not pay for that then also can't carry ads.

Which leads into another issue: the kind of people who generally make and use sideloaded app aren't the kind of people who generally like profit-driven models. Indie apps are often slow to update and have minimal support because you're usually dealing with a tiny team of creators with a userbase of people who can almost certainly name ten flavors of Linux and are thus expected to troubleshoot and solve their own problems.

If this is the kind of thing you want to try, have at it. I'd recommend sticking to apps from the F-Droid Repository linked up above and being judicious about what you install. If you're using apple and would have to jailbreak your phone to get a non-approved app on it, I'd recommend switching to another type of phone.

(For the record, you also aren't limited to android or ios as the operating system of your phone; there are linux-based OSs out there and weird mutations of android and such - I am not really a phone person so I can't tell you much about them, but they are out there!)

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changes · 11 months

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Tuesday, July 25th, 2023

🌟 New

We’re running a new experiment in activity on web with more visual design updates.

We’ve rolled out a new top navigation bar in the iOS app. (This was already rolled out in the Android app.)

In the post editor on web, you can now reorder where an existing poll is in the post content when editing a post with a poll.

🛠 Fixed

We’ve fixed a bug in blogs’ RSS feeds that could prevent a title from being set on individual items in the feed.

On web, we fixed an issue that was causing the reblog icon at the bottom of posts to be misaligned by a couple of pixels.

We’ve fixed a bug across all platforms that was showing the “Mutuals” label for privately answered asks in activity when you aren’t mutuals with the answering blog.

We’ve fixed a bug on web that was preventing “retired” themes from appearing on their creators’ theme management page.

🚧 Ongoing

The new navigation layout experiment on desktop web is still going, and we’re still collecting feedback, making iterative improvements based on that feedback, and fixing bugs that people have pointed out to us.

We’re also fixing issues that are being reported to us about the direct messaging redesign experiment on web.

🌱 Upcoming

We’re working to fix a wide range of scroll performance issues on web, which has helped dramatically conserve memory usage and CPU in our tests so far, especially for folks using Tumblr in a mobile browser.

Experiencing an issue? File a Support Request and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can!

Want to share your feedback about something? Check out our Work in Progress blog and start a discussion with the community.

#tumblr update

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productivefairy · 17 days

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Your guide to block out distractions

So, here I am gonna share all the apps which is gonna help you block out distractions like tik tok,surfing and all.

1.Cold Turkey Blocker -

This app is for my PC using girlies. It has two versions free and paid. The free version works just as good but if you wanna support the creator and have pomodoro advantages then You can Pay for it.

2. AppBlock -

This app is for andriod and IOS. This is paid app but if you happen to have android then you can dm me, I'll share the apk with you. (Its safe I've been using it since 6 months as of now.)

3. DigitalDetox App-

This app is free and works like magic. Its for IOS and Android. Just make sure to block settings so u are unable to change the app permission thus uninstalling this.

4. Forest -

The Classic app for focusing on task by timeblocking. Again, if you happen to have android then you can dm me, I have the paid version which you can install in your phone and its safe.

5. StayFree -

This works for PC, IOS and Android just as good. If you have a problem with scrolling on youtube but dont wanna block the app as you also happen to watch educational videos there then this apps for you. Just add the excpectation channels and block shorts. You are good to go. Also add this app to other app block list (after allowing ytube channels u want) like cold turkey. You wont be able to change the permission that way.

6. Stayfocused -

This app is for PC, android and IOS. This app works like charm. In intensity its like between stayfree and coldturkey.

7. Yeolpultuma -

This is technically not an app blocker but its an amazing app if you like to track your studies/work. I feel like its the superior sister of forest. (some people prefer minimilasm aesthetic of forest which is fine.). You can plan everything in that.

Maybe I'll make a list of useful study apps.

Additional tip-

Block chrome:// extensions to make you unable to remove the extensions.

Disable account setting, time setting and everything which is given here to maximize your success in blocking these sites.

Hope you like this.

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genericpuff · 6 months

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The Kiss Bet Episode 172 - Hot Pot and Venting About How I Want My 70 Cents Back

Okay, look, this isn't a post I was expecting to make today but it's something that just happened and I have to fucking talk about, so let me preface this with some context.

