Update (9/11/23): A TikTok spokesperson told Media Matters that “WGA has been inadvertently blocked as part of the platforms’ protections against QAnon conspiracy theories.” Searches for “WGA” and related terms now appear to function normally.

take a cold shower

Well umm, that’s kinda the trick. In Phoenix in summertime, “cold” water is cold in name only. It’s more tepid than anything. That’s just another part of what makes it so oppressive living there in summer.

Yeah, this is simply how federating works, but the user experience of seeing the same thread across multiple subs, across multiple instances, does not make for a great user experience.

The other troublesome thing is that I feel like I’m spending an increasing amount of time every visit blocking little unwanted one-off communities. It was also a challenge on Reddit too, but here you’ve got the additional complication of each instance spinning up its own multiverse of madness.

Well shucks the core definition of the word “mercenary” means one who is acting out of self-interest rather than loyalty. The only thing these MFs are going to do now is look for work.

They’re paying Joe Rogan $200M to be the exclusive home of his conspiracy disinformation bullshit, and they’re more concerned about forest_stream_with_gentle_rain_3.mp3?

Kudos to them for rolling out support more widely, but it’s a bit misleading as Firefox nightly/Fennec has supported extensions for years (albeit via a cumbersome process), and Kiwi Browser is also a thing.

I can’t understand how folks out there are just rawdogging the Internet out there without ublock or at least a DNS ad filter. Admittedly, Chrome runs a hair more smoothly, but the ability to use extensions like uBlock / DarkReader / Consent-O-Matic make the Firefox experience a tier above.

I just hope this makes it possible to install the Bypass Paywalls extension again so I don’t have to hop over to Kiwi for that.

Spotify is also paying Rogan $200 million for the honor of being the exclusive platform used to spread his disinformation, which is one of the reasons I prefer to avoid it. It’s bad enough they distribute it, but the fact that my subscriber dollars would directly be funding his bullshit just sticks in my craw too much.

• YouTube test threatens to block viewers if they continue using ad blockers
• How well is uBlock Origin working for you in Chrome Mobile?
• Read up on Manifest V3. They were forced to delay Jan 2023 implementation due to outcry, but it’s still very much on their roadmap.

Are you really certain that Google is trying to eliminate adblocking is just an alarmist assumption?

I think the issue is that Google has both A) a track record of backdooring restrictions on adblocking, and B) an overwhelming motivation to do so seeing as how they generate their revenue from online advertising. They’ve forfeited the benefit of the doubt, especially when they’ve already disclosed that the whole point of the change is to enhance the profitability of online advertising:

Google’s engineers elaborate, “Websites funded by ads require proof that their users are human and not bots…Social websites need to differentiate between real user engagement and fake engagement”

So given that once implemented, this hop and this skip would just require a teensy jump in order to further restrict adblocking, it is reasonable to assume that’s within their desired goals.

Yeah, uhh we had that in the 1990s and it sucked:

Why do one thing poorly when you can do a whole bunch of different things even worse.

Ayep. It’s a clever move to get a July traffic bump to offset any losses from the unpopular API etcetera decisions. Then they can point to the overall numbers and say hey, our average visits per user actually went up after we closed the API, so this is proof our users actually love all our shitty recent decisions.

Makes sense. People are thirsty for a something along the lines of “Twitter, but fewer nazis”, so tons of people checked it out, but it still lacks feature parity with Twitter since it was a rushed-to-market MVP.

I think once it adds on a handful of new features, it’s only a matter of time before audiences gravitate to Threads over a platform whose owner is bragging about funnelling money to human traffickers.