Meta's Twitter clone launches, immediately censors anyone with unapproved thoughts - "Yep, just censoring a factually true story about cocaine being found in Joe Biden's White House because the poster posted real pictures of Hunter Biden doing cocaine and implied there might be a connection. At least it's non-partisan, right?... So it censors you for posting facts that might make people in power look bad, tries to dissuade you from following one side of the political aisle, and tracks everything you do. And on top of that, it doesn't work...
'Meta is already too powerful. One company controls what much of the public is allowed to see. And if Threads succeeds, it will have 80% of the global market outside of Russia and China, according to one industry insider. As such, it's reasonable to expect that Meta will censor precisely the same way the large news media corporations, including the New York Times, and corporate advertisers want it to. More censorship is what the mainstream news media, big corporations, and their celebrity pitch people have been demanding.'
Shellenberger also notes an important distinction between Elon Musk's Twitter, which has the policy of only censoring as national laws deem fit, and Meta/Facebook, which censors according to the woke ideology of the religious zealots who control the company. But hey, at least Big Brother is "friendly.""
I swapped my Twitter addiction for Threads – it was full of the same sniping rubbish - "If you leaned out of the window this morning, you might have heard a strange noise, somewhere between a chirrup of curiosity and a weary groan. It was the sound of millions of people waking up and seeing that yet another new Twitter rival had arrived to compete for their attention: Threads. Since Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44bn last year and started making eccentric management decisions, there have been several mooted successors: Mastodon, Bluesky, meeting up with your friends in real life. But none has achieved lift-off. For all its faults, old and new, Twitter has remained Twitter. Threads might be different. It has come from Meta, Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook parent company, so there is plenty of heft behind it... For a few happy hours, it had a prelapsarian quality, a reminder of what social media was like when everyone approached it in a spirit of fun and optimism. I was reminded of joining Twitter in 2009, the vague feeling of looking around like a child in the playground. People posted earnestly about being happy to be on Threads and not on Twitter. This time, they pondered, it could all be different. We could join arms around the world and sing songs of freedom. Ed Balls had an instant hit by reprising his “Ed Balls” name-search tweet. Some jokes work on any platform. It didn’t last. By lunchtime, people were already settling into the old familiar routines: sniping, bullying and posting whatever desperate rubbish they thought might get engagement. Celebrities were being peppered with abuse. Those who had big followings elsewhere quickly accumulated them. Newspapers were linking to articles. People you’ve never heard of were showing off and brands were using it to fish for engagement. What’s your favourite Farrow & Ball paint? Where has the best hamburger in London?... Although Zuckerberg’s attempt to pioneer virtual reality – the Metaverse – has yet to bear fruit, he has a remarkable track record when copying rivals. Instagram Stories was a version of Snapchat’s format, while Reels defanged TikTok. If he can get Threads to stick, he will find himself, between WhatsApp, Instagram and Threads, presiding over a good chunk of the world’s attention. Clearly he wants to be “master of messaging”. To judge by the rubbish being spouted on Threads already, what’s less clear is why he would want to."
Deleting your Instagram account is the only way to delete your Threads profile
Threads: Mark Zuckerberg’s safe space - "The similarities between the two rival apps are so stark and so noticeable that Twitter has threatened to take legal action against Meta. Meta has hardly tried to hide the similarities, either. Earlier this week, Zuckerberg posted his first tweet in over a decade. It was of the Spiderman meme – where two men in exactly the same Spiderman outfit point at each other, unable to tell the real thing from the imposter. Besides, ripoffs of other platforms are not unknown at Meta. For instance, Instagram Stories are a shameless copy of Snapchat, while Instagram’s Reels feature is an obvious imitation of TikTok. So, with all its similarities to Twitter, why would anyone feel the need to move over to Threads? The main draw for the great and the good is that Threads is promising a more sanitised social-media experience. This is what Zuckerberg rather creepily refers to as its commitment to ‘friendliness’... There have been other, similarly sanitised alternatives to Twitter in recent years, of course. Until Threads came along, Mastodon was the refuge of choice for many of Twitter’s self-exiled blue checks. With Mastodon, you can join a server which connects you to people with similar interests and identities. Some random examples of servers include those for Scottish people, for Freemasons and for