無頼漢チェダー @goo_hori@fedibird.com

賃貸アパートで密かに制作されたアート王国が文化財に
https://www.cnn.co.jp/style/arts/35217753.html?ref=rss
#cnn #CNN #ニュース #ワールド #アジア #ヨーロッパ #アフリカ #太平洋 #大西洋

Frankie getting his Sunday bath 😸🐾 #CatsOfMastodon #MastoCats #FediCats #Cats #TheHardyBoyCats

#SilentSunday

Visited the Jurassic Jamboree in Drumheller today as we attempted to set a world record for most inflatable Dinos gathered.

Unofficial tally is around 3000, which blows out the old record like a meteor hitting the Yucatan.

How was your Saturday?

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.

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.

Bloomberg：AppleのAR統括責任者Frank Casanova氏が退職
https://www.macotakara.jp/news/entry-46591.html
#macotakara #Apple_iPhone_iPad_Mac

Air alert covering the whole of #Ukraine

08:30 Kyiv time, stay safe.

russia is a Terrorist State

何か気になる→調べようとスマホ取り出す→マストドンひらく→何調べようとしたか忘れる
のムーブが板についてきた

Time for another look back to four years ago for #ThrowbackThursday

The kittens were getting the hang of their legs, both for propulsion and aggression.

Sumie would flip between being one of the kittens and being their second mother.

#Cats #Kittens #CatsOfMastodon #FediCats

NTDC

(National Turtle Diving Championships)

#turtles #nature

#NeilYoung & crazy horse open their tour last night in #SanDiego with a 15-minute "cortez the killer" with lost verse. https://www.youtube.com/watch?si=g5yU8vnF1M_YfSID&v=atf1IkUh8kM&feature=youtu.be
full setlist: https://sugarmtn.org/sm_show.php?show=202404240

Thank you, #America for the vote in favour of giving @Ukraine the $60.8bn military aid package.

Vote 311-112 (What were the 112 thinking!!!!)

Real action now required to make up for lost time.

*Take profits while you can, AI boosters