Yeah, I’m not sure my reaction to them adding Pandas as a playable race (in the Warcraft III expansion) was that they were “really badass” as OP seemed to think.

YouTube serves probably dozens of formats/bitrates, and has spent years tweaking how it ingests, transcodes, and serves videos. Adding in-stream ads might have been a bigger engineering task in that environment. Depending on the percentage of users/viewers avoiding ads, it might not have been worth the return.

I’ll be honest: I found David Graeber to be way off the mark in this book (and only kinda off the mark in Debt, the book that put him on the map). Setting aside his completely unworkable definition of what makes a job “bullshit” or not, it still doesn’t make a persuasive case that our social media activity is driven by idle downtime on the job.

The majority of the time that people are spending on Facebook YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter are happening off the clock. It’s people listening to podcasts in the car, watching YouTube videos on the bus, surfing Facebook and Instagram while they wait for their table at a restaurant, sitting at home with the vast Internet at their disposal from their couch, etc. And perhaps most importantly, it’s a lot of younger people who don’t have jobs at all.

So the social media activity is largely driven by people who aren’t working at that moment: commuting times in mornings and evenings, lunch breaks, etc. that’s not the bullshitness of the job, but the reality that people have downtime outside of work, especially immediately before or after.

Bullshit Jobs

No, the actual definition that Graeber uses for bullshit jobs is not relevant for this discussion. Corporate Lawyers are his classic example, but those are jobs that don’t have a ton of idle time. Other jobs, like night security guard or condo doorman, are by no means recent inventions, and exactly the type of people who used to pass the time with radio and magazines.

If you’re saying that there’s a rise in idle time for people, I’m not sure it comes from our jobs.

With social media came the timeline you could mindlessly scroll through or click on suggestions.

I mean before broadband Internet you could sit around and passively consume cable television or radio pretty easily. There’s always been a role for people to act as curators and recommendation engines, from the shelf of staff picks at a library/bookstore/video rental store to the published columns reviewing movies and books, to the radio DJ choosing what songs to play, to the editors and producers and executives who decide what gets made and distributed.

I don’t buy that social media was a big change to how actively we consume art, music, writing, etc. If anything, the change was to the publishing side, that it takes far less work to actually get something out there that can be seen. But the consumption side is the same.

Nowadays, I hear a lot of people say that the alternative to these massive services is to go back to old-school forums. My peeps, that is absurd. Nobody wants to go back to that clusterfuck just described. The grognards who suggest this are either some of the lucky ones who used to be in the “in-crowd” in some big forums and miss the community and power they had, or they are so scarred by having to work in that paradigm, that they practically feel more comfortable in it.

I’m totally in agreement.

I agree that the subreddit model took off in large part because centralized identity management was easy for users. We’ll never go back to the old days where identity and login management was inextricably tied to the actual forum/channel being used, a bunch of different islands that don’t actually interact with each other.

I’m hopeful that some organizations will find it worthwhile to administer identity management for certain types of verified users: journalism/media outfits with verified accounts of their employees with known bylines, universities with their professors (maybe even students), government organizations that officially put out verified messaging on behalf of official agencies, sports teams or entertainment collectives (e.g. the actor’s unions), and manage those identities across the fediverse. What if identity management goes back to the early days of email, where the users typically had a real relationship with their provider? What would that look like for different communities that federate with those instances?

Not sure why companies try to push mobile games like that so fucking hard. Just because everyone has a phone doesn’t mean everyone wants to play games on them.

Mobile games make more revenue than PC and console gaming combined. Of course companies are gonna try to get a bigger and bigger piece of that pie.

Sometimes the identity of the messenger is important.

Twitter was super easy to set up with the API to periodically tweet the output of some automated script: a weather forecast, a public safety alert, an air quality alert, a traffic advisory, a sports score, a news headline, etc.

These are the types of messages that you’d want to subscribe to the actual identity, and maybe even be able to forward to others (aka retweeting) without compromising the identity verification inherent in the system.

Twitter was an important service, and that’s why there are so many contenders trying to replace at least part of the experience.

It’s just a type of injury. Injuries themselves don’t give you a right to sue, you have to be injured by someone else doing something wrong.

Can I sue for blindness? Yes, if someone caused my blindness in a way that they’d be liable for. Same with other injuries like broken bones or lost employment or embarrassment or paralysis.

So if someone drives drunk and hits you with their car, paralyzing you and causing loss of enjoyment of life, you can sue them and would have to prove liability (they caused your injury in a way that causes them to have to pay for it) and damages (the amount of money they owe you based on how injured you are). Something like loss of enjoyment of life would be part of the second part of the analysis.