Perfect storm of misanthropy

I'm a doctor, but not the kind that helps people.

[tomundsen-deactivated20250731]

TXF 3x20

[beggars-opera]

Your honour, I admit that I do have a superiority complex over not watching Disney "live action" remakes, but in my defense, I am right

[azspot]

Google, Amazon, and Meta are making their core products worse — on purpose

Google, Amazon, Meta, and other big tech companies are making their core products worse and ruining everything from apps to the internet.

In recent years, Google users have developed one very specific complaint about the ubiquitous search engine: They can’t find any answers. A simple search for “best pc for gaming” leads to a page dominated by sponsored links rather than helpful advice on which computer to buy. Meanwhile, the actual results are chock-full of low-quality, search-engine-optimized affiliate content designed to generate money for the publisher rather than provide high-quality answers. As a result, users have resorted to work-arounds and hacks to try and find useful information among the ads and low-quality chum. In short, Google’s flagship service now sucks.

And Google isn’t the only tech giant with a slowly deteriorating core product. Facebook, a website ostensibly for finding and connecting with your friends, constantly floods users’ feeds with sponsored (or “recommended”) content, and seems to bury the things people want to see under what Facebook decides is relevant. And as journalist John Herrman wrote earlier this year, the “junkification of Amazon” has made it nearly impossible for users to find a high-quality product they want — instead diverting people to ad-riddled result pages filled with low-quality products from sellers who know how to game the system.

All of these miserable online experiences are symptoms of an insidious underlying disease: In Silicon Valley, the user’s experience has become subordinate to the company’s stock price. Google, Amazon, Meta, and other tech companies have monetized confusion, constantly testing how much they can interfere with and manipulate users. And instead of trying to meaningfully innovate and improve the useful services they provide, these companies have instead chased short-term fads or attempted to totally overhaul their businesses in a desperate attempt to win the favor of Wall Street investors. As a result, our collective online experience is getting worse — it’s harder to buy the things you want to buy, more convoluted to search for info

[sodom-hussein]

Cory Doctorow has a similar concept of enshitification:

Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

…

This is enshittification: Surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they’re locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they’re locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle.

…

Enshittification truly is how platforms die. That’s fine, actually. We don’t need eternal rulers of the internet. It’s okay for new ideas and new ways of working to emerge. The emphasis of lawmakers and policymakers shouldn’t be preserving the crepuscular senescence of dying platforms. Rather, our policy focus should be on minimizing the cost to users when these firms reach their expiry date: Enshrining rights like end-to-end would mean that no matter how autocannibalistic a zombie platform became, willing speakers and willing listeners would still connect with each other.

-Cory Doctorow. The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok (archive link)

To add to this, I believe Tumblr has evaded some of this because of it having always had a niche audience and an abundance of porn. But the first steps of enshitification on Tumblr are the 2018 porn ban and the release of Tumblr live. Let’s be loyal to the community and not to the platform.

[redpandarascal]

it does feel a little bit like being gaslit that the internet is slowly getting worse in barely perceptible ways- it’s validating to see an article that says, “yes, it’s not that you’re getting old and somehow losing your google proficiency, GOOGLE IS WORSE THAN IT USED TO BE.”

Amazon literally shows you fewer search results if you sort by user reviews instead of “Amazon recommended”, and I remember that it didn’t used to do that

[maybekatherine]

Sounds like it’s time for me to write up

Katherine’s Guide to Making Google, Facebook, and Amazon Work For You

Keep reading

[jackdaw-kraai]

So like. I know this isn’t what the post is about but like. Firefox is *right* there. And it’s free. And you can add a bunch of extensions like *actual adblockers that work.* And scripts that tell corporations trying to collect your data to go fuck themselves, like Privacy Badger and Privacy Possum. And you can import your bookmarks and passwords with *literally* just two clicks of a button so you don’t lose anything.

So like. You don’t *have* to put up with Google. You can, absolutely, just ditch it. Let it rot in peace while you go make your internet experience habitable again.

Here’s a link to download it on windows. Go do it. And install uBlock Origin. Two clicks again. Thank me later.

[zoobus]

What is with people who ostensibly use the same Internet I do who seem to believe Firefox, duckduckgo, and adblockers can undo all this shit? Firefox is not magic.

