Reading Time: 7 minutes With a clamor of church bells to set the blood pumping, the Annual Festival had come to Ocabos, that glorious city of gleaming gold and pristine white spires. The festival began with a clamor of car radios and headphones, the jovial fuss of parking, and rental vehicles and taxicabs ferrying their smiling passengers past restaurants […]
Posted inTechnology
The ongoing ethical erosion of popular online platforms
Reading Time: 4 minutes Anti-corporate-monopoly and digital rights advocate Cory Doctorow calls it the “enshittification” lifecycle. First, a company caters to a demographic, offering free services to build a user base worth selling to investors. Then it caters to business clients at cost to the original users (maybe by scraping their data, or maybe by clawing back free features […]
Posted inTechnology
The Blue Check debacle rears its ugly head—again
Reading Time: 4 minutes OnlySky has previously reported on the controversial decisions of Elon Musk in his acquisition of Twitter, including the situation of the “blue checkmarks” or “blue ticks.” It appears that Musk hasn’t learned and is keen to double down on bad ideas. Traditionally, blue checks have been an indication on Twitter that someone famous is who […]
Posted inDeep Dive
2022: The year in global review, Part I
Reading Time: 8 minutes All end-of-year lists are suspect. One must embrace futility when trying to summarize what happened on a planet of eight billion for one spin around the sun. So why do we do write them? At best, to break up our routines of knee-jerk outrage at the latest inane news item, and to think more systematically […]
Posted inSocial Media
Musk’s Twitter polls: the slopey moral shoulders of deferring decisions
Reading Time: 3 minutes The Great Elon Musk Twitter Saga continues. Most recently, Musk reignited the culture wars with his decision to “temporarily suspend” a range of journalists for apparently doxxing his 2-year-old son. Except this is not what they did, and the screenshots of those banned showed it was meant to be permanent. However, though Musk appears to […]
Posted inSocial Media
It’s a great time to quit Twitter
Reading Time: 3 minutes Elon Musk’s capricious decision-making has ruined whatever potential Twitter had. There are other social media sites that aren’t hostage to his whims.
Posted inFree Expression
“I’m a free speech absolutist!”*
Reading Time: 5 minutes Free speech is a thoroughly thorny issue, not just because it is divisive in online and offline debates, but because it is philosophically troublesome and potentially an unsolvable quandary. We all have our own lines about what is and isn’t acceptable. Everyone has a line somewhere. You would be hard-pressed to find someone who thinks […]
Posted inGaming
Using games to defuse frustration in the Dark Ages of Twitter
Reading Time: 9 minutes Sure, it’s gallows humor. But maybe sometimes we need a good laugh when things are on fire all around us.
Posted inSatire
Elon Musk now owns my local lemonade stand. And he’s destroying it.
Reading Time: 2 minutes Hi. My name is Lucy. I’m 10. Me and my best friend Miranda opened up a lemonade stand on our block. It was pretty good. At least that’s what our friends and family said. We’d sell a lot of glasses of lemonade in the summer. Maybe we got a little too popular, because one day, […]
Posted inEconomics, Social Media
How the Twitter Blue Check debacle went from hilarious to horrifying
Reading Time: 4 minutes Who knew that if, as the newfound CEO of a huge social media company, you got rid of half of your staff, including most of your content moderation team, and many of your team leaders and experts then walked, you would be left with a hot mess? People, including corporations and the people who run […]