internet gryphon, they/she
it appears someone has whispered in his ear, as the tweet is now deleted and it’s making his right-wing supporters flip out
his first major firings:
Gadde was the one who had final call on banning Trump, as i recall.
a much necessary step both for the community but also generally: it is absurdist that we have entire sections of police for schools when 1) it demonstrably contributes to worse outcomes for everybody and 2) the conflict mediation and intervention generally needed in schools is something we don’t train cops for and simultaneously have entire professions dedicated to.
amusingly, one of the groups musk was using to fund this deal backed out earlier, so i’m not totally sure who he’s going to replace them with–but as expected this acquisition is a huge mess.
their core ideas:
nobody has gotten it quite right yet
we think existing platforms have some good ideas, but no one’s managed to create one without profound flaws. we’re borrowing liberally from other sites, but we want to build cohost into something that works well and serves its users rather than just another clone. there is value in being in the same place as everyone
on a web without functioning search engines, blogs and friends-only sites may be okay for some, but they leave people who are scraping by on public visibility and word of mouth in the lurch. …but nobody wants a digital panopticon
on modern social media, there is an ever-present fear that someone will see your post, have their own bad faith interpretation, and decide to ruin your day over it. platforms are often built to encourage this sort of behavior to drive up engagement, but they don’t have to be. metrics are ruining our lives
modern social media is designed around a vicious feedback loop that keeps users Engaged at the expense of their mental health, all in order to make their executives more money. the value of social media is its posts
we aren’t the ones providing the most important part of cohost — you are. cohost exists to give you ways to express yourself and stay in touch with your friends.
my suspicion is this will not be “successful”, but i am interested in it because it feels like this kind of stuff–which is closer to how stuff on the internet used to be–is the next “innovation” in social media to be had.
not surprising at all, and in fact italy specifically is a really good example of how this can manifest. due to the widespread political conspiracies and corruption during the years of lead, the country has an equally widespread distrust of basically all its political figures, so conspiracism has taken a very strong root there. last year polling found 20% of the population suspicious of 5G, 11% of the population believing vaccination was useless, and almost 65% of italians believing big multinationals were “responsible for everything that happens to us”.
Advertising has a habit of grabbing any available space where we look, and if train windows are available, I’ll bet it’s going to happen any time soon. No, I’d expect it would not happen on those beautiful Alpine railways… But on dreary subway trains, oh yes! Maybe a nice use would be to display passing Alpine scenery on a subway train?
i’m reminded of the ongoing, piecemeal adoption of advertising screens on glass doors in supermarkets, which is a particularly cynical and dystopian, egregious example of this. i fully expect similar to happen with train windows if an opportunity arises.
san francisco mandated buildings over a certain size in certain areas of the city have a system for sorting water that can be recycled from other waste, and then didn’t build the water facility necessary to actually recycle the water, so all but one of the purple pipes that define the system lead nowhere. efforts to build a water facility which can actually connect to some of the pipes have since been written off as too expensive, even though they’re literally building another water facility right now.
San Francisco will open a recycled water plant on the west side of the city next spring, but this $216 million facility will not connect to any buildings but instead irrigate Golden Gate Park, Lincoln Park Golf Course, the Presidio and other landscaping areas.
The latest attempt to build a recycled water facility on the city’s east side, where the buildings with purple pipes are located, fizzled this spring after officials deemed the price tag prohibitive.
just incredible stuff here
Wake me up when the cryptocurrency community decides that these scams are a bad thing and something needs to be done about them, so far it looks like that community is more than happy they happen, as long as it helps provide liquidity to the space.
i’m reminded of how when dan olson did his big video on crypto at the beginning of the year he found the community more or less encouraged basic financial fraud schemes like pump-and-dumps and how if you made an NFT project–heavily tied to cryptocurrency–artificially inflating the value was a prerequisite to show you cared about your investors. the whole ecosystem is really just a nesting doll of scams, lol.
one of the funny consequences of this downstream is it’s bled heavily into fascist aesthetic; no doubt if you’ve spent enough time on twitter or another such website you’ve run into the traditionalist who thinks the bleached roman statue or the great, bland roman building is the pinnacle of art and who doesn’t realize they weren’t like that before
to avoid confusion, i’ll remove this post now since we have a thread covering the new information on this incident.