Such a depressing article.

Hmm. Unsurprising but all the more frustrating for it.

Fascinating read on web crawlers and robots.txt

Domain name infrastructure plays a bigger role than we might think.

Hate to see Swift taking a page out of Musk’s book here.

I don’t like Spotify, but they’re not wrong here.

C’mon Apple.

Sideloading for Americans, too, please.

I don’t get what’s missing from a world without generative AI—and examples like this don’t make me any more convinced.

Yeah, but don’t worry, this is definitely the only way that generative AI will be used to overwhelm us with useless content.

Good for Platformer.

Happy Public Domain day!

There are legitimately difficult content moderation decisions, but this is not one of them. Shame on Substack for this approach.

I think folks are right to distrust Meta, but Threads with ActivityPub seems to me to be clearly better than Threads without.

This… this is even worse than just giving him an account back. Ugh.

What the hell, Musk.

Looks like Masnick’s (and others’) predictions about Musk’s changes to Twitter are coming true. This isn’t what verification is for.

What a gross idea.

It baffles me when platforms think “oh, but we can help you see more relevant ads” is a selling point. Also, “not sharing data outside Reddit” doesn’t help either—it’s still an invasion of privacy.

Amazon is too big, and while I’m not a policy expert, I welcome government efforts to keep it in check.

Gizmodo’s owner seems way too optimistic about AI.

Even if ChatGPT could be trusted to do this task, “let’s remove books from libraries with less work” is a good example of how efficiency isn’t always a good thing.

Look, if an automated process could save human moderators from the awful work they have to do, I’d be all for it. I’m unconvinced that GPT-4 could do it, though.

I think this is two weeks in a row that I’ve shared Casey Newton’s Platformer column, but that’s because it’s two weeks in a row he’s written something important.

Casey Newton has some good insight here.

This is a welcome step, but I’m concerned it’s an empty, distracting gesture—it certainly doesn’t solve the deeper issue.

Zoom’s responses to this are meaningless, empty corporate speak. I’m not concerned about owning my content, I’m concerned about others using it while affirming my ownership. And yes, I “consent” to it in the sense that I use Zoom, but that is meaningless consent and Zoom knows it. What a garbage response.

We read Cory Doctorow’s “Unauthorized Bread” in my class on computer fundamentals, and I try to share actual examples of how tech companies going bankrupt can create actual problems like in the story. Bookmarking this for next time I teach.

It appears that Musk’s “free speech absolutism” continues to be selective and self-serving.

I read that “chronological order of Star Wars” media piece mentioned here in io9 and I was baffled by how poorly done it was (not realizing it was done by AI and wondering how an io9 writer could get things so wrong). Using AI to content farm is a terrible idea.

This is very exciting! I’m far too locked into Apple’s ecosystem to seriously consider this right now (even this post is being composed thanks to Siri Shortcuts), but I hope this does well, because I’d love to own a Fairphone one day.

C’mon Reddit.

Perhaps most interesting thing here is official comment from Reddit. It’s not quite “auto-reply with a poop emoji territory,” but it might actually be worse?

I’m glad this article points out how much unpaid work mods do to make Reddit a place people want to go. They arguably add more value to the platform than employees do, and this strikes me as a bad move.

Feels pretty sleazy to me.

I get that any platform has to pay its bills, but Huffman keeps coming off as a real jerk.