The Mastodon Bump Is Now a Slump (Wired). “Active users have fallen by more than 1 million since the exodus from Elon Musk’s Twitter, suggesting the decentralized platform is not a direct replacement.”
My $0.02: No, it’s not a direct replacement. Mastodon is similar to Twitter, but different, and the differences will become more pronounced over time.
The article notes that traffic went from 380,000 users late last year to 1.
[Many publishers] no longer have audiences in real sense; what they have instead is traffic — a huge stream of drive-by readers, delivered by search engines, that they can monetize primarily by getting them to make attributable purchases.
Casey Newton writes on Platformer about the emerging wave of AI and how it will disrupt search and publishing.
Many publishers already operate like spam operations and the time may be running out for them to be able to convert human journalists’ output into Google search results and then sales, Newton says.
For an example of my ignorance today: I only have a vague idea who “Drake” is. I gather he’s a rapper? And super-famous? Other than that, I can’t tell you a single thing about him.
It’s not just Drake. I routinely don’t recognize the names of popular actors, other musicians, movies, and even many TV shows.
This intrigues me, because in the 70s and 80s I was pretty plugged in.
This makes sense if we consider that people are more likely to put off starting or completing tasks that they feel aversion towards. If just thinking about the task makes you anxious or threatens your sense of self-worth, you will be more likely to put it off.
Research has found that regions of the brain linked to threat detection and emotion regulation are different in people who chronically procrastinate compared to those who don’t procrastinate frequently.
The grass at Lake Murray is tall after all the rain we’ve had, and yesterday I saw a golden retriever enjoying the grass so much–creeping through on its belly, and then rolling over on its back and writhing with its legs waving in the air.
At first, I thought the dog was enjoying the feel and smell of the grass, but it seems equally likely it found a carcass or a nice pile of poop to roll around in and cover itself with the smell.
We took a break for a few months after watching the end of season one of “Succession,” because the story seemed complete. But now we have watched episode one of season two.
I’m going to say “don’t forget to like and subscribe!” instead of “good-bye.” When leaving social dinners, ending meetings, before hanging up the phone, at funerals. It’ll be my “thing.”
I’m learning to use Midjourney for a work assignment. This is my professional headshot, modified with the prompt “sitting at the counter of a diner drinking coffee with a cigarette smoldering in an ashtray in the style of Edward Hopper.”
You know the business cliches: “It was a bad fit” and “it was a mutual decision”? I used to think those cliches were bullshit. Now I see those two brief statements are the best way to sum up my experience on that job.
I’ve already got a couple of promising leads on full-time jobs, one ongoing freelance assignment, and am looking for more.
I posted the following to LinkedIn this morning:
