Permanently Deleted
I wouldn't be surprised - they have plenty of money to pay someone to keep that page clean.
I also found out after this post that they're in the active process of acquiring Simon and Schuster. Cory Doctorow (aka @pluralistic) has a great writeup on them here.
Interesting. Looks like it can't do character development whatsoever, and the story is basically a novel summation, not an actual story. There's also no plot twists, or scientific explanation of the technology. This is what I'd expect from a moderately talented 10 year old.
You're right, and one of the reasons I decided to start a community here was because @ernest has done a fantastic job laying out the plans for scale at kbin (both the instance and the platform as a whole) thus far - detail here. Thus far he's the only instance owner I've seen with a real roadmap, and actively applying for grant funding to cover scaling costs. It's good to see - kbin is definitely his baby and he takes great care of it.
Regarding other small kbin instances, you might look at kglitch.social. @kglitch has made some frontend changes that bring it more in line with Mastodon and Lemmy, and I haven't seen an outage yet.
Goddamn it. I knew my Tardis was malfunctioning after that last crash into the #BBC. Apologies everyone - gotta flush the quantum improbability matrix again before I untangle the timelines. By the way, if anyone happens to spot a thylacine with a spiked collar roaming around London, please let me know. He answers to the name of Cryptodile Dundee and likes kangaroo niblets.
Been on kbin.social for a month and it's been pretty solid. Note it's a different platform than lemmy (designed to read both lemmy and mastodon), but does a great job posting to and handling the content from lemmy platforms. There's growing pains here too, but the uptime has been good.
Excellent article that really looks at the history of antitrust law and draws a pretty spot-on analysis of the current case, and how the presiding judge, Amit Mehta, compares to Harold Greene, who broke up AT&T:
There is also a loss of faith in American institutions writ broadly, which differs from the 1980s. At the same time as he’s been dealing with Google, Mehta is presiding over trials of January 6th perpetrators, a showcase of the deep fissures that simply did not exist decades earlier. One result is that the politics of corporate power is very different, and that antitrust is on a generational and bipartisan upswing. (Indeed, Trump’s Attorney General Bill Barr brought the case, Biden’s antitrust chief, Jonathan Kanter, is continuing it.)
The net effect is that Mehta is an important actor here, but not as important as Greene. The case is likely to be appealed, probably all the way to the Supreme Court. And if the Supreme Court erodes antitrust caselaw against Google, then Congress will be confronted with the reality that it is hard to use the existing antitrust laws to address big tech. But ultimately if no cases against dominant firms succeed, then eventually Congress will change the law. Moreover, this case isn’t a one-off; the environment is less like AT&T in 1982, or even Microsoft in 1998, and more like that of the turn of the 19th century, when Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson brought dozens of cases against dominant firms. This is one chapter in the fight over corporate power, but not the only one.
I think the author is being a bit too hopeful here that Congress will enact stronger anti-trust legislation if the case fails, but he's likely right about this eventually ending up in front of the Supreme Court.
No more Githankypanky?
Serious question for the authors reading this - if there was a non-exclusive Fediverse e-commerce alternative to self-publishing on Amazon (including print on demand), would you use it?
Second question - what features would you like to see to make it fly? Dream big here - I'd love to hear all your ideas.
Third question - besides the topic of the article above, what does Amazon do wrong for authors? I've got a fair idea, but I really want to hear your thoughts and personal experiences.
I agree - the Mastodon platform, while much better than Twitter, still makes it difficult to find good communities, and a lot of the ragebait gets pushed to the top due to engagement. It takes some active curation of your feed to make it worthwhile.
I recommend using Kbin. It reads both Lemmy and Mastodon, and can classify Mastodon toots based on tagged topic. Additionally, if you're in a community / magazine, Kbin also looks for Mastodon Toots based on moderator assigned tags to that community, and posts it in their Microblog section.
Lol - shows you how old I am. There was a point, pre-Digg and pre-Reddit, where Slashdot was the premiere news aggregation site (circa 2000 - 2004) followed closely by Fark.com as the premiere shitposting site... mainly because they were the first to use the post/commentary style that made Reddit and Digg so popular. Slashdot didn't aspire to this point of prominence - they simply assumed it because there was nothing else out there at the time that was as good.
You're correct that when Reddit and Digg came on the scene, they pretty much erased the concept of Slashdot or Fark being the "frontpage of the internet". Neither site died, as you note, and Slashdot in particular continued to maintain an active community that persists to this day by keeping their content tech-focused and not fucking with the user experience that made them popular in the first place.
I chose Fark and Slashdot as examples because I think unlike Digg (which just completely collapsed), I do see Reddit communities persisting in a similar reduced form.
Let's call out the particular global investment vampire in this story, KKR - Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, because it's the Count Dracula of hedge funds, and also the company that killed Toys 'R' Us:
This whole thing smelled like enshittification to me, so I kept digging, this time into OverDrive itself. Right away I saw that in June 2020, OverDrive was sold to global investment firm KKR.
