Is there a list anywhere of which organisations are paying for Twitter gold ticks? (The ones that cost 1k+ per month.) I've only seen a couple, it would be interesting to have a list to... you know... "engage with".
@tomw yep just like Musk, every other day he gets twitter back on the news with some comically bad decision but it keeps people taking about twitter rather than other social media 😏 he recently claimed engagement is highest ever during these times as it reminds folk to open the app and watch the car wreck unfold. Trumps used a similar playbook throughout his career.
@tomw Often, but not always, these database systems are designed with the hope that they'll work in many different countries (with different addressing systems) if there's "enough" fields.
Then when people DO write UK-specific systems, they just copy what they saw elsewhere (CS class, StackOverflow, some other application...) and you end up with all these "address lines" again.
@dan Yeah – worse, you see UK as a thin translation layer (at best) for what is "zip codes" etc internally, and does some completely wrong things. Like Nationbuilder stripping leading zeroes from phone numbers, which I bet it does to this day.
Spare me the people looking at Bluesky and going "well it has these interesting features", as if you can evaluate such a thing technically and not socially.
You can't trust this platform, even with that little sheen of "it's actually a protocol". It's far too easy for them to add something terrible at any time.
It probably won't be crypto since that has died down, so my money would be on some awful AI thing.
@mikesheldon Hey, good to have! I bet there's something interesting in there. (I don't think I've ever put anything into a tarball, only taken stuff out.)
AI moderation of human writing and speech will cause it to gradually evolve into a form designed to be as difficult for machines to decode as possible.
Think: little sound effects, hand gestures, complex social codes to indicate that you mean the opposite of something said.
Use (a fraction of) the cash to make a new Twitter - Bluesky's main vibe is "the ground-up rewrite of the whole project that programmers always wish they could do"
(Optional) Buy back ruins of Twitter later and switch it to Bluesky's system
I can see this working. I also don't see why any of us would want to help them. The best outcome would be persuading/shaming them into federating with ActivityPub.
@tomw
I still think Twitter will end up with Automattic or Oath eventually, but it will depend how much value is left when it comes to that (and it might be a few owners away yet).
Any new technology starts with a built-in advantage over its critics.
NFTs were obviously, comically useless and they still pulled lots of people along because hey, it's new, it's technology, you can't just dismiss it. It took a lot of focus on the harm, especially energy use, to overcome this.
AI on the other hand produces at least superficially useful results, and the problems are real but a bit harder to pin down: cases of bias, spam polluting the web, semi-plagarism. It's an uphill battle.
It is annoying that every time Mastodon is made a little bit easier to use, you get these viral posts from high-follower accounts about "threat to the fediverse!!!"
Yes, choosing a server isn't the biggest barrier in the world. But from where I'm sitting, the problem is that many people hesitate for a long time at that step and so never sign up.
You're not helping the health of the fediverse overall by fighting pitched battles against every small UX feature.
The obvious problem of loudly screaming about how Mastodon sign-up should work is that we are only hearing the people who already signed up, and not the people who gave up because it was too complicated.
@tomw also, the messaging that "it doesn't matter which one you pick, you can always move to a different one!" is horribly misleading, on top of the already overwhelming number of choices.
Now that birdsite (real) blue ticks are gone, can we quietly agree that they were a terrible idea, and shouldn't be added to future systems?
Impersonation was a real problem, but the answer to it ended up being to create a status symbol that people craved, mostly not for the purpose of avoiding impersonation, but as validation of their own notability. A lot of nonsense ensued.
@tomw I don’t disagree but wondering how to verify authenticity without creating castes. Additionally, it was nice to know who might be an expert and who was a clown. Funny that now you can spot all the clowns a mile away.