people with a ‘furry’ fetish. This allows for a curated internet experience with only like-minded people. A newer alternative is Spill, set up by ex-Twitter employees, which is an invite-only app for ‘marginalised groups’, such as the ‘black community’ and the ‘queer community’. What both of these apps lack is the scale that’s needed to make a social-media platform thrive. For all the elites’ hissy fits about Twitter, the size of the audience there has kept even the most demented enemies of Musk coming back for more. Threads, some hope, will soon be able to offer a similar-sized audience, but with a kinder, gentler user experience. Of course, the only way to maintain such ‘friendliness’ is through censorship; through the harsh application of rules, community guidance and codes of conduct. This means the deletion or downgrading of posts that are seen as unkind or unfriendly. Indeed, on Threads’ first day of operations, users already reported having their posts taken down, mainly for political reasons. Some accounts say they are being blacklisted or greylisted. When you try to follow a ‘problematic’ person on Threads, you might be warned that their account has ‘posted false information’ or has violated ‘community guidelines’. Censorship techniques that have been honed by Meta on Facebook and Instagram are already being zealously deployed on Threads... Certainly, many of the fiercest critics of Musk-era Twitter have been clear that what they want is more censorship. From the very day Musk took over last year, every inch Twitter has taken towards greater free speech has sent the Twitterati into spasms. For loosening up the rules on what people can tweet, Musk was accused of empowering fascism. For restoring the accounts of formerly banned users, he was accused of having blood on his hands. And for shaking up Twitter’s verification system, for allowing ordinary people to get themselves a blue tick, he was accused of enabling disinformation and conspiracy theories. So low is the liberal elite’s view of free speech nowadays that any rolling back of censorship is presented as a mortal threat to society. This is what explains all the excitement over Threads. The tweeting classes are desperate for a return to the censorious, pre-Musk status quo. They yearn to be protected from the free expression of the masses. They want social media to be a safe space again. They want Big Tech to be their Big Brother. The fight for a free internet is clearly far from over."
Instagram’s Threads Engagement Has Already Dropped off - "Threads has already seen a drop in daily active users and time spent on the app since its record-breaking debut... On Tuesday and Wednesday, the platform’s number of daily active users were down about 20% from Saturday. Meanwhile, the time spent on the app by users has plunged by 50%, from 20 minutes to 10 minutes... “The backing of Meta and the integration with Instagram likely gives Threads a much higher flood than other services, but it will need a more compelling value proposition than simply ‘Twitter, but without Elon Musk.’”
Meme - "Day 170 of "Twitter will collapse next week bro, trust me."
lan Miles Che... @stillgr...: "Zuckerberg has already lost."
"twitter
threads
Interest over time"
Zuckerberg Implies Less Than Half Of Threads Users Have Stuck Around - "70%. That is how much user engagement on Threads had fallen two weeks after its launch, according to data released by market intelligence firm Sensor Tower last Friday. Daily active users on the site dropped to around 13 million users, down from 44 million in the week it launched while average time spent on the app dropped from 19 minutes to four."
Meme - Physiognomy Check: "The people who forgot that they hated billionaires as soon as Zucc announced a replacement safe space for the one Elon took from them suddenly realize that it was never actually for them in the first place."
Joshua: "Well, capitalism ruined this app already, time to go home"
shan horan @shanhorandraws: "This screenshot from threads made me nauseous"
backstreetboys: "Oh my god, we're back again"
mcdonalds: "hi from grimace say it back plsss"
ellendegeneres: "Welcome to Gay Twitter!"
netflix: "Threads is kinda like Love is Blind cuz everybody is all about the engagement!!!"
Meme - Mistress Matisse @mistressmatisse: "If you're a sexworker, think VERY carefully about joining Threads, because here's what Mark Zuckerberg did to me: I had a FB account as Mistress Matisse, but FB scraped my legal name from somewhere else and then changed my displayed NAME on my account without notice/consent. Yep."
Meta’s Threads traffic continues to plunge | Fortune - "The latest data reports from Sensor Tower show the daily active user count for the Twitter-like social media channel have dropped 82% since its breakthrough launch on July 5, CNN reports, citing data from Sensor Tower. The numbers are as of July 31... The average time spent has dropped from 19 minutes at its peak to just 2.6 minutes. And instead of opening it 14 times a day, current users only check in about three times now. The numbers show that the slowdown in users isn’t slowing down for the Meta property. Just two weeks ago, traffic was down 70% from Threads’ launch. Twitter users have remained steady at 200 million."
