A muddy river after stormy weather

Twitter X-Roads – Twitter Crossroad

Byrichard
Reading Time: 2 minutes

With the change in name from Twitter to X, and with the destruction of a recognisable brand mentioned in tens of thousands of podcasts, podcasts, episodes and millions of web pages I was curious to see how Twitter was, with the new logo. It took more than 24 hours to change the favicon, and whilst x.com does redirect to Twitter, it does not do anything else than redirect to Twitter.com. You can’t see your x posts there.

A Twitter X Roads – Twitter at a Cross Roads

I was web disaster tourism yesterday and today. I was going over to Twitter to gawk, and stare, at the app formerly known as Twitter, being disfigured to please the ego of a billionaire. One of the things that surprises me is that people are still using Twitter. I stopped months ago, by now, and I don’t miss it. The community that I was going for either left, before Musk, or after he transformed the site. I noticed that at least one website called it the Zombie network.

Social Networks Without Ads

When you get used to the Fediverse, you get used to timelines without ads. You get used to timelines without algorithms choosing what you do or do not see. You see things as they are posted, and in conversation order. Without ads life is nicer.

A few days ago I noticed that a fediverse instance raised two thirds more than it needed to break even. This is good news for that instance as this means it can expand, if and when required, and it can continue for two more years, if not.

And Finally

I am happy I gave up on Twitter weeks ago, because if I had not I would find current developments depressing. Instead I’m looking out of curiousity, and I’m surprised to see that people are still using Twitter, despite the high probability that the site we loved to hate, is on borrowed time. I’m just a web disaster tourist, looking at the site, before it is left for the way back machine to remember.

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YouTube and AI

YouTube and AI

Byrichard

According to a recent article YouTube will use AI to direct the content that people make, how it looks how it sounds and more. In so doing YouTube will be even less interesting.

AI tools will also begin informing what kind of content creators make. A new AI feature in YouTube Studio will generate topic ideas and outlines for potential videos. The AI suggestions will be personalized to individual creators, YouTube says, and based on what’s already trending with audiences. Additionally, an AI-powered music recommendation system will take a written description of a creator’s video and suggest audio to use.

Human Interest

The beauty of YouTube, back in the day is that it was user generated content. People would go out, live their lives, film something interesting and then choose to share that on YouTube, whether it was a bird flying in an interesting place, a swollen river, and more.

Clickbait and Uniform

The problem with YouTube, with algorithms is evident enough. The videos have clickbait descriptions with absurd images and the videos that are promoted are those with hundreds of thousands, or even millions of views. With AI chosen topics, AI generated backgrounds and AI chosen music everything will become as formulaic as the Hollywood film industry. Nothing will be unique and creative. Everything will be uniform.

Personal Content

The entire reason for using YouTube was to find original content created by individuals. With the imposition of AI driven content so the originality and imagination will take a back seat.

He said that YouTube creators have expressed that editing and brainstorming can often be time-consuming. The tools were developed to assist with these tasks.

source

That’s the entire point. I spend hours trying to think of a topic blog post, and then I spend yet more time writing. With video it’s the same thing. We think of a subject, we shoot the material, and then we spend time thinking about how to edit the video so that it’s interesting.

Creativity Takes Time

It’s time consuming because it’s creative, because it’s artistic. It’s time consuming because it’s about learning to think for the edit. The more experience you have as an editor, the faster you become. That time consuming moment is about learning to be creative. If AI replaces the thought process then, with time, all content on YouTube will be boring and unimaginative.

Bland Uniform Content

To some degree it already is, which is why I stopped paying for Premium and reverted to conventional video content sources. Television shows, films and more. YouTube forces us to see specific content, and makes it impossible to browse. They did it for viewers, and now they are doing it for viewers.

It is not that I don’t like AI. It’s that I don’t like AI to replace imagination and the decision making process of content producers. It goes back to my old question. If you can’t be bothered investing the time to create content and find new ideas, then why should others take time to watch that same content?

The Mountainous Levelling

In a cnn article Neal Mohan said, “We want to make it easier for everyone to feel like they can create, and we believe generative AI will make that possible,” which, in theory is fantastic, except that when you login to YouTube to see videos you see content with millions, or at least tens of thousands of views. You don’t see video content with 15 views, or even zero views. You see the content that is already popular, either because of algorithms, or large subscription numbers.
Those ordinary people, for whom the field has been levelled, is now even more uneven, because videos with millions of views will be shown to everyone, and so become more popular, whilst other videos will have five views. The algorithms don’t allow us to find niche content, like they should.