With that sentence, my audience just divided into two types of people
- the ones who (like me, usually) pay no particular attention to the world of “high finance”, don’t recognize the moniker, and so had zero reaction,
and
- the ones like my friend who happens to be a business journalist at the New York Times, whose reaction as soon as I said “KKR” was the aural equivalent of the Munch scream.
The private equity firm of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, I quickly learned, was either the inventor of, or an early pioneer in, basically all the Shitty Business Practices: leveraged buyouts, corporate raiding, vulture capitalism. They’ve been at it since the 1970s and they’re still going strong.
Even in the world of investment capital, where evil is arguably banal, KKR is notoriously vile.
KKR was the subject of the famous 1989 book (and subsequent movie) Barbarians at the Gate, in which a pair of investigative journalists from the Wall Street Journal detail what one Times reviewer called the “avarice, malice, and egomania” of KKR’s leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco with “all the suspense of a first-rate thriller”. The ultimate result: KKR’s private equity barons raked in the cash, while thousands of employees were axed and consumer prices of RJR Nabisco products soared.
More recently, KKR teamed up with two other private equity firms to execute a leveraged buyout of Toys ‘R’ Us. They deliberately weighted down the company with a crushing level of debt in order to begin feeding on its profits; they sucked out half a billion dollars as the company staggered along for another dozen years. When Toys ‘R’ Us finally collapsed and died in 2018, the vultures flapped off, unconcerned, leaving 33,000 desperate workers unemployed and without severance.
Even in the world of investment capital, where evil is arguably banal, KKR is notoriously vile. They are the World Champions of Grabbing All The Money And Leaving Everyone Else In The Shit.
...and now it's come for your local library.
Agreed - I think that the trend was in play already. The protests tapped into it and definitely accelerated it, but the decline in the quality of posting and commentary has been steadily increasing since 2015. I personally mark the sudden popularity of TheDonald as the point at which the community started to die - the influx of Russian trolls, bots, and their 4chan goon squads was the beginning of the end for intelligent discussion on the site in my opinion.
I'd like to introduce the gizmodo.com writers to the term Pyrrhic victory. One look at /r/all and it's become nothing but reposts and memes that are hours, if not days old.
Reddit drove out its most important users - the moderators and content creators. They have enough old content to keep their viewership for awhile, but they'll never regain the community trust they've lost. And this will continue to kill their influx of new material, which will inevitably erode the viewer base.
Do I think reddit will die? No, it will continue on, just as have slashdot and fark and other staple communities from the same era, but the highwater mark of the community as the "front page of the internet" is long past.
NSFW Removed
https://sattaking01.in/
Jump
Holy wall of text, batman!
Line breaks, my man - readability is key to getting your message across. This is an interesting topic, but it's lost due to the formatting.
Ok, but if you don't return them this time I'm sending your ass to collections.
Holy shit, this is beyond fucking vile:
After all, he had years of practice writing about eugenics as Richard Hoste, advocating for precisely those types of policies.
“The maintenance of the quality of the population requires not just a stable population at all levels but the active weeding out of the unfit,” Hoste wrote in 2011 for Counter-Currents, the white supremacist site.
“There is no rational reason,” he wrote, “why eugenics can’t capture the hearts and minds of policy makers the way it did 100 years ago.”
To make matters worse:
Hanania has his own podcast, too, interviewing the likes of Steven Pinker, the famous Harvard cognitive psychologist, and Marc Andreessen, the billionaire software engineer. Another billionaire, Elon Musk, reads Hanania’s articles and replies approvingly to his tweets. A third billionaire, Peter Thiel, provided a blurb to promote Hanania’s book, “The Origins of Woke,” which HarperCollins plans to publish this September. In October, Hanania is scheduled to deliver a lecture at Stanford.
For those you wanting to make a statement regarding publishing and promoting Nazi filth, here's the link to contact the Stanford Ombudsman, the Harvard Ombdusman and here's the contact info for Harper Collins Publishing:
ADDRESS
HarperCollins Publishers
195 Broadway
New York, NY 10007
HARPERCOLLINS RECEPTIONIST
212-207-7000
HARPERCOLLINS CUSTOMER SERVICE
800-242-7737
Make sure they know exactly who they're promoting and supporting, and that we know it now, too.
Don't bother talking to Musk or Thiel, they'll take it as encouragement.
They committed treason for less than $15k a pop. This indicates to me that either the CCP was threatening their family members in China, or that they're just dumb as rocks.
While this seems evident on its face, there's good reason to draw attention to what's happening here. This isn't just his lawyers scrambling for a defense, this is a coordinated media effort to define the narrative that's being actively pushed through the alt-right media (please use protective gear when viewing that link if you're sensitive to bullshit). They're using the indictments to claim the Dems are weaponizing government against Trump for political reasons, then conflating the charges to treason, and then further claiming that the Dems are trying to send him to the chair for sedition.
Regardless of whether or not you think that possible outcome is fair, it's important to note how it's being used as a rallying cry to further incite the alt-right base to violence, and that this is very much a manufactured narrative push supported by multiple media outlets. I'm glad Vox recognized the trend and decided to stomp on it promptly.
Well, me and the cool kids are...
You get what you pay for.
Professionals get paid. Reddit has never had professional mods.