I had to buy coins recently and because I switched to using my iPad for reading comics on, I got a "new reader" type deal from Webtoons for a coin bundle that got me like 100 coins for $5; because technically it was a 'new account' as Webtoons operates their in-game currency model on apps, not on actual emails (meaning if you use the app on an Android phone and then switch to an Apple iOS device, they're technically two separate accounts which you sync the reading data between via the account info linked via the email, therefore they have two separate coin wallets).

So with more coins than I knew what to do with, I decided to start FastPassing The Kiss Bet again, which I had recently stopped FP'ing around the S3 mark, as it's recently devolved back into the "will they won't they" trope, but instead of between Sara-Lin and Joe, it's between Sara-Lin and Joe's younger brother (the "true endgame") Oliver.

Now I don't mind the ship in essence. Joe was definitely not gonna be endgame, it was always gonna be Oliver, anyone who's read any amount of romance before - especially high school romances - knows how this shit tends to go, and The Kiss Bet isn't exactly trying to be groundbreaking or subversive in any way, it knows exactly what it's about and what it's trying to accomplish.

But it's almost become a little too good at this. Because in playing the "will they won't they" game for so long with a character that we know is endgame, it's basically been weeks and weeks and weeks of-

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That said, after I caught up on the recent FP episodes, it seemed like stuff was finally moving a little bit. We were finally meeting Oliver's mom and his stepdad who he has a fractured relationship with, Joe was finally getting with his true endgame girl, Vicky (who's totally not an exact genderbent version of Joe lmao) and Sara-Lin was finally realizing she had feelings for Oliver.

And then the newest episode came out, Episode 172 - Hot Pot and Venting.

CAUTION: FASTPASS SPOILERS FOR THE KISS BET OFFICIALLY BEGIN HERE!

Already I was a little petty over the title like "lmao ok clunky title but whatever". I swept it off as not a genuine criticism, just me being a nitpicking asshole over what's essentially Fluff: The Comic.

The episode cost 7 coins, which is about roughly 70 cents, albeit closer to a dollar for Canadian readers (here's something they don't tell you about Canada - our Monopoly game currency is just as fucked as it looks) and that's where I'm gonna get into my second disclaimer that I need to be perfectly clear about (and it'll be what we get more into later on in this post).

I understand the principle of paying for art. I understand fully that many of these webtoons are being produced on tight deadlines by creators who often can only afford 1-2 assistants, if any at all. I understand and fully agree that creators deserve to be paid for their skills, time, and efforts, not just as creators working on the hellsite that is Webtoons, but as artists in general who deserve to make a living the same as anyone else. Anyone who follows my stuff here knows I'm an artist myself so I would never debate the ethical necessity of paying artists for their work.

However.

I can say that, and also agree with the people who have stated in discussion circles such as on /r/webtoons that a lot of the comics that have started charging 7 coins have been suspiciously delivering less comic since. And it's not even so much in the literal panel count, the liquid volume of these comics have remained the same, but the calorie count has dropped significantly. Food metaphors aside, what I mean is that despite many of these comics maintaining their 40-60 minimum panel count requirement, they have in fact reduced the actual amount of content that happens in them, and The Kiss Bet's newest episode is a stark example of what I mean.

I am going to start by posting only post three panels - three panels that literally sum up the entirety of Episode 172 and what it chooses to spend its time on.

That is it. That is literally all that's established in this episode. I'd tell you to go read it yourself, but honestly, this is genuinely one of those rare times I can honestly say that a 40+ panel episode is not worth 70 cents and you'd be better off, and that's saying a LOT when these episodes are only priced at the cost of a gumball. At least Lore Olympus has entertainment in how bad it is most of the time, Episode 172 of The Kiss Bet is just nothing. You will literally get more substance and flavor from an actual gumball.

Literally every other panel in this episode is either repeating the same dialogue (Sara-Lin saying the same thing multiple different times to express how Oliver is holding her hand or how his stepdad is a dick) and then Sara-Lin and Oliver staring at each other. Over. And over. Again.

I am not joking. I did not cut anything out in that sequence. That is where the episode ends. Complete nothingburger, seemingly cut off right as it was just getting started like Cait Corrain's career.

Out of the entire episode, there were 45 panels. So I can safely assume Ingrid's minimum panel requirement is at least 40 per episode, that's me assuming the best that she didn't exactly meet her panel minimum at 45 panels on the dot.

