If Netflix’s reporting on the matter is to be believed, then it’s an ironic outcome considering the wave of strongly-opinionated comments predicting the death of Netflix following the crackdown on password sharing. I guess convenience and habits really trump principles and posturing.

I agree that investors requiring demonstrable returns has played a role in this cycle. Steve Huffman is desperate to show profits ahead of Reddit’s IPO, and Musk is desperate to recoup his $44B investment in the blue bird.

However, I believe that there’s also another consideration. Many of today’s platforms started out with a somewhat idealistic intent. Jack Dorsey wanted Twitter to be an open protocol, though never quite achieved his vision. Aaron Swartz contributed to the open design of early-days Reddit. Facebook was meant as a non-profit university community builder. Google has a “do no evil” motto. Etc.

The original user-first approach of these platforms created organic growth and encouraged ambassadorship by motivated users who became frequent contributors, unpaid moderators, etc.

Over time, however, people moved on (Dorsey, or very sadly Swartz) or got greedy from success (Huffman, Zuckerberg). The focus shifted from user-first to advertiser-first. Platforms like Reddit still used a loss-leader approach of losing investor money on frills such as API because it helped sustain growth for a while longer.

But once critical mass was reached, there was no longer a need to coddle the most enthusiastic and long-time users. They had exhausted their usefulness. The platforms could finally embrace the advertiser-first model in which the user, not the content, becomes the product.

So here we are with the worst of both worlds. Reddit could have offered a reasonable paid API plan that would have allowed the thriving third-party ecosystem to retain the power users and contributors. Instead, it went all-in with a walled-garden approach buoyed only by advertising money, even if it means that the content quality dwindles. Twitter also went “private” in the sense that an account is now required to even view the content, and aggressively promotes its paid plan to users –who are still subject to interstitial ads and promoted content– even for basic hygiene features such as 2FA.

As for why Reddit, Twitter, and Discord shit the bed at almost the same time, part of it has to do with VC pressure (as mentioned by the parent), and part of it is they are the same generation (more or less) of social networks and are reaching an equivalent stage where buyout (Twitter) or IPO (Reddit) is the next logical step.

The writing is on the wall that a paradigm shift is in order. The pendulum has considerable momentum, though, and will allow the centralized, walled-garden web to thrive for a while longer, just like Facebook survives catering to mostly an audience of unsavvy boomers. But the swing back will gradually enable alternative models to grow that are based on open platforms and federated content. We’re just very, very early in this cycle.

Oh, and sorry for the long-ass essay, I got a bit carried away.

I’ve been online since circa 1993 and for the first decade or so, discoverability was a challenge due to the lack of efficient search engines like Altavista or (later) Google.

Webrings consisted in individual website owners (e.g., on Geocities) placing one or more banners at the bottom of their webpage linking to a directory of like-minded sites.

This was when “surfing the web” meant exactly that - you would surf from one site to another using hyperlinking within web communities. Bookmarking was then how you kept track of the most interesting sites you came across.

Now there is hardly a need for hyperlinking and bookmarking, since much of the content is centralized on a few platforms, and search engines take care of the discoverability of niche content.

Another voice for the Brother laser printer, a truly dependable workhorse.

I miss it too - the curated experience after years of filtering out the crap and muting the nonsense, the sleek UX in Apollo, and the many friendly and familiar voices left behind who didn’t make the switch.

My advice would be - don’t give up on the Fediverse just yet. It will take a bit of time for the dust to settle and these multiple federated communities to find their voice. Like on Reddit, don’t ever browse /all - it’s just a litany of low-effort memes. Be deliberate about which communities you sub to, and browse by /sub. There’s enough quality content here to fill a feed, though perhaps not in any single community where the critical mass has not yet been reached to offer fresh content throughout the day.

What an odd title. WorldCoin never masked its biometric collection effort as “public art”. There was never any mention of art anywhere in the white paper or anything. Art has literally nothing to do with any of what WorldCoin is doing.

The concerns about WorldCoin are absolutely genuine and worthy of public discussion, but this particular title is just clickbait from an art publication trying to draw traffic about a trendy but unrelated AI and crypto topic.

I think I speak for most of the world when I say “Netflix still does DVDs??”

I mean, you literally do, because that service apparently only existed in the US.

It’s not just the loss of brain white matter and myelin with age, it’s also the “generational thinking” that the parent eluded to at the end of their post.

