“Bluesky opens up to the world – but can anything really replace Twitter?” – Alex Hern (TechScape, Guardian)

“Threads is massive, but its user base is lurkers and influencers. Like being in the audience of a Marvel movie, you may consume some professionally produced content, but you’re certainly not going to form any lasting memories. For the past year, Bluesky has been pure posters, locked in a room with each other, deprived of much of the dopamine that they need to maintain their frenetic energy. And Mastodon is a community of commenters and reply guys, decentralised to the point that it’s possible to have a nice chat, but difficult to discern a conversation arising from within”

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/feb/13/bluesky-twitter-jack-dorsey-social-network

“The people who ruined the internet” – Amanda Chicago Lewis (The Verge)

“the reality is that most people running a company will break whatever rules they are able to get away with breaking. While Ray herself said she has left behind the guideline-violating tactics of her past, choosing instead to do as Google asks and make high-quality websites that will “make the internet a better place,” as she put it, that kind of moral standard can be a lot to ask of someone running a business.

“They want this wholesome thing, and I can understand that. That’d be neat,” said an SEO named Cade Lee. “But that’s maybe in a world where we don’t have money and greed and things, you know?”

https://www.theverge.com/features/23931789/seo-search-engine-optimization-experts-google-results

“Raging Bill” – Reeves Wiedeman (Intelligencer)

“Ackman’s senior thesis, submitted in 1988, looked at how admissions quotas to limit the Jewish student population in the 1920s echoed what some saw as the unfair treatment of Asian Americans in the ’80s. Ackman concluded that Harvard was admitting more students from other minority groups simply because “it has been pressured to do so.” He also critiqued the idea that the university was primarily a place for the transfer of knowledge. The real purpose of a university, in a capitalist society, was “to distribute privilege,” Ackman wrote. “The question, ‘Who should go to college?’ should perhaps more appropriately become ‘Who is going to manage society?’”

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/bill-ackman-war-harvard-mit-dei-claudine-gay.html

“February 11, 2024” – Letters from an American

“Lincoln saw clearly that if we give up the principle of equality before the law, we have given up the whole game. We have admitted the principle that people are unequal and that some people are better than others. Once we have replaced the principle of equality with the idea that humans are unequal, we have granted approval to the idea of rulers and ruled. At that point, all any of us can do is to hope that no one in power decides that we belong in one of the lesser groups”

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-11-2024

“We need to talk about digital ownership” – Molly White (Citation Needed)

“The topic of resale is also more complex. If you buy a movie as a physical DVD and then decide you’re finished with it, it’s perfectly legal to resell it as long as you don’t make copies. If you buy a movie as a digital download or as an item in your online library, it’s much more complicated, but resale is generally prohibited. Do you own something if you can’t resell it?”

https://www.citationneeded.news/we-need-to-talk-about-digital-ownership/

“The Great Fiction of AI” – Josh Dzieza (The Verge)

“The second thing I realized is that it might not be such a bad thing to have to apply a Turing test to everything I read, particularly in the more commercialized marketing-driven corners of the internet where AI text is most often deployed. The questions it made me ask were the sorts of questions I should be asking anyway: is this supported by facts, internally consistent, and original, or is it coasting on pleasant-sounding language and rehashing conventional wisdom?; how much human writing meets that standard?; how often am I reading with enough attention to notice? If this is the epistemic crisis AI-generated text is going to bring, maybe it’s a healthy one”

https://www.theverge.com/c/23194235/ai-fiction-writing-amazon-kindle-sudowrite-jasper

“The Age Gappers They say they’re happy. Why is it so hard to believe them?” – Lila Shapiro (The Cut)

“As Gloria Steinem once put it, “If feminism means anything, it means taking responsibility for ourselves. It is not ‘women as victims’ but women refusing to be victims.” The revelations of Me Too undercut that logic, showing that powerful men, protected by the institutions they dominated, could harm even the most capable and intelligent women. Age-gap discourse, which is aimed primarily at older men dating younger women, grew out of that movement’s concern with power differentials and with coercion and consent. But it also sits at odds with Me Too’s core ethos — “Believe women” — by raising an outcry on behalf of women who, by all available public accounts, have no complaints about their relationships. Even if they say they are happy, the age-gap critics don’t believe them”

https://www.thecut.com/article/age-gap-relationships-couples.html

“Japan’s SmartNews was growing fast in the U.S. What went wrong?” – Andrew Deck (RestOfWorld)

“SmartNews also instituted an annual company road trip as part of this project. Employees, often accompanied by Suzuki himself, would drive through political swing states across the American Rust Belt and the South to interview SmartNews users, local voters, and politicians. The company’s most recent road trip in the fall of 2022 brought members of the marketing team to Atlanta, Georgia, ahead of the state’s midterm elections.

The trips often included visits to rallies for Donald Trump, multiple employees said. “Why would I want to give up one week of my life showing some guy from Tokyo around a Trump rally?” recalled one employee who declined an invitation to join the road trip in 2020. “The whole premise of the idea was very bizarre.”

https://restofworld.org/2023/smartnews-japan-unicorn-layoffs-media/

“The Collapse of Hollywood” – Development Hell

“Everyone is trying to sell this thing you’ve created to the next person in line, that’s how the industry works. At its core, it’s a sales business. Not creative. Try to get that into your head. This is not a creative industry, you didn’t read Save The Cat from cover to cover because you wanted to be David Lynch

When I left school I worked in sales for a couple of years, and I learned one very valuable lesson; most sales people don’t relish a challenge. They would far rather you gave them something easy to sell, something that sells itself. “We’d be more comfortable selling this movie if you had Tom Cruise attached”. Sure, I get that. But if I had Tom Cruise, I could sell the fucking thing myself – how about you try earning your commission?”

https://developmenthell.substack.com/p/the-collapse-of-hollywood