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anildash Profile picture
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30 Sep, 4 tweets, 2 min read
There’s an undersung, but radical, shift happening very quickly: millions of people are evading large parts of the surveillance-based tracking systems that power today’s ad networks. It’s one of the biggest wins in decades for regular users’ privacy. anildash.com/2021/09/30/pry…
Thanks to @robinberjon for a smart articulation of this context, which was a leaping-off point for my thinking here. (Do read the thoughtful replies there, especially concerns about lock-in to email or password vendors.)
There’s also a connection to @chrislhayes astute observations in the New Yorker on how we’re all famous now; we can learn a lot in the parallels between being always-visible on social media and always-tracked by ad platforms. newyorker.com/news/essay/on-…
Finally, I referenced this piece where I talked about how “we’re all celebrities now” and advocated for how we take control of our identities online. It’s from 2002. anildash.com/2002/12/17/pri…

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More from @anildash

anildash Profile picture
30 Sep
This is way more steps than picking an image from your photo album. Also, I could create an actual original work from scratch myself and it wouldn’t get the little badge but a smudge of pixels gets badged if it is verifiably wasting resources on a proof of work blockchain? Hmm.
If the purpose is to prop up the NFT or crypto markets, then just say that. I don’t know what institutional investors are going to believe that’s the best way to increase Twitter’s value, but there must be some I guess. But this is optimized for speculators, not creators.
Here’s the thing — any image can be saved & uploaded to your profile. If your goal is to show off the art, that’s done. But this is a design intended to coerce & reward linking a crypto wallet to a Twitter account. That is in direct tension with Twitter’s platform health efforts.
Read 4 tweets
anildash Profile picture
23 Sep
Oh, this is a good one, even if you're not a coder. Today on @Glitch, we're launching Playlists — for apps! blog.glitch.com/post/introduci… Now creating and curating a list of apps on Glitch is as easy, and rewarding, as making a mixtape for a friend...
What we've seen so far is that it's super handy for things like a teacher giving a playlist of example coding projects to their class, or companies that have an API showing off great demos to their dev communities.
Y'all know I love tweeting about art projects that Glitch users make, and this makes it easy to collect and share a set of apps; there's even a gallery view to let you click through a list of apps — just click the Play button on any app in a playlist. ▶️
Read 5 tweets
anildash Profile picture
23 Sep
Wonderful documentation of the death of hierarchical file systems for users.
Folders are for boomers.
I’ll write it up fully later, but I was training people on folders when Windows 95 came out & made the metaphor mainstream. Users absolutely *hated* the idea that you could infinitely nest folders, and that they sat on your desktop (next to a trash can?!) but couldn’t be stacked.
Read 4 tweets
anildash Profile picture
17 Sep
This is absolutely brilliant. ⁦@playablequotes⁩ lets you reference any moment in a GameBoy game with real, live playable code. It’s like a YouTube video that you can embed or cue it to a particular point, but with a game instead of a video. joel.franusic.com/playable_quote…
The way it was made is fascinating; of course the part that jumped out to me: “@jf started by loading the GitHub repository for GameBoy-Online into @Glitch and directly making some edits. To his surprise, it was actually pretty easy to get one of our … Playable Quotes to work.”
You can check out the app for yourself at glitch.com/~tenmile and because it’s on Glitch, you can remix it or dig into the code to learn how it works.
Read 4 tweets
anildash Profile picture
13 Sep
Financial press is so bought in to crypto scams that they'll just run straight up lies now, and then update with an "ummm, we're still looking into it" message later. One big reason we need stronger regulation is because the journalistic checks & balances are non-existent.
Truly, not even the slightest interest in anything except pandering to crypto enthusiasts who are always looking for the greater fool.
The crypto insider take is "silly mainstream media doesn't realize Walmart would never pick that coin, they'd pick... this other cryptocurrency I own more of!" The issue is that the entire community's norms are broken, scams are rife, and exploitation is assumed.
Read 4 tweets
anildash Profile picture
10 Sep
When called in front of congress 3 years ago, Zuck tried to play-act accountability by saying they’d share key data with researchers. But FB made a fundamental error in gathering that data. nytimes.com/live/2020/2020… Since then all the links to the original announcement are dead.
Either Facebook is too incompetent internally to share the data necessary to enforce a bare minimum of accountability, or Facebook is so corrupt that they undermined the data-sharing process, knowing it would be years before the truth came out. Which is it?
And either way, Facebook culture will draw the lesson that trying to share accountability data only for them criticized, so they should even *try* to be accountable in the future. They’ll see any work with credible researchers as a PR risk.
Read 4 tweets

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