The world has changed radically from the time that you (or I) went through our formative years. We may still perform cognitively, but eventually our software is from an obsolete and bygone era, and we must admit that we’re just not in tune with the more contemporary zeitgeist.

It happens with every generation. Science has a saying for it: that it progresses one funeral at a time, because established ideas must physically die with their owners to make space for disruptive thinking.

Henry Ford used to disallow “beat practices” in his factories because he wanted new guys to repeat the same failed ideas and experiments that had been tried before, without being discouraged to do so. The practical reason is that the world changes, and things that were brushed off as not working some 20 years ago can suddenly start working due to a context change.

A generation lasts 20–30 years, and yet in politics it lasts 40–60 years. Those dinosaurs in politics have no actual grasp of how the rest of the world has evolved around them. They don’t understand tech, or climate issues, or academic inflation, etc. They still apply recipes from a bygone era in which they were actually skillful and successful policymakers, but that era ended long ago.

I thought today (July 5) might be the day we break $2K, but we didn’t and we seem to be receding right now.

Which leads me to ask, having lost sight of the /r/ethfinance pulse:

What’s this community’s sentiment with regard to the next few months? Are we still stuck in a foreseeably long bear? Are we at the cusp of a crypto spring? Are there trigger points (such as the Blackrock ETF’s approval, or the XRP verdict) that you think must happen before this is even decidable?

spez: thank you for the replies. I love that among four replies, one says surge up, one says crab sideways, and one says drop back down to the local low.

Le pire, ce sont les sites qui tronquent silencieusement les mots de passe trop longs au lieu de les rejeter…

They’re still encased in polymer. “Soluboard printed circuit boards need to be immersed in 90°C water (close to boiling point) for 30 minutes for the product to delaminate”, according to the CEO. I don’t imagine it will just melt/degrade slowly in a very short time span simply because of environmental heat and humidity.

Thanks for creating a weekly. I posted earlier about the ratio in a standalone post because there was no daily available. Happy to hear reactions here instead!

I’m looking forward to Apollo’s sister stealing the show!

A year ago, a hacker exploited CremaFinance’s Solana flash-loan smart contract for $9M which he then converted to ETH and XMR.

Today, the U.S. DOJ announced the capture in New York of the hacker who left enough breadcrumbs to get caught despite using TornadoCash to launder the proceeds of the hack.

The hacker is a NYC-based “senior security engineer at an international technology company” with expertise in blockchain and smart contract security audits. Looking up his name returns a senior security engineer working at Amazon in NYC. He is facing up to two 20-year sentences.

Oh, and he was arrested by Homeland Security special agent Chad.

Like many others here, I’ve nuked 10+ years of Reddit posts and comments. I have not deleted my account, however, as I worry about Reddit resuscitating my posts against my will, as has happened to others.

I feel genuine sadness at turning the Reddit page, and removing Apollo from my device. I’ve learned a lot from Reddit, including much of what I know now about crypto. On the upside, I will take this as an opportunity to improve my daily habits by spending less time mindlessly doomscrolling, and being more cautious about the risk of doxxing. My contributions to the fediverse will also be more deliberate, meaningful, and targeted. And, I snatched a prized username!

I look forward to being part of this community.

Intel is discontinuing its NUC line, after stopping its investments in the SSD/NVMe line in 2020. This is a loss for stakers who enjoyed Intel’s NUCs for their price/performance ratio. There are alternative OEMs of course - though Intel pioneered the form factor.

It feels a little weird to me that we can manually upvote our own comments and posts on kbin.

Reddit would automatically set them at +1 because it’s implied that the author would want to upvote their own contributions, and it’s one less hassle if it’s done automatically.

Alternatively, new posts and comments can start at 0, but then I feel like authors should not be able to upvote their own contributions.

Suck it Karl Popper!

Just because he called it an apparent paradox doesn’t mean that Popper disagrees with you. He merely said that open societies should first fight intolerance with reason and civil discourse; but if that fails, the tolerant majority should hold the right to suppress intolerant opinions.

In the US, perhaps. But the logic that “if you work at a Catholic school you gotta do their shit” is precisely the problem here, and what needs to change. In many other countries, a contract is unenforceable if it contains discriminatory terms. The onus ought to be on religious schools to adapt to contemporary societal norms if they want to engage with society through labor, procurement, etc contracts. Otherwise we’re just tolerating and perpetuating little islands of discrimination and bigotry in the name of religious freedom.

I used https://redact.dev/ and it worked very well.