Out of those 45 panels, there were:

Two actual unique backgrounds that weren't gradients or just a single piece of furniture

4 separate panels of Sara-Lin freaking out over Oliver holding her hand and wondering if he even noticed

10 panels of Sara-Lin staring at Oliver either dumbfounded or asking him to repeat himself (or apologizing over nothing)

5 panels of the characters saying nothing

11 panels of Sara-Lin repeating information in different ways that could have been accomplished in half that time

Two separate occasions of Oliver getting Sara's attention from off-panel, literally formatted the exact same way both times (and both followed by reaction panels of Sara-Lin staring at him dumbfounded)

Way too many panels of Sara-Lin blushing in response to Oliver being an asshole tbh like literally this guy's a douchebag, Joe may have been the "out of her league" love interest but at least he was nice and didn't treat Sara-Lin like someone who just bought a Husky as a "starter pet" ???

Again, I don't usually like being a dick about the coin costs, and I definitely don't like being a hypocrite in telling people they should pay artists for their work while simultaneously posting their paywalled content like this, but I think there does come a point where it feels more irresponsible for people to not be aware of what they're about to pay for and how little they're going to be getting. This episode is literally one of the best - and worst - examples of how far the romance genre has fallen on the platform - when it's not being overtaken and oversaturated by problematic series that romanticize abuse and sexual assault, it's being dragged to death with the most boring executions of tropes that everyone has seen before and is only exciting for anyone who's never read a book or watched a romance movie, period.

And here's the thing where I do approach a bit more "hot take" territory, but every time I see this argument come up about episodes not being worth the coin cost, I see others who rightfully argue that 70 cents isn't that much to pay for what you're getting - weekly episodes of work that are usually always delivered on time, with more panels than you would ever typically see in a free to read comic.

But here's where I take issue with that argument, as much as the principle of it is sound, it misses the overall point: readers are paying for entertainment first and foremost, so can anyone who's actually paying for regular refills on their app currency step away from this and truly call it "entertainment"? Nothing was gained. The comic had 45 panels to say something, anything, and managed to not even squeak out so much of a word. Even the silent moments have no substance, they just reiterate information that we already know.

Do we really need another panel of Sara-Lin blushing at Oliver? We've known for weeks now that she has a crush on him. Do we really need another panel of Oliver getting Sara-Lin's attention? What is this actually showing of their chemistry? What is being shown here that hasn't been shown numerous times - with and without dialogue - for weeks now? What does the comic have to show for itself after four seasons?

Another point of the "it's just 70 cents, don't be an asshole" argument that people seem to miss is it's not 70 cents. It's $1. Because if you want to buy a single episode of the Kiss Bet, you can't just pay for the individual episode in isolation, you have to pay for the coins first, and $1 is the absolute bare minimum you have to pay to get 10 coins, which will only pay for one episode of a 7 coin series - of which there are many now, basically any series that's 40 panels or more will cost 7 coins and, shocker, those are the series that WT will tend to promote most, you'll rarely see the 5 coins series in the banner ads, and that's not even getting into how there are more and more series cropping up that have 5+ episodes behind FP rather than the traditional three.

So if you're someone who's (almost definitely) keeping up with more than one series? You can't just pay the $1, you have to pay at least $5 for 50 coins, and that will NOT go far anymore or cut as evenly as it used to when just about every series is now 7 coins. Webtoons knows fully well what kind of game they're playing by making the new coin cost an uneven number while still offering increments of 5/10 in their coin bundles. They undoubtedly want you to be left with an uneven number so that you'll be easily lured into buying more coins so you don't 'waste' the uneven amount you have left that isn't enough to buy the episodes for the series you want to read. Obviously this is more speculation and not fact, but it's a common business model and with the series that have adopted the 7 coin count model (rather than starting off with 7 coins outright) such as The Kiss Bet and Lore Olympus, it's becoming abundantly clear that either the creators or the platform itself is encouraging these series to meet their panel minimums with as little content as possible in order to get more money out of readers who are barely even being drip fed actual entertainment and narrative progression, let alone spoon fed.