I don't even see liberals crowing about how much of a success Threads is anymore. Even they can't deny the problems
Meme - Christopher Bird @mightygodking.bsky.social: "BROKE: this is the Year of the Four Twitters
WOKE: this is microblogging's Warring States Period
INSTAGRAM TUMBLR THREADS VK KOO BLUESKY TARINGA MASTODON SPILL TWISTER
(RESERVED FOR FUTURE RACIST TWITTER CLONE)
GETTR PARLER GAB
TRUTH SOCIAL
2ND MASTODON THAT HATES FIRST ONE
POST SPOUTIBLE QZONE
3RD MASTODON SOMEHOW
WEIBO"
Is It Ritual? Or Is It Children? Distinguishing Consequences of Play from Ritual Actions in the Prehistoric Archaeological Record - "This paper identifies a significant interpretive issue for prehistoric archaeology: distinguishing adult ritual actions from the activities of children in the archaeological record. Through examining ethnographic accounts of recent hunter-gatherer children and reconsidering archaeological patterns and assemblages in light of these data, we explore how the results of children’s play can be—and likely have been—misinterpreted by archaeologists as evidence for adult ritual behavior in prehistoric contexts. Given that children were a significant component of past hunter-gatherer (and other) societies, the fact that the material components of their activities overlap tremendously with items used in adult rituals must be routinely considered by archaeologists if we are to reconstruct robust understandings of past peoples all over the globe."
It’s 2022 and the Magic Mouse still charges from the bottom
Why did they have to design it like this : mildlyinfuriating - "Apple is often about the design aesthetic, in this case, by making it impossible to use while plugged in, any photo of it in use will be wireless, clean, thus maintaining their branding."
Baldur's Gate III Boasts 'Tender, Consensual' Sex With a Bear - "Baldur's Gate III developers Larian got its livestream banned on TikTok after it revealed a spicy scene with a bear."
New Baldur's Gate 3 Trailer dropped : KotakuInAction - "I don't ever want to see "she's actually a thousand year old vampire" made fun of again after they all justified "he's actually a druid in bear form". Don't get me wrong, this is funny as fuck. But as usual SJWs are being complete hypocrites."
"The funniest part is to know people who like this shit are the same ones who think sexy women in games are gross lol"
Meme - Priest: "Without us you'd still be I worshipping the Sun!"
Native: "Dude... the Sun is real"
SG Speaker of Parliament Tan Chuan Jin insults Jamus Lim: "Fucking Populist". : SingaporeRaw
PARL | Speaker of Parliament - "In carrying out the duties in the House, the Speaker must remain impartial and fair to all MPs."
Jack Claxton's answer to No lying: did you regret having children? - Quora - "Yes. My son is 27, suffering from chronic depression, in a low-paying dead-end job without the faintest idea of how to get out of it. His life is an unending continuum of unhappiness and dissatisfaction. If I knew that he would develop like this, I would not have had him. I would not want to bring a person into this world outside of his own volition, if I knew that he would experience no joy in his existence. I was under the impression that almost all living creatures had at least the capacity for joie de vivre, and I assumed that it would be so for my child, as well. Sorry, son. I don’t know what to do."
Naturally, there were some people blaming the father
Meme - "THE CUP PROBLEM
Walking down the street you come across an evil beggar, who has no faults prohibiting him from working, he is only lazy. In front of him is his cup filled with money hes grifted off of innocent good-hearted hardworking christians. The Categorical imperative states that kicking the cup while walking past is the night thing to do. But, the man is of an ethnicity which lacks any agency, he will learn no lesson from this thus rendering your actions morally evil, but if you do not kick the cup sending his change flying across the sidewalk and into the gutter, he will use it to fund organized crime. Do you kick the cup?"
The Little-Known Legend of Jesus in Japan - "On the flat top of a steep hill in a distant corner of northern Japan lies the tomb of an itinerant shepherd who, two millennia ago, settled down there to grow garlic. He fell in love with a farmer’s daughter named Miyuko, fathered three kids and died at the ripe old age of 106. In the mountain hamlet of Shingo, he’s remembered by the name Daitenku Taro Jurai. The rest of the world knows him as Jesus Christ."