I use Firefox! In fact, I use IceRaven. I grappled with the extensions-to-mobile Collections project mozilla themselves seems to have forgotten to get back at least *some* of the benefits lost from using Kiwi/chrome re-skinned (hey mozilla no rush but you intro’d this years ago and you still have no built in translation). I’ve got the free version of Blokada on my phone. About:config messed with. F-droid. Phone is (well, was -forgot the damage an update can do) rooted. NewPipe instead of Youtube, xmanager for Spotify. Every single day I force myself to use duckduckgo like I don’t know there’s a 70% chance I’ll have to take my ass to google anyway. Miles of extensions just for blocking ads and content farms

NONE OF THESE TACTICS/COMPANIES ARE POWERFUL ENOUGH TO COMPLETELY REVERSE ENSHITTIFICATION.

What is mozilla gonna do about steam pushing connect 3 and hentai games to my recommendations? Why would all of the other search engines be impervious to SEOification? Did Privacy Badger bring porn back to Tumblr? Did you hear about reddit switching to a paid API model, killing staple make-reddit-usable project Pushshift? Hell, remember when AdBlock Plus was the belle of the ball? A Firefox staple? Only to get - you guessed it! Enshittified.

This is my ongoing pet peeve, like is it an ongoing astroturfing campaign? Gaslighting just for fun? do you even use the stuff you recommend? Because I do. I put more effort into curating my Internet than the average guy so I sit here with a bewildered look each time you guys come here and insist an individual downloading a different browser can overcome a hundred different companies conspiring against them. You are literally on the unfixably enshittified website right now. Nothing you download to your pc will undo FOSTA-SESTA

[theonewhopoops]

Thank you for your breakdown zoobus because got damn

[muldery]

best of b99: best of raymond holt

rest in peace, andre. you will be greatly missed. thank you for bringing captain raymond holt to life. ♡

[anthonybourdainpartsunknown]

corrective action

[vague-humanoid]

be the change you want to see in the world

[dearydeerling-deactivated201904]

His name is  Onur Albayrak! Here’s the story.

Hurriyet Daily News reports that Albayrak had been hired to photograph the July 5th wedding at Turgut Özal Nature Park in the eastern Turkish province of Malatya. On the day of, when he noticed that the bride-to-be didn’t look like an adult, he asked the groom her age and learned that she was only 15.

“The groom had come to my studio some two weeks ago and was alone,” Albayrak tells the Daily News. “I saw the bride for the first time at the wedding. She’s a child, and I felt her fear because she was trembling.”

Albayrak then reportedly refused to continue as the wedding photographer and attempted to stop the wedding.

The argument soon turned physical when the groom attacked him as he was attempting to leave, Albayrak says. The photographer ended up breaking the client’s nose in the fight, according to local reports.

Albayrak confirmed the reports in a Facebook post, which has been met with widespread approval, attracting thousands of Likes and hundreds of overwhelmingly positive comments.

“I wish this had never happened, but it did,” Albayrak writes. “And if you were to ask me if I’d do the same thing again, I’d say ‘yes.’ Child brides are [victims] of child abuse and no power on earth can make me photograph a child in a wedding gown.”

The legal minimum age for marriage in Turkey is 18-years-old for both sexes, and child marriage is punishable by imprisonment for men who marry underage girls. Despite being outlawed, however, child marriage is still prevalent in the country and remains a controversial political issue.

[Source] – go read the rest!

[erikacpataki]

this guy is a hero.

btw - let’s remind ourselves, americans, that unlike turkey, in the US the legal minimum age for marriage is only 18 in two states. in alabama, you can be married as young as fourteen years old if you have “parental permission”. in california, you can get married under 18 if you go to counseling, have a parent with you when you apply for the marriage license, and appear before a judge. in some states, there isn’t even a specific minimum age for marriage.

the minimum marriage age for girls in new hampshire is 13 years old.

48 states allow child marriage.

child marriage is not an “over there” problem, it happens right here, legally. any one of us might find ourselves called upon to break somebody’s nose if we encounter something like this occurring. we also have a responsibility to support groups and laws trying to end child marriage in this country.

[wielderofscythes]

Florida judges have approved child marriages of children down to age 11.

[wiisagi-maiingan]

Why do so many people make tiktoks while they're clearly driving. What the fuck. Stop that shit, you're gonna kill someone.

[wiisagi-maiingan]

I think people online treat driving too casually tbh, like there was a poll about people's bad habits while driving and they weren't bad habits or problematic or whatever, they were all things that literally kill people every single day. You are driving a massive vehicle that can very easily turn into a murder weapon with your carelessness, take this shit seriously.

