Well, my idea of doing daily link posts hasn’t quite worked out. But I’ve been collecting things nonetheless, so here are a few days worth of links.
Social Media Sharing Buttons with no JavaScript
This site provides social media sharing buttons with no JavaScript or third party requests, and therefore no tracking. The social media sites supported are still all corporate silos (except for email), but they make a reasonable choice for promoting your decentralized content on the centralized networks.
What Does My Site Cost?
This site gives an estimate of what loading a page on your site costs, in US dollars, to load a single page of your site over a mobile network. It has average, high, and low costs for different countries.
Something is wrong on the internet
James Bridle writes about a disturbing trend in monetization of engagement on YouTube. AI-generated content, or AI-generated scripts for human-generated or produced content, designed to optimize appearance in search results for characters or trends in children’s videos. Some of the content tends towards the surreal, some towards the horrific.
I made a 100% edible roasted Alien Facehugger out of chicken and crab - and have been told I’m not allowed to make it for Thanksgiving this year.
To be clear, I didn’t make this; I just found it, and it’s very much my thing.
City of Villains: Why I Don’t Trust Batman - Uncanny Magazine
A story from the perspective of a henchman, on how it looks like the villains of Gotham really act more in the interests of regular people than Batman (and Bruce Wayne).
The Complete Moral Bankruptcy of Manipulating Human Psychology To Turn Users Into Addicts
An response to an article that was in favor of manipulating users. This response pulls no punches in condemning that behavior.
Using Social Media to Prevent Suicide
I confess to not having read this yet.
Adactio: Journal—Hooked and booked
An article on A-B testing, and how it tends to serve the interests of site owners rather than users.
Back when I was on Facebook, I used the mobile website, rather than the app, and I was frequently annoyed by their aggressive A-B testing. They would frequently break basic features of their website, mostly related to sharing, in order to A-B test.
Terabytes Of US Military Social Media Spying S3 Data Exposed
The perils of bad default settings.
New Research Suggests Social Issues are Down to Neurotypicals more than Autistics
Communication problems are a two-way street. Also, the importance of first impressions.
Did gender norms “cause” the autism epidemic?
CW: Nazi iconography.
A deconstruction of why autistics are problematized and medicalized under certain regimes of gender norms — notably the group-orientation and hypermasculinity of Nazi Germany, and the relentless self-promotion of contemporary late capitalism. Contrasts the valorization of autistic traits in high modernist literature, such as Camus’ The Outsider.
Capitalism: Not With a Bang But With a (Prolonged) Whimper
A review of a book on how the collapse of capitalism will be an inevitable, but also ongoing, dystopic process, thanks in large part to the lack of any other social movements that exist to replace it.
Technoanarchism - HackMD
A somewhat more positive view — how we can replace capitalism from within.
How far they’ll go: Moana shows the power of Polynesian celestial navigation
An explanation of the celestial navigation techniques seen in Moana.
Inclusive Components
Web components that emphasize accessibility and progressive enhancement.