Father claims mystery death of ‘healthy’ son, 29, found naked in Chinese foot massage parlour related to illicit sex service, rejects US$69,000 payout - "A father in China has rejected a 500,000-yuan (US$69,000) compensation offer from a massage parlour where his son’s naked body was found, claiming the business is a front for a brothel and did not seek medical help in time. The man’s 29-year-old son, surnamed Yan, died mysteriously at a foot massage parlour in Wuhan in central China’s Hubei province... Yan’s father also claimed the parlour delayed seeking medical help for his son and reporting the incident to the police. After viewing surveillance footage from the parlour, Yan’s father said: “At 19:43, the staff noticed something unusual. They came to my son’s room very flustered. They were wearing white gloves, carrying a plastic bag, and went in and out four times. What exactly were they doing in there?”... a preliminary investigation by local police has ruled out any criminality."
Final moments of Bradley Lyons' life tortured by Australian Freedom Fighters with a chainsaw - "A ruthless gang of drug-fuelled vigilantes menaced an innocent father with a chainsaw while trying to force a confession out of him for crimes he did not commit, in a brutal torture and murder that shocked Australia. Father-of-eight Bradley 'BJ' Lyons was tortured and executed after being betrayed by his meth-addled wife Jana Hooper, who falsely accused him of sexually assaulting her daughters... Thorn had been the leader of a vigilante gang with a very specific hatred for paedophiles. Such was Thorn's hatred for paedophiles, he tattooed the gang's name, Australian Freedom Fighters, across his entire back and posted photographs to Facebook... Stefani forced the barrel of the shotgun into Mr Lyons' mouth and threatened to kill him if he didn’t confess to the sexual assault allegations. CCTV shows Harvey and Smith run from the home, with Smith falling out of the getaway vehicle driven by yet another mate, Jayden Ball. Mr Lyons was eventually dragged out of the boot of Thorn's car to an old shed on his property where things went from bad to worse for the terrified dad. The court heard Thorn was giddy with excitement. 'I could see Bert getting really turned on and getting some sort of pleasure from this,' Ms MacFarlane told the jury... One account had the men sawing Mr Lyons' hand off. The jury was told only 93 per cent of Mr Lyons' skeleton was recovered, with both feet, bones from his hands and a neck bone missing... Mr Lyons was made to wait while a shallow grave was dug. When it was ready, Thorn blasted Mr Lyons in the leg with a .410 shotgun cartridge. On his knees, another shot was put into the back of his skull. Bottom would later lead police to the burial site, which had a large log dragged over it. A single shotgun cartridge remained at the scene. The court heard the men had celebrated their crime, holding a party at Thorn's property in which Mr Lyons' own wife and children attended."
Who are Australian Freedom Fighters: Lakes Entrance dad murdered by leader of ped hunter group - "Stefani lied to Thorn that Hooper’s children had confided in him about the allegations. Adding fuel to the fire, he further falsely claimed Mr Lyons had intentionally drugged and raped his own wife... Hooper told numerous people that her husband had sexually abused some of her children, had returned to heavy drug use and had 'spiked her drugs'. The court heard she claimed to a friend that Mr Lyons was part of a 'paedophile/child pornography ring' and put pictures of her children on the dark web. When Mr Lyons' brother asked about him, Hooper told him he had told her that if he ended his life she would get $380,000. Again she repeated alleged sexual abuse of one of her daughters. They were claims she made again to detectives when they came knocking on December 11 that year."
This won't stop the virtue signalling anti "pedo" squad
Are the Kids Al(t)right? - "the editors of this august journal asked me to contribute a piece on the “alt-right.” I hesitated, for a number of reasons, at least two of which are relevant here. First, I did not then—and still do not—quite know what the “alt-right” is. That is to say, I know what the term means to the Left and to the mainstream media (apologies for the redundancy): “anyone to my right whom I can profitably smear as a Nazi.” But so far as I can tell, even many who consider themselves “alt-right” can’t agree on the term’s meaning, or on who or what qualifies. Furthermore, some of those least afraid to accept the label insist that the underlying phenomenon is dead, having immolated itself in Charlottesville in August 2017. Why bother writing about something that no one can define and whose most prominent proponents claim is defunct? Second, in looking into this a little, I found plenty of books about the alt-right but none by the alt-right."
