javi

javi, 29 days ago to random

Our president (center-left in social issues, kind of economical liberal in economics) just announce he's not stepping down, after 5 days of meditating about it.

Now the right wing is furious with him because they feel he's dishonest and he should have actually stepped down for multiple reasons

The left is furious with him because he had ignore the smear campaign the right wing media has been running against every single left wing politician for a decade until now, and with this stunt he has made it all about him.

And look, the guy is a clown, and mostly a centrist which I disagree with in almost every single economic measure he has taken (or refused to take). But the reality is that if he had stepped down, we would have gone for general elections, and the chances of the right wing party teaming up with the actual fascist party to get to the government would have been extremely high.

So yeah, I'm relieved we are keeping our liberal clown president for another year, given how the alternative is having actual fascists as head of several ministries.

teknomagic, 29 days ago to random Spanish

MIS VECINOS ESTÁN CHILLANDO

javi, 1 month ago to random

And who doesn't? This is like Big Brother finals, but with the added thrill that if the handsome guy decides to step down, the fascist party gets a bunch of ministries for four years

RE: https://retro.pizza/users/teknomagic/statuses/112330903175718677

javi, 1 month ago to random

Look, USians, I don't want to step into your internal politics, but you see, 45 years ago, we spaniards had the occurrence to write in our constitution that the head of state (the king) has immunity from prosecution for anything they do while they are in the job, and now we have an ex-king with a Wikipedia page that includes a "alleged corruption" section 55 paragraphs long.

And it's only "alleged" because he can't be taken to court even with the piles of evidence that exist.

Just saying.

javi, 1 month ago to random

And you be clear of what I mean: there isn't any "non profit" reasons for a German company to stablish a non-profit entity in the US. Zero.

RE: https://journa.host/users/w7voa/statuses/112343524122689542

sesamenom, 1 month ago to random

doodling around with some fake goblin ads

javi, 1 month ago to random

also, for the comments, it looks like telegram is editing the posts.. .but they haven't edit the spanish version yet:

Also, that mocked phone number has a hell of a prefix, too.

RE: https://plush.city/users/PsyChuan/statuses/112336464469767051

javi, 1 month ago to random

if it takes a while for you to find it, as it took to me, here:

Given how rest of the numbers are variation of 'meme number' 420, it looks highly unlikely it's just a random coincidence

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteen_Words

RE: https://plush.city/users/PsyChuan/statuses/112336464469767051

javi, 1 month ago to random

somehow, I think /cc @professionalamateur seems the thing to do with this post

RE: https://spookygirl.boo/notes/9sj5q5gyqx5k9lzw

javi, 1 month ago to random

Btw, as a citizen of a country that as recent as... [checks notes] ... five months ago, expelled three US spies for trying to infiltrate some government agencies, I find hilarious that there is a moral panic over there about the Chinese government theoretically having the chance of using TikTok for spying matters.

javi, 1 month ago to random

Btw, as a citizen of a country that as recent as... [checks notes] ... five months ago, expelled three US spies for trying to infiltrate some government agencies, I find hilarious that there is a moral panic over there about the Chinese government theoretically having the chance of using TikTok for spying matters.

javi, 1 month ago to random

Yeah , tell that to the children who, as we speak, are very much being killed by us-made bombs after being selected as targets by US-made software. Get the fuck off, murderer

javi, 1 month ago to random

One of us one of us

RE: https://goblin.band/notes/9sj5m2k2qm38qjyn

javi, 1 month ago to random

Today, Goblin had its first mini-viral post (2500 notes/interactions in 24h) and I'm very positively surprised that:

Goblin.band server worked fine all the day without getting slashdotted.

Goblin actually works fine with posts with large numbers of notes. I was pretty sure the UI was going to crap itself with any post with more than 30 reply-or-reblog, but I was wrong and everything works like a charm.

javi, 1 month ago to random

Our president sent an open letter to the country today saying that he is fed up with the discredit campaign the right wing is running against his family, and that he is going to take the next five days for reflecting about if he is going to step down to spare them the bullshit or not. He will communicate us his decision next Monday.

Everyone is WTFing extremely hard, obviously, but I'm WTFing especially because of the cliffhanger. Wtf, announcing he is going to announce if he leaves or not next Monday? The fuck is he doing? Driving up engagement? Maximizing the hype?

Is he getting ready to pivot towards a YouTuber career??

Pedro no hagas locuras que ahora en Andorra te piden el C1 de catalán para la residencia

javi, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago) to random

@fraying

I actually want the polar opposite: I want different, isolated accounts within the same platform, so I better can manage my social graphs on my own.

RE: https://xoxo.zone/users/fraying/statuses/112327690582698127

javi, 1 month ago to random

Everyone in Spain right now after reading the current news

RE: https://ohai.social/users/GIFS_of_Puppets/statuses/112325590918484438

cygnathreadbare, 1 month ago to random Spanish

Pdro por el amor de $deity, deja de convocar elecciones cada vez que te sale algo regular, que ya las últimas las sacamos por los pelos y los sondeos no indican mejoría.

javi, 1 month ago to random

The collectivization debate scene in Ken Loach's Land and Freedom is the fediverse discussing if we should shun threads or not.