The Cult of the Amateur

One of my personal gripes with YouTube, TikTok and other platforms is that they encourage amateur producers with no film and television theory, to create content, seen by millions of people. Back in 2007 or so I joked that it was User Generated Crap, and I still feel that way today. Rather than worthwhile content we’re encouraged to watch dull content.

As the film and television industries have been drained of funds they have been replaced by amateurs creating content for online platforms. People who love music hate auto-tune because it allowed people who never learned to sing to be seen as singers, and so music has degraded over time. The same is true of youtuber, TikTokker and other content. The rules and conventions that made film and television art forms, have been undercut for mediocre modern videos. What was once seen as crap, is now seen as good, and those that want to create legacy content are forced to create clickbait rubbish.

And Finally

I went from potentially watching several hours of YouTube content a day to watching a few minutes every few weeks. I grew tired of the clickbait headlines, and mediocre content that the promoted accounts produced. I found myself thinking “Why am I watching this rubbish” and eventually stopped.

If AI generates topics, video backgrounds, chooses music and recommends what to watch then we have lost the freedom to find and watch spontaneous content and ideas.

The Facebook Monopoly

Byrichard

I am tired of the Facebook monopoly. While Google gets fined for helping people shop websites like Facebook do the opposite. Instead of increasing the diversity of content on the web and the sharing of ideas it has helped create silos of like minded people. Likeminded people is a polite way of saying brainwashed in the case where opinions are based on opinions rather than facts.

Low value posts

Shorts on Facebook are usually very short. You skim through dozens, even hundreds of posts but none of them have much value. Compare this to blogging. When you blog you need to develop ideas that you can expand to at least three hundred words. With those three hundred words you can include images, video, tables and more. You can tell a complete story. On Facebook you post some text and people might read it.

Conversational monopoly

People use twitter both privately and publicly. People I follow have their accounts set to private so I am careful not to answer to certain comments to preserve their private sphere. Other people see no value in having a public chat. They don’t remember the chatrooms on the late 1990s in the same way that I don’t remember party lines. Whatsapp and Messenger are used instead. Both of them allow private group chats from the comfort of a computer or with the mobility of a mobile phone. Ingress, Pokemon Go and others are happy to experiment with other platforms but mid to late adopters are stuck in the Facebook universe. They have a monopoly.

Picture sharing

Instagram is a great image sharing app but it’s owned by Facebook.

Events

Almost every event you go to these days has a Facebook events page. Many events only have a Facebook page. Unless you are a Facebook user you miss out on a lot of events.

 

The World Wide Web offers such a breadth of opportunities for creativity that it’s a shame that people are spending time on Facebook rather than on more malleable social networks. I’m thinking of Wordpress as one example. We will see whether people go back to blog friendly social networks.

 

 

May-21st for a twit-out, boycott of twitter

Byrichard

I’m not the only person that’s annoyed with the vast amount of downtime suffered by twitter and there is a call for an international boycott of twitter on may 21st. During that day we’ll be using other more reliable services to show that twitter is nothing without the community that makes it what it is.

Twitter has been having some serious issues over the last few weeks. It seems that the service is down almost as much as it’s active. Exaggeration or not, it’s a problem, and it seems to be worsening rather than improving. As a result, a bunch of us Twitter power users were using FriendFeed to discuss a way to hit Twitter where it hurts in order to send a message to the powers that be.

Sourc

Cloud Storage Tiers

Cloud Storage Tiers

Byrichard

On the 17th of February I will stop using Google One Drive and I was looking at the smaller tiers. You have 15 gigabytes for free, 100, and 200 gigabyte options, and then 200 gigabytes. At the moment I have 200 GB on Google Drive for documents and three hundred GB for photos. All of those photos are now backed up with Immich, PhotoPrism, and possibly one or two other storage solutions.

The Chasm From 200 GB to 2 TB

The issue that I, and others, come accross is that there is a massive leap from storing 100GB, 200GB or 2TB. There are no 500, 750 or 1TB tiers. You go from three francs per month to 10 CHF per month. I’ve had Google One with 2TB of space and used no more than 800 GB except for a day or two when I backed up my photos to Google Drive while migrating them off Google Photos.

