I hate hate HATE that when huge companies make dumb, short-sighted decisions and then lay off people they don’t give a shit about and think of as interchangeable parts, those same people are then forced to go on social media to talk about how their “role has been impacted” and how grateful they are for all the wonderful experiences they have been granted by their former employers.

To be clear, I am not criticizing anyone for making these sorts of posts. We all do what I have to do to get by, and it makes sense not to burn any bridges.

🔗 [the writer type: I deny that I’m in an echo chamber, and so do the voices.](http://thewritertype.blogspot.com/2024/09/i-deny-that-im-in-echo- chamber-and-so.html?m=1):

The stark truth is that far from cocooning us, social media exposes us to a wide variety of previously unencountered people and opinions. These people are invariably weird, and their opinions are horrible. What pundits fail to take into account – but is obvious to normal people – is that it’s nice to be in a bubble. It’s only natural to view those who don’t share your beliefs as intellectually defective and morally degenerate, and to avoid them at all costs. Who wants to spend time arguing with a bunch of idiots?

🔗 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.