TechCrunch: TikTok’s road to becoming a super app. “Although TikTok is widely described as a social media giant, it’s been gradually moving beyond that category. Over time, the video app added TikTok Shop, a map for local discovery, robust search, games, and so much more. Now, it has recently added hotel booking capabilities and is pursuing a fintech license.”

Love and loyalty

It’s easier to desire and pursue the attention of tens of millions of total strangers than it is to accept the love and loyalty of the people closest to us.

slip:4a1251.

Social media

We cannot make social media good, because it is fundamentally bad… all we can do is hope that it withers away, and play our small part in helping abandon it.

slip:4a1103.

Solving the Identity Challenge in Decentralized Social Networks

https://openchannels.fm/solving-the-identity-challenge-in-decentralized-social-networks/

A big ol’ distraction

Quit your yakkin’ and get busy. Quit wasting time obsessing about pimping your ass and checking your stats. Instead, MAKE stuff. Make AMAZING stuff. Make stuff that is so good that people have no choice but to find out about it. Otherwise, you REALLY are just wasting your time. This game is already TOO hard and TOO BIG a time suck to fritter away on what is, for the most part, a big ol’ distraction.

slip:4a947.

Nature: Instance-level community detection in the Mastodon federation: a graph- and content-based approach. “This study analyzes Mastodon, a prominent federated social network made of several interconnected instances, and investigates community detection at the instance level by integrating content-based edge weighting to enhance modularity maximization techniques.”

What information consumes

In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

slip:4a767.

It may be, as he says, obvious to Simon, but it really was not obvious to me. Until I read this I had always thought of myself as giving, or perhaps spending, my time on information. In recent years I’ve begun reminding anyone who’ll listen, that we all have large Oxo grips that extend from the ancient systems cobbled together which today form our intelligence, our fear, and our psyche. It’s easy to grab someone by those handles and lead them. That’s fine because everyone doesn’t try to grab me by those Oxo handles. But software is good at grabbing those handles. Hardware is good at it. And companies run by people who haven’t thought through the morality of what they’re building using software and hardware are really good at it.

So when I read Simon’s comment about information consuming my attention. I sat bolt-upright.

…and then I renewed by efforts to swat away anything that I catch gazing lasciviously at my weaknesses.

ɕ

Information

In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

slip:4a767.

Search Engine Journal: Reddit CEO: LLMs ‘Would Not Exist’ Without Reddit Data. “Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said large language models ‘would not exist as we know them’ without Reddit’s content. He called the platform’s user-generated data ‘modern oil’ for AI. Huffman made the comments during an interview at Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies Summit.”

Palindromic e555 with Andy, Michael and Michael - pointing devices, #TheGuild #TheMovie kickstarter, #AI in commencement speeches, #DiscoBall icons, #AI in podcasts, physical #letter #SocialNetworks, #museums for #VirtualWorlds & #OS and a whole lot more!

http://gamesatwork.biz/2026/05/25/e555-one-two-one-two/