Notices by Erin Kissane (kissane@mstdn.social), page 4

Plenty of great people have cycled through #Medium at various points, but I would love to see a little bit of memory retention about their organizational history:

"Medium abruptly cancels the membership programs of its 21 remaining subscription publishers" https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/05/medium-abruptly-cancels-the-membership-programs-of-its-21-remaining-publisher-partners/

"‘We had no idea that it was coming’: Medium pulls the rug from under publications" https://www.cjr.org/business_of_news/medium-publication.php

"The long, complicated, and extremely frustrating history of Medium, 2012–present" https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/03/the-long-complicated-and-extremely-frustrating-history-of-medium-2012-present/

"Medium has pivoted so many times it has now come full circle" https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/medium-has-pivoted-so-many-times-it-has-now-come-full-circle.php

"Medium Pivots Again, Offers Voluntary Buyouts to Editorial Staff" https://www.thewrap.com/medium-pivots-again-offers-voluntary-buyouts-to-editorial-staff/

So I mean feel free to hop on that scorpion's back! You might have an awesome trip across the river and everyone will be super chill and friendly forever. But maybe check out the history before you hype up their new Mastodon experiment and keep your eye on the exits.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Even in early release, the Elk (elk.zone) web app for mastodon is so good, and also no waiting list ✨

Tangentially related, I REALLY miss local search for finding posts that I saw and want to refer back to—like the one introducing Elk—but didn’t bookmark. Is there something that can help with this?

(Please do not tell me to get better at bookmarking.)

NYT: Health experts say it’s time to wear masks again https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/13/well/covid-flu-rsv-masks-tripledemic.html

Also the NYT: “The Last Holdouts,” framing people wearing masks as isolated oddballs https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/26/us/covid-masks-risk.html

I did not understand the magnitude of this at all, this is by far the most plausible explanation for the intense reply guy culture here. If I hit the triple-dot menu for the post below and view the original page, I can see like three times as many replies as I can just looking at the post in the regular view

https://fedi.simonwillison.net/@simon/109559268498004036

@jplebreton As far as I can tell from reading other threads, this is happening at the protocol level, rather than in the client/app

A nice thing about mastodon's per-post visibility settings is that even if you don't have a locked account, "Followers only" disables boosts.

Super nice for things you'd rather not have attract tons of random replies, or escape into context-collapse land. A little nuance-preserver.

[I wish the "Sensitive content" label was more usefully written though.]

So Google search is increasingly vibing late-90s Alta Vista in a casino, Facebook has melted into MySpace + Second Life, Twitter is dogpaddling as hard as it can toward early 4chan but probably isn't going to make it, people are making blogs again, and everyone wants to talk to the ELIZA

Is the whole internet swimming back home to spawn and die, what is happening

ty google translate, very helpful