From 2019
Identical twins are handed $1.5M in damages after being falsely accused of cheating in medical exam - "A pair of identical twins have been handed $1.5million in damages by a college in South Carolina after it wrongly accused them of cheating in a medical exam through signaling, as a court ruled their answers were identical because their minds were connected. Kayla and Kellie Bingham, 30, were initially enrolled at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) in 2016 to fulfill their dreams of one day becoming doctors. Now, six years later, after suing the medical school for defamation, the two sisters were compensated for having their reputations damaged after a jury ruled in their favor... It also wasn't the first time that the daughters of South Carolina Republican state Representative Kenny Bingham had tested together and scored similarly. The twins had received the same SAT scores despite testing on different days and locations and were also graded within a fraction of a point of each another in high school. Both of them had been registering similar answers to test questions since the first grade.A professor, who taught both siblings in college before their enrollments in medical school, noticed these striking similarities and wrote about them in a letter defending the twins. He said they had both submitted the exact same answers - right or wrong - on an exam that he oversaw in 2012, despite making them sit at opposite ends of the classroom. Professor Nancy Segal, a psychologist and behavior geneticist, specializing in the study of twins at California State University, Fullerton, also came to the Kayla and Kellie's defense and even testified in court for them... She also said that cheating complaints filed against twins are 'common' in higher education... In spite of coming up with a staunch defense, the twins were not able to prove their innocence and appealed to the college's dean, Raymond DuBois, who cleared them of any wrongdoing a week later. Nonetheless, the two sisters' credibility and reputation had already been damaged by then. They became unpopular on campus and had been labelled 'academically dishonest' by their peers. Their names also ran in local and state media outlets, which prompted them to be isolated from friends and to be 'disinvited' to two weddings... Since dropping out of medical school, both sisters have moved on to become lawyers and scored similarly on the LSAT before eventually graduating in 2021. They're now co-workers at the same law firm, where they take on defamation cases similar to the one that they first experienced six years ago."
Incredible moment young opera fan stands up during soprano’s Verdi performance to... - "A star soprano was stunned, as a young opera fan stood up during her Verdi recital to be the Alfredo to her Violetta. When a young Verdi fan noticed his favourite star soprano was without a duet partner, he boldly stood up and sang the tenor part from the audience. The acclaimed operatic soprano Lisette Oropesa was singing Violetta’s ‘Sempre Libera’ (Always Free) from Verdi’s La Traviata, as an encore for her recital at the Verdi Festival in Parma, Italy. In the opera’s staging, the tenor playing Alfredo is usually off stage, as if he were singing to Violetta from beneath her balcony outside. As this was a solo recital, no tenor was present. Liu Jianwei, a student at the Conservatorio Giuseppe Nicolini di Piacenza and long-time fan of the Cuban-American soprano, was there to watch the performance."
Violinist Plays Unplanned Duet With Pianist At Suntec, Passers-By Stop To Enjoy Beautiful Music - "Finding herself drawn to his music, she asked for permission to play music with him. He agreed, and they played a duet of Golden Hour by JVKE. The music was so beautiful that passers-by stopped to enjoy the performance."
87% of classic video games are ‘critically endangered’, it’s claimed - "The Video Game History Foundation, in partnership with the Software Preservation Network, has claimed that 87% of classic video games released in the United States are “critically endangered. A study conducted by the two groups found that across a sample of games released prior to 2010, a small fraction of them were still in circulation from re-releases. For example, from the sample of Commodore 64 games tested, only 4.5% of them were still purchasable on a modern digital storefront. Across the Gameboy family of systems, only 5.8%. This figure was far higher prior to the shutdown of the WiiU and 3DS Eshop, which resulted in the only games available for those systems largely being locked behind Nintendo‘s online service. “Imagine if the only way to watch Titanic was to find a used VHS tape, and maintain your own vintage equipment so that you could still watch it,” the study said. “And what if no library, not even the Library of Congress, could do any better — they could keep and digitize that VHS of Titanic, but you’d have to go all the way there to watch it. “It sounds crazy, but that’s the reality we live in with video games, a $180 billion industry, while the games and their history disappear.” The study looked to grant further exemptions to libraries and organizations when it comes to preserving video games. Currently, most archives and permitted to digitally preserve content, but in order to play this old content legally, there is an expectation for fans to maintain sometimes decades-old equipment. The piece of legislation that dictates how classic games are preserved and accessed, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is to be reexamined in 2024."
Parents made a surprise for their daughter. : MadeMeSmile
Mum pulled toddler out of daycare over 'no touching' rule - "A furious mother has revealed she pulled her three-year-old daughter out of pre-school because staff continued to break her 'no touching' rule. The mum explained her daughter isn't 'a snuggler' and will only happily hug her mother, father and grandmother. She despises being cuddled or touched by other people, and always has, the mother explained in a post on Kidspot."