Email or username:

Password:

Forgot your password?
10 posts total
Joan Westenberg

You don't get to talk about the creator economy if you spend more money on your Spotify subscription a year than you spend supporting individual creators.

And yes, I do make the fucking rules.

Show previous comments
TassieDi

@Daojoan Fair enough. I recommend @Bandcamp for supporting musicians directly.

Octale

@Daojoan LOL. How about my 3 Parsec Award nominations in the category of “Best Gaming!Podcast”? (2008, 2009, 2011)

The “creator economy” did exactly what the mainstreaming of anything does: ruined something the early adopters made awesome.

The difference between me and your average creator today is that I was never arrogant enough to think of content creation as a job. Thus, I never sold out to anyone, and we never compromised our content. Ever.

Octale

@Daojoan and, for the record, the creator economy, like most created content, is total BS.

Joan Westenberg

Mozilla and Automattic really duking it out for who can lose decades of community goodwill the fastest

Joan Westenberg

I made a free Zine called I miss the internet.

And for weeks, I’ve been fielding people who are mad that they have to sign up for my mailing list - again, for free - to download it.

As a creator, if you charge for your work, people ask why it isn’t free.

If you put it behind a sign up wall, people ask why you deserve their information.

And if you just post it for any / all, you get scraped by an LLM.

But fuck it.

I’m tired.

If you want it just grab it from my Dropbox.

Show previous comments
Eugene Parnell

@Daojoan I just read it. Thank you. I feel much the same way.

Sacha Ravenda

@Daojoan Hi. I just subscribed to your mailing list. As someone who also really loved the internet of the late 90s/early 2000s, I appreciated reading your zine.

LAUREN

@Daojoan @Mrfunkedude We have got to change the way we internet. Signing up for a newsletter with an email seems like a good place to retreat. Thank you for making the effort.✊

Joan Westenberg

Xbox laying off 2,000 workers because "the industry didn't grow enough" is obtuse at best.

And it ignores a simple economic reality even a toddler should be able to understand:

Infinite growth is a goddamn myth.

It’s the great collective delusion of capitalism.

An industry cannot grow year on year indefinitely.

At some point you run the fuck out of consumers.

If your business model is based on hand waving hypothetical growth, you’re either lying to us or you’re lying to yourself.

Show previous comments
Marc Edwards

@Daojoan Not only do I *VERY* strongly agree with you, but I think striving for infinite growth almost always destroys the good thing you have going. It’d be cool if some businesses just said “our goals are long term stability and ensuring our customers are happy”.

TAI

@Daojoan It would be nice if there were examples of what honest discussion of economic states should look like. including life cycles of a product, saturation points and decline. Growth to maturity of services to a plateau or replacement. Why not offer an alternative to the current investor directed bullshit and just the natural state of an economic situation

Chumchum Tumtum

@Daojoan especially when the percentage of the value generated through labour which the labour (who also make up the consumer market) receives decreases constantly. People can't consume the products necessary to support things if they can hardly keep a roof over their heads

Joan Westenberg

I consume 90% of the content I read online via RSS. Feedly on most platforms, read through Reader 5 on my apple devices.

It's still the single best way to read the internet.

Show previous comments
Andy

@Daojoan Same goes for me! I frequently check my Feedly subscriptions and prefer managing the info I receive. I also use @omnivore to save links and subscribe to newsletters.

Nikola Kotur

@Daojoan Feedly was awesome until they started to send weird signals. Went to Inoreader and never looked back.

uk.pcmag.com/security/146237/f

Stefano BSD Cafe (snac instance account)
@Daojoan@mastodon.social I'm using Miniflux (and FreshRSS) on a self hosted installation. No apps, just a browser.
Joan Westenberg

Being transgender is the least exciting thing about me.

I have no particular interest in discussing it.

But as long as there are people whose entire existence is built around erasing mine, I'll scream about it from the Goddamn rooftops, and nobody can shut me up.

Show previous comments
David Koff (he/him)

@Daojoan this is what it feels like for me to be Jewish right now.

Vaguely here 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈

@Daojoan before they spent so much effort trying to murder and eradicate trans people I was just chilling in my cis-passing life, and the most trans thing you got out of me was the occasional "when I were a lad" joke around cis friends who knew.

Now I'm all pride colours, being very outwardly trans because fuck you all if you want to kill my siblings.

Joan Westenberg

This statement may seem blasphemous in a society obsessed with hustle culture and endless motivation, but let me be honest — I loathe the act of working. I hate it. It doesn’t fulfil my purpose or ignite any passion within me.

Our obsession with hustle culture, this idea that our self-worth is tied to how much we achieve, is suffocating.

joanwestenberg.com/blog/i-hate

Show previous comments
Eye

@Daojoan

Absolutely this!

Wouldn't it be great to have some kind of basic income that's enough for people to get by on, and allows them to work at what they want to do, if they want to.

It'd be just as great if a UBI trial could happen in an entire country somewhere. Maybe Kenya would consider it...

(Don't suggest things like this out loud though, people will assume you're one of those pesky socialists!)

Joan Westenberg

How it feels to be a journalist in 2023

Joan Westenberg

The worst thing about online learning is that everything has become a video. Every code tutorial. Every design tutorial. Nobody actually writes out a guide anymore.

It's just "hey guys welcome to my tutorial" and watching 10 minutes of content that mostly isn't relevant...

Joan Westenberg

I shitcanned my Twitter 2 weeks ago.

Left behind 30,000 followers.

Only have 1000 here.

But I still get more traffic to my writing...

Which should tell you something about Birdchan.

Anyway, repost to support an indie transgender tech writer and journalist! ✍️🍕🏳️‍⚧️

Show previous comments
DELETED

@Daojoan
Not a whole lot of readers over there.

Jay Peach

@Daojoan BTW, do you have a blog? Your tweets about the net the way it used to be would be great as a blog post. Your instance appears to have a really limiting post length. My main account is on my own server and has a 3000 character post limit. You can really streach your thoughts with that kind of room.

Zeno

@Daojoan People tend often to confuse quantity with quality.

Go Up