[wiisagi-maiingan]

"Haha I never use my turn signals" you are going to kill someone.

"I don't do full stops at stop signs lol" you are going to kill someone.

"Sometimes I text while I'm driving 🤭" YOU ARE GOING TO KILL SOMEONE.

[wiisagi-maiingan]

Also people who speed up or suddenly stop or swerve a lot to freak out someone in the car for fun: it stops being funny when you get into a car accident because of it. Just so you know.

[catchymemes]

[daily-spooky]

[cosmicretreat]

[reasonsforhope]

Sorry I'm kind of dissociated and my vocab crashes during that can you explain the Biden drug thing in just. Shorter simple sentences.

Sure! You're not the only one who's mentioned being unclear on what it means either, and I'm happy to help

(Context for anyone else: US Sets Policy to Seize Patents of Government-Funded Drugs if Price Deemed Too High, via Good News Network, December 11, 2023)

From the very basics:

When drug companies create new drugs, they get a legal protection called a "patent." The patent means no one else can make or sell the same drug for whatever number of years.

Usually, this is about 10 years after the drug starts being sold to the public.

So, for those years, that one drug company is the only source of whatever medication. And since people need their medication, drug companies can charge however much money they want.

Meaning a lot of drugs that people need to live cost way too much money to buy.

So, with this, Biden told drug companies "Fuck you, if you keep making medicine too $$$ for people to afford, I'm giving your competition the right to make and sell those drugs too."

The US has never done anything like this before.

This is a huge threat to the whole (awful) drug industry in the US. It will save people thousands of dollars. If he does this, it will save lives.

--

Edit 12/17/23: Quick note, as people have said in the notes, this only applies to drugs made in part using taxpayer money. Which is! Literally all of them!

[reasonsforhope]

Reblogging again because I put this info in the original post but forgot to put it in this simplified one. So, again in simpler words:

The US is asking for "public comment" on this. That's the US's way of saying "We want to do this. Do you want us to do this? Why or why not?"

You can go here to tell the US gov that you want this new rule.

At the link, click the blue button that says "Comment." It's right under the big, bold title, on the left. You can comment until February 6, 2024.

[sashayed]

“And during this recent interview in Manhattan, [Braugher] dwells on his two passions: his family and his work. What fuels that love for acting? “It’s an emotional release,” he explains — an outlet that might otherwise lie beyond his reach. “Men are not usually forthcoming in the expression of their emotions.” Growing up in a rough Chicago neighborhood, he was blessed with loving and demanding parents. “But I was socialized in a certain way. Even as a kid there’s no real suitable outlet for emotions that don’t fall within a certain small range: anger, lust, ridicule — Army emotions, I call them.” Then, at Stanford University as an engineering major, he helped out a friend by filling a vacant role in a campus play. He liked it — a lot. He had found a new major, and an unexpected calling. “As an actor, I’m allowed — encouraged! — to explore emotions that have been basically unacceptable in my life. I have a huge well of emotional stuff, and once I give myself permission as an actor, it all comes to the surface. But I’ll be damned if I can give myself permission to bring it out as a man.“ “As a father,” Braugher goes on, looping back to one passion from the other, “I’ve tried to encourage my children to have a broader and deeper emotional life than I’ve had. I want my sons to be able to express their feelings about things,” he says with feeling he seems fully able to express.”

—

Andre Braugher interview, 2006

I read this interview over a decade ago now and the concept of “Army emotions” is still key to helping me understand what men deal with in terms of toxic masculinity.

(via mswyrr)

[bucky-bucky-bucky-bucky]

RIP Velvet Thunder

“Everything is garbage, never love anything”

[shadovvlurking]

[frehorn-deactivated20181011]

Whatever floats your stoat

[thehappysorceress]

Andre Braugher Dies: Star Of ‘Homicide: Life On The Street’, ‘Brooklyn Nine-Nine’ & Other Series And Films Was 61

Andre Braugher has died. The two-time Emmy-winning star of series including Homicide: Life on the Street, Men of a Certain Age and Brooklyn

This is not ok.

[minim-calibre]

Oh no. What a massive, massive loss. He was far too young.

[always-rolling-my-eyes]

Stop 😭

[theriverbeyond]

i must not get takeout. takeout is the wallet-killer. takeout is the little-death that brings total obliteration. i will face the kitchen, fridge, and pantry. i will make choices about what to cook and then execute them. when hunger is gone there will be nothing. only i will remain.

[casliyn]

Rest in Peace, Andre Braugher.