🔗 I Like Sally Rooney’s Novels - The Biblioracle Recommends:

When you get down to it, every novel is something of a con job where the author is trying to put one over on the reader. We know these people don’t exist, that everything is made up, an illusion. The great thing is that it’s not a cynical con job, but a sincere one, and the first person who has to buy the illusion in the author themselves. I’m continually reminded of the absurdity that is the attempt to write a compelling novel, and I have great appreciation for those attempts, even when they don’t work on me, personally.

🔗 Social media and online video firms are conducting ‘vast surveillance’ on users, FTC finds | Technology | The Guardian:

The FTC report published on Thursday looked at the data-gathering practices of Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube, Discord, Reddit, Amazon, Snap, TikTok and Twitter/X between January 2019 and 31 December 2020. The majority of the companies’ business models incentivized tracking how people engaged with their platforms, collecting their personal data and using it to determine what content and ads users see on their feeds, the report states.

Whenever someone posts a new privacy-focused app or service they have discovered—web-search, chat, social media, etc.—my first question is “How much does it cost?”

If the answer is that it is free, my next question is “How does it make money?” If I can’t find or get an answer to that question, I don’t bother trying out the app.

This stuff costs money to build, host, and maintain, and that money has to be coming from somewhere. Either 1) there is actually some under-the-covers data- mining or ad revenue going on, 2) it is being built and maintained out of the goodness of someone’s heart, or 3) there is some nebulous plan of making it financially sustainable somewhere down the road. My experience has been that ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it’s going to end badly.

I think we need a word for that moment when you realize that the individual creator you like has turned their thing into a hustle.

It’s when the podcast you’ve been enjoying that was about a specific topic is spending more and more of their time talking about their live events and the three other shows that they’re starting up. Or when the nonfiction author who had a good book starts a podcast and a Substack and then a subscription series. Or when the cooking YouTuber starts pushing their cookbook and their nutrition plan.

There was a long discussion thread on Micro.blog this past week about the platform’s lack of “social” features such as likes and boosts, and how the community aspect of Micro.blog would be better if it had these sorts of features.

Everyone is, of course, free to like what they like and think what they think but for me, the absence of likes and similar stats-gathering functionality is a feature, not a bug.