Cascada
Kayaking over waterfalls, camera operators hanging from ropes to get the shot. Spectacular images.
Since 2006 I have been using Twitter every single day for several hours a day, reading up to ten thousand posts per day. Every time it failed I would know about it. Weeks ago I decided to stop using Twitter, so when it fails I read about it in articles.
I am happy that I took a break from Twitter because if I was still thinking of it as a serious tool, I would feel heart break every time it failed. I would feel sad about the limit to 1000 tweet views per day, I would feel sad about the disabling of Tweetdeck. I would feel sad every time something new breaks.
There is nothing worse than being on a site that is declining, where you see functionality degrade and then disappear. The death of hope is painful. I follow the decline of Twitter, but I am not emotionally invested anymore
Worry When a Customer Stops Complaining
There is an old saying that when a customer complains, they want to keep doing business with you. The moment someone stops complaining, is the moment you are in trouble, because they have moved on. It’s when people don’t give you a hard time, that you have pushed them to breaking their relationship with your product.
People Leave Twitter for Bluesky
The Reddit AMA breakup
I saw a headline today that said that Reddit moderators are thinking of no longer hosting and facilitating AMAs. Reddit too, has pushed its most loyal users to far, so they have decided to take a break from helping the company gain value, at their expense.
The Reddit AMA Moderator Walk Out
The Absurd Limit
Imagine that you’re a social network, and imagine that people love to use your network for hours a day. Now imagine that you decide to tell them that they can only see a thousand posts before they’re cut off. In theory that could be 1 to fifteen minutes of browsing, depending on how much time they spead on each post.
For a comparison Facebook and Facebook Instagram encourage people to binge, seeing hundreds of posts that are irrelevant, to keep them around, so that they see ads. Remember a social network benefits from getting you to waste time, and failing to achieve your goal. That’s why I stopped using FB (Facebook) and IG (Instagram). My ROI, as a user, had gone down the tube.
This reminds me of the joke, “That’s not a bug, that’s a feature”.
Identi.ca
In 2008 we had identica and it was a great, open source alternative to Twitter, with no users and little engagement. It has survived to this day but it failed to gain enough traction to be a viable alternative to Twitter. Things are different today. There is a critical masss of users. This means that when social media giants misbehave people have somewhere to flee to. Users are finally empowered. We are no longer stuck under the thumb of Venture Capital Social Media. That ship has sailed and now we are empowered, once again.
Musk bought Twitter just as the social media bubble burst. Now that we have so many alternative tools to choose from social networks owned by Social media giants have no value. I hope that as Venture Capital Social Media implodes, so the world’s attitude to social media as an addiction declines. Social media is not an addiction. Social media is about people chatting with each other, nothing more. It’s the Social Media giants that pushed the Social Media addiction narrative, to behave immoraly. I’m glad to see them losing traction.
And Finally
As I stated, at the start of this post, Twitter is a sinking ship, and it would be sad, if we didn’t have the Fediverse and all of its instances to replace it. We also have BlueSky and BlueSky will thrive. It has to limit new user signups. This is a fantastic situation for them to be in, because it means that people are looking for alternatives, in several directions at once.
When I read books i read to be transported back to a different time and a different way of thinking. That’s why i read James Bond books, among others. The books are old-fashioned but it is that obsolescence that makes them interesting.
They take us to a time before travel as we know it today. Imagine reading about being sun burned and sun oil. Imagine reading about speeding cars. Imagine reading about a time before road safety laws and speed limits. Imagine reading about when scuba diving was still exotic and more.
Recently people have been reading old books and destroying them by changing words and meanings. By editing books to be socially acceptable today we are behaving like the priest with a bell in Il Nuovo Cinema Paradiso. Do you remember the scene. Clang clang clang, insert a paper into the film reel where the kiss has to be spliced out.
The morality police isn’t splicing kisses or sex. It is neutralising gender, offensive terms and more. Words that make children giggle and laugh are being removed by grown ups.
They, the adults, see this as a social good but I don’t. In the age of Brexit, COVID denialism and a shift by political parties to the Far Right why are we worrying about books when the real social ill comes from what politicians are saying, of how populism is being used, to mislead people to vote against their own best interests?
A book is just a glimpse into the past and i am worried about the present.
My view on books is that we read them to understand how people saw the world before, whether from the 90s, the 50s or a century ago. We read Jane Austen A) because our English teacher told us to, but second to understand a different age and way of seeing the contemporary world. The world, contemporary to the writer, not to us.
I remember reading The Tiger that came to tea, thinking, “this is old fashioned and sexist” but that doesn’t stop me from reading it for a sibling’s offspring. Instead, it would be an opportunity for a well brought up child to say “but that tiger was not kind, that tiger was rude, and so was the dad when he came home.”
This brings me on to “All Creatures Great and Small”. “Oh I do wish you would pay attention” and more. Siegfried tells James off on a number of occassions for what he told James to do. James gets angry, but doesn’t say anything.
The issue with sensitivity readers is that they are moving on to adult books, with adult themes. James Bond is old fashioned, but if it is re-written then it loses some if its allure. I read James Bond while working in a humanitarian organisation. I knew that it was written in a different age, when people had different values and norms.
I worry about what contemporaries think, say and write, rather than what people wrote 60 to seventy years ago. The past is the past. Modern conversations, and modern books should reflect modern values. Will old films be re-edited to remove smoking? Will old films be edited for modern values?
Where will the line be drawn, on changing the past, to suit the views of people today?
Roald Dahl was edited for modern audiences but the originals are still available, so you can have the “modern politically correct version” or the old fashioned historical version. Will you read the old fashioned version, and have a conversation about values, or read the sanitised version, and skip the conversation on morality and ethics?
The Crosscall Odyssey Plus fills two niches. It is a rugged weather proof phone rated to the IP 68 standard and is equipped with dual sim capability. This makes it ideal for the sports I enjoy, mainly via ferrata as pictured below and hiking. It comes with a smaller carabiner than the one pictured below. I swapped it for one of my own.
IP 68Â is a code to determine how resistant a device is to both particulate matter and liquids. 6 denotes that the device is dust tight so particulate matter will not make it’s way in. 8 as defined by the manufacturer denotes that this device can be submerged for half an hour at 1m before damage occurs. If you get caught in the rain or have to cross a river the phone should survive.
Another interesting feature is the dual sim capability. This phone allows for two microsims to be used at once. In my case I have a Swiss sim card and a french one. Both sims are constantly active so you can select whether to make phone calls from Sim 1 or Sim 2. You can also select which sim card is using the data plan.
It runs android 4.3 and works fine with the TomTom app, the ingress and others. I found that battery life is also comfortable. With me as a user the battery lasts for a day.