Okay folks: this morning we're launching something we think is pretty useful. Lots of people have strong opinions on how content moderation should work, but they've never done it. So we built a content moderation mobile game (browser-based): https://moderatormayhem.engine.is/
Years ago, I got to interview and hang out with Kevin Smith backstage before a show, and he was incredibly kind and generous with his time.
It's good that he's now talking openly about his mental health struggles, and I know he's worried that he's going to get hate for it so I'm sharing this for the positive vibes that should be sent his way. https://people.com/health/clerks-direc...
@mmasnick both my husband and I are huge Kevin Smith fans...we watch his movies, buy his books and we used to see him often when we lived in Vancouver, he was always receptive to waves and comments as we passed him by. He is a good guy.
again, Twitter only succeeded because journalists paid attention to it and signal boosted everything off of it relentlessly on broadcast news. Without that signal boost, there is no spreading of Twitter. The user base is actually quite small.
@mmasnick The lines between reality and absurdity, fact and fiction, and good and evil, get finer every day for these people. I worry about the day when the convergence is complete. I'm calling it societal enshittification :)
@mmasnick I mean I get that there's a pipeline between "lauded figure" -> "exposure as a sexual harasser/predator" -> "conservative for pay" but I don't get how he could be as incompetent and incapable in that interview, unless the books he wrote, had VERY VERY VERY good editors...
Actually when I think about #MSNBC on air talent, it's just so much better than any other "news" network. They are all there because of their brilliance and tenacity, instead of their looks or charisma.
Oh, this seems pretty cool. Now that Elon has cracked down on the API and made tools like debirdify not work, @scafaria has created Whosum, a browser extension to help make your social graph more portable. It currently "records" your Twitter connections and then highlights those on Mastodon all in your browser (not on some server somewhere). https://whosum.com/
@mmasnick@scafaria I wrote a small client-side script that scanned the Follows page to retrieve @darth's 4,000 follows. It took a lot of scrolling tbh. It makes me appreciate Mastodon's account portability all the more.
@mmasnick@scafaria When I try that link, I get an error message: "An unhandled error has occurred." I'm sure it's a work in progress. Will keep checking back.
Interesting timing of Twitter changing its logo to the Doge dog... just as Elon is trying to get out of a (stupid, likely to fail) lawsuit arguing that he pumped & dumped dogecoin.
@mmasnick Also, in regards to my jacked up Following feed, if I hover over it, it says that people I follow, follow it. Which is what I get on my For You feed? WTF!
So, uh, not pleased that Elon is now implying I might be a gullible sucker who would pay him his monthly "I'm a gullible sucker" fee. Dude should just take away our legacy blue checks like he promised.
So, as @chancerydaily points out, legacy blue checks who don't want the blue checks are currently stuck with the blue checks and Musk is implying they may be paying.
And the only way to hide the blue check is if you actually do pay, where you will soon get an option to hide the fact that you pay.
@mmasnick You can consider me a twofer. My (differently named) bird site account follows you but I rarely access the site. Ethical problem: How do you unfollow someone on the bird site without making them think your account was a now-deleted bot or that bird site management is manipulating their followers?
@mmasnick my observation is they come here to dump content then get upset when it gets no traction. They don’t follow anyone so they don’t see anything interesting. They don’t get the way this works. If they followed people they’d have higher engagement and more interesting content. On Twitter follow ratio mattered to the algorithm. Here it doesn’t.
@mmasnick At the end of the day, people just need something that works and can handle the traffic of a major social media platform. Ninety-nine percent don't care whether it is a centralized or open platform.
@mmasnick
Oh I can’t wait to see what I will do
@mmasnick Thanks for the warning!
@mmasnick Does copyright expiration really depend on local time? That sounds weird. But if not, when exactly did it expire?