Interesting Links for 02-07-2023

[andrewducker]

1. Twitter now requires users to sign in to view tweets, making it useless for sharing information with non-Twitter users

(tags:twitter OhForFucksSake )

2. "Our Dialects" - cataloguing English as she is spoke. And writ.

(tags:language UK English viaSarah )

3. Google joins Facebook in removing news links in Canada

(tags:Canada Google Facebook news )

4. Picture books featuring disability and neurodiversity

(tags:neurodiversity children books viaClare )

Comments

[cosmolinguist]

2 is an extension of a project I worked on as a linguistics undergrad at Manchester five years ago. Nice to see it still going so strong!

[andrewducker]

That's excellent! Thank you for helping get it started!

Twitter

[lsanderson]

I should look to see if shorting Twitter stock is still viable. It seems like it's on the operating table in an ICU.

Re: Twitter

[andrewducker]

Good luck finding people to take the bet!

Re: Twitter

[ckd]

It isn't, because Musk took it private.

[dewline]

1. Annoying. One more way in which His Sinkness is sabotaging the project of human civilization.

2. Specific to the UK, I see.

3. Idiots running both companies.

[elf]

Re #1: Musk has decided that he also doesn't want logged-in users on the platform:

To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits:

- Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day
- Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day
- New unverified accounts to 300/day

A short bit later, those limits were increased to 10,000/1000/500, but... ah...

[andrewducker]

Read posts? What kind of sick filth would want to do that?

[dewline]

And he's since further backtracked on those limits. For now.

[melchar]

It's like he's racing himself to see how quickly Twitter can be made irrelevant.

[adrian_turtle]

4. A relatively early book along those lines is "Mama Zooms." Not "early" in the sense of being for an especially young picture book audience. It was just published about 30 years ago, and most of the picture books featuring disability seem to be much more recent. It's about a child of 3 or 4, whose mother uses a wheelchair and the child regards this as perfectly normal and sometimes delightful.

[cmcmck]

2. My dialect is weird. I grew up in the deep southeast but with grandparents from the West Midlands and the northeast then lived abroad for a time before ending up in East Kent This means I don't have the 'Medway' accent you'll be familiar with!

People here in Shrophshire have me down as local due to that West Midlands influence.

[captainsblog]

I noticed the MuskRat's latest move when trying to check a sports team's feed and it no let me on my phone.

I'd previously, if somewhat inadvertently, "signed up" for Shitter by allowing the "sign in with Google" option that I thought would, well, sign me in with Google, not create an actual account with the need to follow at least one user (I picked Biden just to piss him off). I also promptly changed my at-handle to _idontusetwitter (one of those capital I's is a small L) and my user name to "Elon Musk" because I heard he likes that. I have never published, liked, commented or retweeted a thing, though I did just add "Cis Male" to my profile in hopes of THAT "hate speech" (in Elonese) getting me banhammered before actually saying anything there.

[captainsblog]

Boy Genius has now backed off, saying it's a "temporary emergency" because of the sudden massive amount of data scraping on the site.

Data scraping that is now occurring only because of Boy Genius's decision to monetize access to API for the site, costing 42 large a month now and not even working for those stupid enough to pay him.

Already I'm hearing that newspeople are learning to rely on other sources for things they used to get through Tweet subscriptions. Foot, bullet. Bullet, foot.

[andrewducker]

He could have monetised things so much better than he did. I'd have paid for no ads before.
Not now though.

[bens_dad]

After Musk or just Before Musk ?

Problem with a paid "no ads" option is that he can't sell ads ...
Is there a price-point where that makes business sense ?

[andrewducker]

Twitter apparently make $12 per American user per quarter. I would happily pay significantly more than that to be a customer.