Infomaniak is Cheaper, Microsoft 365 Offers A Better Tier

It turns out that Infomaniak’s Kdrive and Microsoft 365 Personal are two of the best options available. They’re priced with a 2 CHF difference. 67 CHF and 69 CHF per year. One offers Office Suite, as well as one terabyte of storage to use as you like, and the other offers two terabytes to use as you see fit. Both make it easy to backup photos from your phone to the cloud, and from the cloud to your laptop or external hard drive.

Self Hosted Replacements

As I mentioned above Google Photos has been duplicated via PhotoPrism, Immich and to some degree kDrive so I can delete those photos without concern, in theory. Google Drive is backed up to Kdrive so in theory I can delete that dat from Google Drive safely.

No Perfect Tier

My reason for moving away from Google is not based on conspiracy theories, or a moral problem with Google. It’s based on financial considerations. if they had a 500 GB or one terabyte tier then I would just downgrade my account for that tier size. This option does not exist so rather than downscale I might just jump ship.

Crowded Environment

The online backup market is huge. You have the choice between self-hosted solutions and cloud hosting solutions. Their pricing is quite similar but the question is whether you want your data to be in Europe, the US, or your own home, or the home of a friend or family member.

  • Google One – Google/Alphabet
  • iCloud – Apple
  • kDrive – Infomaniak
  • myCloud – Swisscom
  • OwnCloud
  • flickr – hosted
  • nextCloud – self hosted or hosted
  • PhotoPrism – self hosted or hosted
  • Immich – self hosted or hosted
  • Mylio – self-hosted or cloud hosted, although once you pay to backup to an exteran drive you have both

And Finally

I was happy to use Google One, Google Drive and Google Photos for years. The reason for which I decided to leave their service is that I saw the same experience, but for cheaper from Infomaniak. It has the added benefit that the data is stored closer to where I am. It’s nice to support local providers when the option exists.

Now that I have a local backup of my photographs, rather than depending on cloud services I can shop around and switch from the current cheapest to the next most affordable. I only need to check once per year, when the current contract is about to be renewed.

Grapes and Apples
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Grapes and Apples

Byrichard

I have seen combine harvesters at work over the last two days. Yesterday I saw them harvesting colza, and today I saw them harvesting wheat. At the moment you see grapes that are still in a juvenile state, and apples that look a little more mature, growing on their respective plants.


Apples on an Apple tree
Apples on an Apple tree


When you walk every single day of the year, you see nature change. You see plants flower, the fruit or nuts grow, the harvest, and then the next crop, You see this all year long. At the moment as I walk by the vineyards I can see the grapes growing every day. They were tiny and unrecognisable and now we can see what they are, but we can see that they still need to grow more juicy and filled with fluid. There is no rush. They have three or four more months.


Despite the rains, the ground is dry again, so it is easy to walk without getting too muddy. The rivers, too, despite the flood warning for big lakes, are low again. The soil around here was not saturated.


Today I was at a petrol station and I could feel that someone was standing right behind me so I asked “pardon me, but could you step two meters back, and could you wear your face mask, as I gestured a mask on my own face. I said all of this automatically, without thought or consideration. It was a reflex. I’m old-fashioned. The limit is one metre, not two. I surprised myself with that reaction.


What’s of interest is that I was then thanked by the person at the petrol station because usually he’s the one that has to tell them to wear the mask, so I avoided him that unpleasant chore. I think that it might be the first time, this pandemic, that I say this. I haven’t been in such a situation as I tried to avoid people for the last 470+ days.


Relaxing Cows
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Relaxing Cows

Byrichard

Ordinarily you see pictures of cows standing up looking towards the camera but occassionaly people like me walk by cows when they are on their chewing the cud break. They lie around and slouch. It’s amusing to see three cows in close proximity like this. They have their eyes closed, their legs out. Are you used to seeing such scenes?


Cows in Switzerland have a good life. They head from the valleys to the top of mountains, eat grass, and then have siestas in the middle of the day. Their quality of life is good. Not all cows are the life and soul of the hike.


The Convivial Life Of Cows


I didn’t know that as adults they would rest their heads on each other.

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