And then there's the waiting. The goddamn waiting. So many of these series guilty of siphoning their content off through a hose that they're deliberately standing on are designed intentionally with the most egregious cliffhangers in mind to keep their audience hooked so they'll undoubtedly FP next week. Do you know what that amount of waiting does to a comic? To its readers? First off, it artificially extends the actual pacing of the comic to make it feel longer than it is, when in reality, many of these plotlines are happening in a vacuum of very short bursts of time. Case in point, Lore Olympus is commonly confused for having a plotline that takes place over the course of months, when actually when laid end to end in order of cause and effect, many of its subplots - including the romance of Hades and Persephone - takes place over the course of days. This over-inflates the plotline's actual depth and, even worse so, it makes it harder for readers to keep up with information that's being delivered, as it often takes weeks for that information to actually go anywhere - so by the time it does, many readers have straight up forgotten about it.

It's absolutely not okay that so many of these kinds of series are normalizing literal slow burning for an audience who's paying to be entertained. It's not a "slow burn". It's just slow, and deliberately so. It's absolutely NOT FUN to follow a comic that does not go anywhere week after week. It's frustrating. And before long, it starts to feel like gambler's fallacy, where readers have to essentially gaslight themselves into paying into it more and more convinced that it has to pay off eventually, based on a promise that was never actually made, only assumed in good faith. And readers should not have to fill in the bulk of the content that isn't happening with their own imaginations, which is something that happens a LOT in these series that spend so much time on the characters just staring at each other and saying nothing. It's not 'plot' to just draw characters blushing and have your audience fill in the rest of it entirely on their own. This is certainly a technique in writing, but in the case of The Kiss Bet and other comics like it, it's much less of a valid technique and more just flat out manipulating your audience into falling so hard into the sunk cost fallacy trap that they don't notice they're being robbed blind by the plot that hasn't actually happened - and they've been paying for that financial and emotional robbery out of their own pockets and brains every step of the way.

Again, I do not care about the coin cost in and of itself, seventy cents IS still an incredibly cheap price for weekly updates of a series that has to put out so many panels each week. But as a reader and a customer, I should not be leaving these updates with less information than what I started with. And I'm someone who's incredibly old school by webcomic standards, there are comics that I follow that have updated 1-2 pages a week for over a decade that manage to do more with their limited pages than Lore Olympus and The Kiss Bet manage to do after entire hiatuses filled with pre-production time.

Why does this page of Alfie manage to move both the intrinsic plot of the titular character as well as the external plot that's going on around her in one page made up of 5 panels better than what The Kiss Bet can do in 45?

Why does this page of Tamberlane manage to convey more information about the world's lore and the people in it in a way that's emotionally driven and clearly affecting the characters without outright info-dumping than what Lore Olympus has managed to spit out onto its plate since S3 started over a year ago?

How does Tales from Alderwood manage to be more entertaining and convey more meaningful storytelling through its characters in a single page consisting of zero dialogue than what The Kiss Bet can convey in its silent panels of staring, blushing, and repetitive stuttering?

Why are the creators who are relying entirely on their own efforts, resources, and ability to generate income through community interaction and support putting out better work with less panels and on slower schedules for FREE than what we're seeing from professional creators on a professional publishing platform who are being paid to do this as their job?

There's this saying in the tattooing industry: good work isn't cheap and cheap work isn't good.

At this point, 70 cents is not a 'bargain' as many people like to argue in defense of the creators. And while I do want to have good faith in the creators who don't pull this shit, the creators who clearly go above and beyond to do what they do in the pursuit of storytelling and polishing their craft to be the best piece of work that it can be - the comics that are worth paying 70 cents and beyond for - are not the comics that Webtoons is promoting to people. The creators of the works that genuinely deserve more than 70 cents per update are being left to fend for themselves without support from the platform, while those that aren't worth the price of even a flavorless gumball are consistently winning the Wonka Golden Ticket lottery.

The cost of 70 cents is relative. For some works it's a genuine bargain. For others like the The Kiss Bet and Lore Olympus, 70 cents is not a "bargain", it's not a "good deal", it's exactly the value of what you're paying for - cheap work that isn't good.

#so yeah i'm done reading the kiss bet fr now #i figured if i had 100 more coins than i needed i may as well use them for something that i didn't need to start from scratch on #but i literally feel ripped off LMAO #webtoon critical #the kiss bet #lore olympus critical #anti lore olympus #lo critical #Youtube

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