(context of the scene: Spanish civil war, anarchist militias just liberated a village from the fascist army and the villagers meet to decide what to do with the lands that used to be owned by landowners)

javi, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago) to random

@thisismissem :

Fun fact! A couple of months before being shown the door of Tumblr Staff, I tried to make the case of tumblr product direction changing dramatically to consider something I thought it was crucial.

Until that point, everytime we got a big wave of new users (because of Elon doing shit, Reddit's CEO doing shit, etc), Tumblr struggled to keep most of them around for more than a few hours. That tracked with the experience of the majority of automattic management, who couldn't manage to become regular tumblr users themselves. And the consensus was that we needed to change Tumblr to make it more appealing to non-tumblr users, so it could grow, and that could lead to be sustainable, etc.

The point I tried to make is that we didn't need to make tumblr pallatable for more people, but the opposite. Some informal polling, both done by myself and others, clearly pointed at something big we were ignoring. Tumblr does EXCEPTIONALLY well among two groups of people: Queer and neurodivergent folk.

Even looking internally, at who within automattic became a regular tumblr user and who tried but failed to stick around after the acquisition, the biggest prescriptor of someone being in the first group was being either neurodivergent or queer. If you were both, basically there was a 100% chance you were on tumblr daily already.

So I wrote a internal long memo sharing the polling data, digging up numbers of people who self-identify as queer in the US and people who has been diagnosed as neurodivergent, and tried to build the case that since they were the core of the tumblr userbase already, we shouldn't try to dilute whatever made tumblr attractive to them to try to appeal to a wider audience, but the opposite: We needed to dig in and become the neurodivergent queer site for real, and try to grow by bringing in people who may already feel like tumblr was a good home for them.

What I got with that internal post? A lot of likes from queer and neurodivergent staff members and a polite "thank you for your suggestion, we'll keep you in our thoughts and prayers" from management. The CEO and COO just kept insisting that they wanted to make tumblr the home for people who loved art, and ignoring one of the most succesful posts in the history of the platform is about a pineaple and a werewolf (if you know you know).

So yeah, I'm not surprised about that poll. At all.

RE: https://hachyderm.io/users/thisismissem/statuses/112249180947189456

javi, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago) to random

offf, this story about how Google made google search into a pile of seagull shit hits me hard:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

Around the time of this story, I was living through a similar situation in my work life (on a much smaller scope, of course, WordPress.com first, Tumblr later).

Back in 2019, working on WordPress, I started finding myself, almost weekly, arguing against people who wanted to take the product we were working at and made it worse if that mean they could squeeze 0.1% more revenue from it

The 0.1% figure is not even a random number: I remember this speciffic A/B test on WordPress.com that was declared a success and shipped to 100% of the users because it increased the free-to-paid conversion by 0.1%. Soon after it was released, I found out that as a side effect, it increased the churn of free users by 20 something %,so I called for an urgent rollback and removal of the change. So I was promptly explained that we didn't care about free-users churn, because finance had calculated the average long-term value of the free users to be something like $2 per year, and the increase in conversion was bigger than what we could get from them.

Everything became about growth hacking. Everything became thinly-veiled dark patterns. In our private dev slack channels, we joked that since it was impossible to make it smaller or less conspicuous, the next thing the growth team was going to ask us to do was to make the 'free plan' button flee away from the mouse pointer when the user tried to click it. We kept making our product worse, we kept consciously crippling the cheaper versions so we could force people to move to the more expensive options.

Back then I was the lead of one of the two dev divisions working on WordPress.com, so my job was mainly to discuss what we were going to be doing, when and how. And I was getting drained by a constant state of fight against a constant wave of shit they wanted us to build. So much than by the end of 2020, the CEO quietly told me to follow the growth team plans and shut up or step down.

So I requested to move to tumblr, because I thought the pastures were greener over there. But it was all the same: Adding login walls to what we were pretending to be "the last bastion of the free internet", cramping in embarrasingly obvious money-making schemes disguised as features, and making them silently opt-out instead of opt-in so the less people the possible would deactivate them, having to fend off the pressure from the CEO to make everything algorithmic timelines because, you know, tiktok makes a lot of money and why aren't we, etc etc.

I found myself in a place where building something good that people enjoy using was no longer a priority, but tricking people into generating more money for the company was. And when I looked around me, I could see that happening everywhere else, not only in my company. Experiencing the start of the enshittification years from inside wasn't easy.

And, as in the article, the people who decided to turn the shit-metter up to 200%, have a name, in every case. And these people, no matter if they are called Sundar and Prabhakar or Matt and Mark, are destroying the internet. These people are milllionaires, or billionaries, and are destroying our shared, common spaces to squeeze some extra cash from us.

That's why the fediverse and its principles are important. Because that's how we take back internet from their dirty hands. That's how we make internet resilient against them. That's how we build the commons.