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Whereby "companies", what you really mean is American companies.

I'm not sure why you think the alternative to shitty US companies is "terminal decline". Europe is more than capable of coming up with its own tech companies, and the prospect of trashfires like Facebook being driven out and replaced with more responsibly managed alternatives is firmly in the "feature" column.

Yeah, we'll see how this works out for them in the long run. I have a feeling that the end result here is they'll drive away people who use them for years, and would have continued to use them for years out of loyalty, in exchange for customers who are a lot less attached to them, and will probably be more likely to cancel later on.

It's an increasingly crowded market, everyone's distracted, everyone's sick of subscriptions, and nobody has enough money. If I was going to alienate a major chunk of my userbase, this would not have been the time I would've picked.

Just curious, what makes you think they won't do it here? I think they're 100% greedy enough to do it here.

And at that point, I'll cancel. I've already kind of accustomed my parents to it by reminding them that it takes them half an hour to find anything that they even want to watch on Netflix.

DO NOT CLICK THE LINK ABOVE. It goes to a VERY shady "ur device is hacked! download our antivirus immediately!" site.

I don't typically appeal to the almighty dang, but if you see this, it should be removed as soon as possible, and I'd suggest banning the account associated with it as well.

There's no way the dog is actually CEO. Twitter would be in much better shape if that were the case.

(come on, someone was gonna say it.)

Attempts at humor aside, I didn't even attribute any kind of legal motive to it. I just assumed he was high/being a troll, per usual.

I think this was a "journey is the reward" type of project.

> Even if this is done in retaliation, it still seems wrong to allow it to happen.

Um...maybe just don't fuck with crows?

I somehow missed this comment just now, but yeah, moderation is what I'm thinking.

My guess is these are for monitoring content, rather than generating it.

Musk knows he needs mods. He just doesn't want to pay people to do it. He's probably betting that whatever they spend developing the FSD of content moderation will still be less than hiring actual mods.

For whatever it's worth, people like you are why I stuck with Apple even when they were headed for bankruptcy. Quirky, human stuff like the crayon picker (which I remember a lot of people loved; the weardown effect especially) and easter eggs (which I spent much of my childhood hunting for in ResEdit) really defined the Mac experience for me at that point. It was one of the few platforms I can think of that actually had a sense of character.

I've been wondering this for 25 years: how did you generate the crayons? They were pretty realistic.

Um...for those of us who were using Macs back when it wasn't clear how much longer Apple would be around—and especially for those of us involved with web stuff—Panic is nothing short of iconic. They're one of the few indie Mac devs who've managed to keep it going for decades, and their work has been consistently excellent.

So if I were Tim Apple, I would be a little worried by someone like Sasser saying "we tried to launch our crazy popular game on your App Store and ultimately didn't because one of your idiot reviewers gave us the runaround." That's a little like, I don't know, some record label passing on Nirvana because a junior talent scout thought that "the guys looked kind of greasy and the name sounds stupid."

Maybe just don't follow people who post that stuff/turn off boosts/block furry instances/etc?

This isn't like Twitter, where it fills your feed with shit it thinks is relevant. On Mastodon, you have pretty much total control over what shows up in your feed.

What, they didn't go with something like 420, or even 69?

I guess there's still one aspect of the company that Musk hasn't "fixed" yet...

That's an excellent question. Having given the matter some serious thought, I think what I'd suggest would be to start by making Twitter better, rather than worse.

I'm not a business genius though so perhaps I'm missing something crucial here.

Probably the same intention they had when they were brimming with outrage over their spy balloon being shot down: pure posturing for the sake of appearances.

Of course China abuses state power to the hilt, and if an American spy balloon appeared over mainland China, they'd take it out of the sky without a second thought. Government PR is hypocrisy and propaganda to the core; credibility, or any semblance of moral consistency, was never the expectation or the intent.

Especially when the person sharing the problem sounds like a @dril tweet.

Yeah, I saw that myself today. (Right after I posted a slightly snarky response to a troll, too—I wondered if I'd been banned at first.)

I thought your initial comment—the one you deleted a minute after posting it, where you were boasting about how sexually attractive you are—had more personality tbh

Don't mistake your own failings for universal ones.

I'm very curious to hear more about this. All we know so far is that it was apparently cylindrical and the size of a small car.

I'm wondering if it was a small zeppelin. The shape would be more suitable for piloting, but it could stay aloft longer than a drone; would not surprise me at all if the Chinese were experimenting with those.

It would absolutely be bad, and there would—I hope—be consequences, but if they clearly didn't intend to bomb anything, it would probably not be considered any more of an act of war than if their balloon fell out of the sky and hurt someone.

Yeah, I was initially interested, but then I saw that it was a subscription and I just stopped looking.

One reason I heard is that guns wouldn't have been that effective on a balloon the size of a football field; mere pinpricks, basically. The balloon would leak, but not nearly fast enough to bring it down in a reasonable amount of time.

Unless, of course, they unloaded thousands of rounds into it, which is probably more dangerous and less practical than taking it out of the sky with a missile.