You know, before we got used to the term '#algorithms' and expecting 'algos' to feed us content, the social web quite organically surfaced interesting stuff through people who collectively became curators. Curatorial work, being subject to human biases, is also not perfect, but in the arena of political discourse, that is to say, in the course of conversing about what norms to abide in a public space, it was one that felt human. Tumblr and LJ (in fandom spaces maybe) had this down to an emergent art, since every reblog or link post is subject to the poster's whims. That's why TERFs got discouraged (ok, shouted down) there, I think, and how they found engagement-driven algos in places like twt and TikTok so promising. Millennials in their teens weren't less stupid than Gen Z and Alphas. It's just our sources were less poisoned.

Here, we make jokes about serial boosters and include them in the standard advice to newbs to fill out their tl. Curators are back.
(ETA: ok tagging #fediverse)

I feel like I'm going to have to get this carved on my tombstone, I swear to the Goddess:

Look, if you have a huge platform on whatever social media site you're on (including this one) you do not, under any circumstances, have to show your followers something fucked up that a troll with *checks* 29 followers said.

Indeed, you are likely doing that person a huge favour by giving them access to your vastly larger audience. Maybe consider that, and consider how you may be needlessly terrorising.

How much you claim a profession's job can be automated (though AI) is inversely proportional to how much you respect the profession and the people in it.

A lot of the time you just reveal who you respect and who you don't.

Neighborhoods like the Mission, the Tenderloin, SoMa and Chinatown are dense and vibrant. Households have low car ownership and high transit usage. But many residents are working class, often immigrant. They’re not the “right” type of urban dweller for many fans of urbanism.

So instead of being urban archetypes, most urbanists focus on European models of urbanism. They point to the Netherlands, Germany, etc. Whenever places like the TL are mentioned, the focus is on the negatives, on how they’re doing urbanism wrong.

It’s super cringe.

1990s web experience

- Open site in browser
- Watch framework of site gradually appear
- Start reading site text
- View images once they load
- Click a hyperlink to more information on the thing you're looking for

2020s web experience

- Open site in browser
- Wait for Cloudflare to verify you aren't a bot
- Wait for background movie to load
- Dismiss cookie popup
- Decline to subscribe to their mailing list
- Decline to speak to a chatbot that promises it's a human
- Scroll infinitely looking for the information you want that's probably not there since it's all generated text intended for other robots to read anyway