I remember waiting a month at a time hoping to see a hint for whatever game I was stuck on, only for it not to be featured - or perhaps even worse; to see a hint for that very game but one I’d already figured out myself! Urgh! Gaming in the 80s / 90s was a challenging affair!

This article also skips over the other option we had back then - premium rate phone numbers that…slowly… read …out …some …barely …relevant …facts …about …the … game …at …£1 …a …minute …with …maybe …the …hint …you …wanted …after …costing …your …parents …a …£12 …phonebill.

I guess that advertising has been around for 100s of years. For the vast majority of history it’s been something people accept - nobody could avoid posters on the street, adverts in store windows and later it was adverts on the radio, in the cinema, then ads on TV… It’s only incredibly recently that people have had even the possibility of blocking ads, and even then it’s only a small subset of online adverts that can be blocked. Most ads (TV, radio, billboards, print…) are just as unavoidable and unblockqble as before.

Which basically means advertising has been part of people’s lives since the day all of us were born. Mostly folks just accept it, like we accept we have to spent 2 minutes every single morning brushing our teeth even though we wish there was a better way.

It’s just one of those tradeoffs. You can avoid that 2min every day but your life would be massively inconvenienced as a result (people would avoid you and you’d be in pain every day), and you can avoid ads by not using the internet, but life is inconvenienced as a result.

Facebook are an advertising platform. They only offer a paid tier because they now legally have to. They don’t really want you to take the paid tier, they want you to explicitly opt in to the ad-supported ‘free’ one. - because by specifically agreeing to "I want the free Facebook with ads’ option it means you’re actively choosing to be served ads, which is what all the recent lawsuits have been about - users giving explicit consent to be targeted for advertising.

No, you get automatically issues them. About 1 invite every 2 weeks once you’ve been on there for a few weeks.

Interesting. I might give it a go, thanks.

I have both but drifted away from Mastodon. It seems to lack the anarchic wild humour I want. Plus the culture of excessive boosting was too much and just meant my timeline was full of posts from people I don’t follow because they’d been boosted by the people I do follow. I follow folks because I want to hear what they have to say, not what the people they follow have to say.

Also all the servers had too strict rules. Having to post content-warnings if you mention food or other innocuous stuff.

I far prefer Bluesky. It’s a lot more liberal and far more more chill. Plus there’s lots of nonsense that keeps things fun. The feeds are a great way to find new people (you don’t need to beg for followers, just find people you dig and things will grow organically anyway). It takes the good things about Mastodon (decentralisation and open) and the parts of Twitter that were fun (people over brands, weird humour). I hope it keeps growing and opens up to more people, but I don’t mind it taking its time while it stabilises and adds features.

Or alternatively not taking the mobile operators side - being able to charge £10000 data costs to stream a couple of football matches worth of data shouldn’t be allowed.

In what possible way does that price come anywhere close to the costs of the providers in servicing that data?

Everything should be pirated, never use any Google or Microsoft service, use an email server you’ve built yourself, only get your social media access through obscure Mastodon servers, write your code in assembly language, only eat food you’ve caught or grown yourself, avoid the rental market by just building a hut in the woods.

Yeah, this means OP can use their phone constantly for 10 full hours. That doesn’t seem too bad really.

Thanks, but I can’t install into a Roku, which is the main TV I’d be using.

Weirdly, and annoyingly, I get this same thing when watching YouTube on my TV (the quantity thing, not the war propaganda stuff. Just regular ads). Whether via Roku stick, Chromecast or anything. It’s sometimes an ad every 2 minutes. However watching the same thing on a laptop or my phone even without any adblock and the video will play far better. Maybe 1 ad at the halfway point and nothing else.

I don’t know why the TV version of YouTube is such an arse for ads. They’re not even in clean places - I get an ad mid-sentence.

Honestly, for a 20 minute video I’d be perfectly ok with a 30 second ad or so. It helps the creators and isn’t that much of a pain for me. But getting adverts every 2 minutes, even if they’re skippable is just a horrific experience.

A fair few, but as it’s still being developed there’s not many stable uses. You can check some of them out here:

https://atproto.com/community/projects

The protocol (AT Protocol) is what’s decentralised, which is separate(ish) to BlueSky the social network.

Shadow Weather is probably as close as you’re doing to get there, I think.

Love the nominative determinism at play here for Mr Bankman-Fried.

You can’t replicate the cinema experience at home, regardless of how big your TV is or how impressive your audio setup is.

Watching some epic sci-fi on the big screen, or communally experiencing some creepy horror movie, or a whole crowd of 100s laughing along together at a ludicrous comedy is something I don’t want to give up.

Sure, a lot of films are fine to watch at home but with a decent audience the cinema experience can’t be beaten.

Sadly these still a lot of folks on there that haven’t moved elsewhere. If you curate your follower lists and don’t venture into the replies of big/ trending accounts then it’s still manageable. Mostly I just use to to read people I follow rather than post anything new myself these days.

Also, I’ve feeds of decent journalists that I’ve built up over many years that don’t post elsewhere. There’s still that immediacy that you just don’t get elsewhere.

For people still using Twitter, if you view it in a browser like Brave it will hide all the ads for you. Even better, you can save the webpage view as a Web App in your phone and access it that way and you barely even notice it’s the web version you’re using and not the app. I’ve not seen an ad on Twitter in months since doing that.

Very little of the price is the gold.

An actual gold watch case (excluding the bracelet and the movement inside it) weighs about 20g.

At about £50 a gram that’s £1000.

And I doubt the amount of gold in the case of the Apple watch is anywhere near the same amount as in a traditional gold watch case.

I like the fact that the article had to refer to the non-Musk site as XSM instead of its full name of ‘X Social Media’ because it would just make the article too confusing to use the proper name.

That perfectly illustrates the point.

I suppose it also means that if XSM lose the case because X is too generic, anyone can then set up a rival social media company also called X.

They can probably use the same logo too as it’s just Unicode.