Last Thursday, I listened to a recent episode of The Vergecast during my morning bike commute. The episode featured Paul Ford talking about his recent experience with Claude Code, and I was genuinely surprised to find some of his comments resonating with me. It helped that Ford wasn’t uncritical about AI (though certainly not as critical as I would have been), but some of it was just that I recognized some of the thrill that he was describing of using tools and resources to learn how to solve a problem. In fact, I found that thrill so contagious that a passing comment he made got me to spend some time once I got to the office converting my Twitter archive into a CSV that I could finally import it into the Day One journaling app that I use.

Brb, nearly doubling the number of my entries in the Day One journaling app by importing a partial archive of all my tweets.

Holy crap, these numbers. This passage really stood out:

“This is industrial-scale abuse of women and girls,” said Imran Ahmed, the chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which conducts research on online hate and disinformation. “There have been nudifying tools, but they have never had the distribution, ease of use or the integration into a large platform that Elon Musk did with Grok.”

Grok continues to disgust.

This is a very cathartic read.

What a disaster.

For over 7 years now, I’ve been using the Day One app on iOS and macOS to keep my journal. Journaling has been important to me since I was a teenager, and being able to do it on a phone or a computer just makes it more likely that it’s going to happen. My dependence on Day One isn’t without issues: I’ve gotten warier of Automattic over the past couple of years, I’d like to one day extricate myself from the Apple ecosystem altogether, and I do think that there’s something I miss by typing rather than handwriting my journal entries. Nonetheless, it’s a good app, and I’m not likely to jump ship until I’ve finished digitizing all of my older journals and memorabilia so that I can have some PDF, Markdown, and JSON exports of all of my journals to convert into something more homebrew and platform-independent.

This provides some helpful context, including confirming my suspicion that Twitter!Grok works differently than Base!Grok when it comes to these weird episodes.

The “You do not blindly defer to mainstream authority or media” system prompt is raising questions already answered by the system prompt. Also, lol that they have to explicitly tell Grok not to call it “Twitter.”

Oh look, it’s all my least favorite things about tech right now, combined in a single, enraging story.

Good—if depressing—article.

One more thing right out of the Twitter playbook from DOGE: Firing people without understanding how important they are.

Lots of bad things are happening right now, but this one stands out. There’s no good reason for this except to make Musk happy.

If current events continue to echo the Twitter takeover, we’re about a year out from Elon Musk telling a gathering of world leaders to go fuck themselves for not supporting his agenda.

Masnick pulls no punches.

Oh, he really is doing this like he did Twitter. That was a nightmare by itself.

Bookmarking as yet another example of Elon Musk’s free speech reputation being undeserved.

Putting together a reading list for a class on social media research reminds me how much writing on this serves as an unintentional history. I don’t know if any of this chapter on FB and Twitter APIs is still relevant, but that alone may be worth reading it for…

Post election is a great time to realize the dangers that KOSA poses.

Some good points in here about how “shareholder value” can lead to bad decisions.

This is an important take, and I appreciate that the article concludes with a reminder that indie is the answer as we move forward with the social web.

Love these digs at Twitter in the Kickstarter video for Mike Masnick’s new card game.

Back in 2020-2021, I made the decision to pivot from Twitter as a research site in case data ever became less available—and so I could focus more on right-wing online spaces. It was a good call but still hilariously mistaken at the same time.

It’s now been over two years since I ditched Twitter, and I recently made the decision to go ahead and outright delete the account rather than leave it there to ward off imposters. It’s been really interesting to explore the new landscape of social media during this time, and I wanted to put together a post with some of my current thoughts.

I’m on Bluesky now, I guess?

First, I set up a Bluesky account a number of weeks ago, and I’ve been following other Bluesky accounts for a while (first via RSS, now via the Reeder app alongside RSS), but I’ve finally started actually using it since the election, which seems to be sparking some new interest in ditching Twitter. I’m especially happy that Mormon Twitter seems to be re-emerging on Bluesky, since that’s one of the things that I’ve missed the most. I also think a lot of Bluesky features (domain name-based handles, starter packs, better trust and safety features) are neat!

Wild to read this so soon after finishing Character Limit, because I’m getting very similar vibes.