Serendipity

and sometimes they come back when you least expect it, years later, even, and there's this sudden rush of relief like there you are, there you are, even though you barely knew each other.

there's a strange kind of love to it. i don't know you and i want to hold your hand across miles and time zones and oceans. i can still see the imprint of you in this community you left. you don't anyone will notice or care when you're gone, but we notice and we care and we wish you well.

as 90% of desktop users have probably found out, today @staff released an update that for some insane reason COMPLETELY remodels the dashboard to replicate twitter's. this is of course in the wake of numerous other thoroughly hated changes and a continued refusal to fix any of the site's actual problems, half of which stem directly from site management.

HOWEVER, thanks to the power of jQuery, i was able to throw together a userscript that remodels the dashboard back to its original look almost perfectly.

here is my dashboard right now, with the script active:

and here is the old dashboard in separate tab container that hasn't received the update:

it's hardly perfect; i had trouble making it force reload to the fixed layout when switching between other pages and the dashboard, and it currently only fixes just the dashboard. it's also completely untested on browsers other than firefox, and chances are it looks a bit screwy on ultrawide monitors. but for now at least, it's a good fix.

the unfucker is a tampermonkey userscript. all you have to do to use it is install the tampermonkey extension, hit "create new script", and replace the default code on the page with the script (link here) and save it.

The above examples have been provided with the authors' permission to demonstrate what these look like.

Basic rundown:

They are all 3 sentences long

Perfect grammar, capitalization, and punctuation

Like absolutely flawless English teacher-style writing with only a single exclamation mark, ever

No mentions whatsoever of character names, settings, situations, or anything that could be tied to the story

The usernames may be identical to people who exist on ao3, but the name is not clickable, and no profile is associated with it EXCEPT when you directly search for that name. What this means: the comments come from an unregistered (not logged in) reader, bots scrape the site for real usernames, attach that to the comment, and post

Please spread the word about this so authors can filter comments and report them accordingly

hey netizens! i'm not sure how many people are aware, but youtube's been slowly rolling out a new anti-adblock policy that can't be bypassed with the usual software like uBlock Origin and Pi-Hole out of the gate

BUT, if you're a uBlock Origin user (or use an adblocker with a similar cosmetics modifier), you can add these commands in the uBlock dashboard (under My Filters) to get rid of it!

youtube.com##+js(set, yt.config_.openPopupConfig.supportedPopups.adBlockMessageViewModel, false) youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.adBlocksFound, 0) youtube.com##+js(set, ytplayer.config.args.raw_player_response.adPlacements, []) youtube.com##+js(set, Object.prototype.hasAllowedInstreamAd, true)

A recent lawsuit is calling into question the very law that makes user-generated content possible on the internet and it’s going before a bunch of old people who have no idea how the internet works. If Section 230 gets repealed or modified, the internet as we know it will radically change forever. Content policing will be that much worse; and either the guidelines will be so restrictive it’ll squeeze the life out of their sites, or sites will close their doors all together by not being able to meet the moderation demand and not wanting to risk being liable. 

LegalEagle (who I like!) makes a false implication in this video, and you can see that same idea in the CNN article as well. This ruling would not “obliterate” section 230. It adds an interpretation to it that was not considered when the law was written back in 1997: the role of recommendation algorithms in defining whether or not a website is acting as a publisher. This wasn’t necessary in 1997 because those algorithms didn’t exist.

This is a ruling that would NOT negatively impact sites like Reddit or Tumblr, which don’t rely on recommendation algorithms to operate.

Supreme court cases like this operate in a very narrow scope. The question in this case is not “is section 230 legal?” or “are websites culpable for user content?” The question is “does a recommendation algorithm constitute an active promotion of third party content that moves a site from the role of host to the role of publisher?” This is very different from the question of good faith moderation that he discusses in the video, though he conflates the two.

If your website actively selects articles to post, you’re a publisher and liable for the articles you post. If you’re a user content-based site and not moderating at all, you’re a host. You’re not responsible for any of it. Section 230 says that if you attempt to moderate the user-generated content on your platform in good faith, which involves setting a TOS and trying your best to weed out content that violates the TOS, even if your moderation isn’t great, that doesn’t mean you’re endorsing something that you fail to remove.

Saying, “Since you liked this video about ISIS, we think you’d be interested in this video about how to build a bomb,” isn’t as active and intentional as choosing and publishing that video, but it’s also not as neutral as just failing to remove the video from your platform. Even if a human never made the decision to promote the material, the site’s AI did. That’s a big deal.

If this ruling was made, sites that currently rely on recommendation algorithms (YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, etc.) would have a choice: to massively rework their algorithm’s parameters for what gets promoted to do a better job of weeding out content that violates the TOS…. or to stop using an algorithm. LegalEagle makes it sound like this would be IMPOSSIBLE, like this would kill all of those websites forever!! They just can’t work without an algorithm.

If you’re on Tumblr, you know that it IS possible to have a large user-generated site without a recommendation algorithm. You probably agree that it’s better. You choose what content to follow based on word-of-mouth recommendations and text searches. Nothing gets shoved in your face as an “WE THINK YOU’D BE INTERESTED IN…”

This ruling would be a huge blow to websites that use these algorithms to create a passive content-consumption audience. It would probably make the rest of the internet better, though. It would definitely strengthen platforms that prioritize user communities and active participation.