2k20, what's the worst enormous tech company?

there's literally no reason to stop hating either

100% endorse Facebook requiring users to access international news on a platform not riddled with Nazis and publishing conspiracy theories next to the news stories.

Not only has Facebook banned Australian news orgs, it’s Australian users can’t view the pages of international news orgs either. @BBCNews, @CNN and @nytimes are all gone. pic.twitter.com/6x4mvPs798

— Peter Law (@PeterJohnLaw) February 17, 2021

Frankly I never went to FB for any of my news to start with and its weirding me out how many ppl I know apparently do.

I don't understand Facebook full stop but surely if you want the ABC news you go to the ABC website. Would be great if we could get them to fuck off out of australia completely.

This feels like a genuinely interesting development? Like o dunno but I feel this could really fuck up Facebook and drive audiences back toward traditional news sources. Why did I hear the phrase “narrator voice” as soon as I typed that sentence.

Hard to imagine anything at all being of less concern than this

Communications Minister Paul Fletcher says he has spoken to the administrator of North Shore Mums, whose Facebook page has also been blocked, "and that is of significant concern"

— Michael Koziol (@michaelkoziol) February 18, 2021

the Federal Minister for Communications has probably already refunded the ABC's shortwave disaster/emergency regional broadcasting today and is just working right down the bottom of the list though

Arent NSM one of those antivax nobs?

My friend's online vintage store is blocked by this too for some reason. She's not bitching about it to a senator though.

So: Facebook's nuclear-option has really badly distracted from something really serious and significant. Google has entered into an agreement to *pay cash* to spread Infowars-grade misinformation about climate and energy.

My post -> https://t.co/TbmxciyBN4

And a quick 🧵...

— Ketan Joshi (@KetanJ0) February 19, 2021

A rideshare driver terminated an active ride because one of his passengers refused to wear a mask. The passenger ended up punching the driver, grabbing his phone and trying to steal it, and then upon exiting peppersprayed the driver from outside the car.

Here's how Uber responded:

The fundraiser was organized by Cyan Banister, an early investor in Uber who was appalled by the amount of money Uber gave to the driver after the incident.

"Uber then failed to step up to take care of this Uber driver to help him with lost wages and cleaning from having pepper spray chemicals sprayed into the fabric of his car," a statement read on the fundraising page. "They instead began with only offering $20 in compensation for having pepper spray covering his interior fabric. They then upped it to $120 in compensation but this does not come close to the expenses needed to have a professional car detailing to try and remove the strong chemicals of pepper spray and also the lost wages from not being able to work."

Jeff Bezos will soon be the owner of a $500 million superyacht he purchased two years ago, and whose construction is nearing completion, according to Bloomberg. The yacht will be 417 feet long, include several decks, and will also come with its own “support” yacht, complete with helipad.

In other words, this yacht—among the largest ever built in the Netherlands—comes with its own yacht.

Bezos is just one billionaire among many to recently “splurge” on a superyacht. Steven Spielberg is reportedly trading in his modest $158 million yacht for one from the same company currently manufacturing Bezos’s. And overall the “market’s been roaring,” a superyacht appraisal expert told Bloomberg, even (and especially) during the pandemic. Bloomberg explains:

Covid wasn’t a factor when Bezos put in his order a couple years ago, but it has contributed to the industry’s boom. With galas canceled and land borders closed, yachting suddenly seemed the best option for private, socially distanced leisure and a good way to escape from the prying eyes of the public that might look askance at wealthy overindulgence during difficult times.

I suspect part of the mental justification of owning a super yacht is as an insurance policy against the breakdown of social order.

i'm reading https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52019031-notes-from-an-apocalypse right now and there's a good chapter on that

for half a billion dollars you shouldn't have to take a zodiac to the support yacht whenever you want to fly out

Mr Choppy

Facebook will no longer take down posts claiming that Covid-19 was man-made or manufactured, a company spokesperson told POLITICO on Wednesday, a move that acknowledges the renewed debate about the virus’ origins.

how tone deaf is this social media team? this is dystopian, nightmare shit

Amazon's Leila Brown used her background in sports medicine and her passion in alternative therapies to create a space where our employees could focus on their mental well-being. https://t.co/bvk2bw9Lke pic.twitter.com/cEQhsTH0Od

— Amazon News (@amazonnews) May 26, 2021

very good thank you. im jacking off in one of these right now while playing the knight rider theme on my phone https://t.co/AlFIVlttVR

— wint (@dril) May 27, 2021

https://i.imgur.com/1aHabVf.jpg

I'm sure plenty of people have already thought of this but what came to mind:

http://www.reactiongifs.us/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/suicide_booth_futurama.gif

Hi we’re the portal of record for all information, also we think this is not humiliatingly badly done pic.twitter.com/GGUlZ1pbJd

— Tom Scocca (@tomscocca) June 8, 2021

Regulators told Amazon that its ruthless quotas were injuring workers.

Amazon just said it won't be changing anything.

Its plan instead: a donation and a task force!https://t.co/4eD667Tl1j

— Andy Donohue (@add) June 11, 2021

The new Apple Watch commercial featuring real 911 calls might’ve landed a bit better if the people making them weren’t regularly launching themselves out the factory windows

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/13/capitol-attack-subpoenas-google-facebook-twitter-reddit-january-6

The House select committee investigating the Capitol attack subpoenaed Twitter, Meta, Alphabet and Reddit on Thursday for records related to the 6 January insurrection, as it seeks to review data that could potentially incriminate the Trump White House.

Facebook is part of Meta and Google is part of Alphabet.

Far from the worst thing about either, but good God the renaming of these companies is so mindboggling stupid and irritating.

Is anywhere on ilx hosting the "let's clown the metaverse video" conversation? Lots of pointing and laughing on twitter.

ysi?

Twitter enabling NFT losers even more than they had previously lol

Civil War II won't be fought between MAGA and liberals but people who paid $300k for a racist caricature vs. people who think those people are troglodytes.

this video?

This is the #metaverse... A live rave happening right now in @decentraland for the upcoming @LightbulbmanNFT release by #BjarneMelgaard. Music from @feedelity @prins_thomas @mightbetwins #NFTdrop #rave #virtualevent #NFTCommunity pic.twitter.com/aC4WYRbgH9

— Alex Moss (@alexmoss) January 20, 2022

Yeah, that one. It's just... THIS is what the facebook billions are being spent on? Sub-Second Life garbage for incredibly boring NFT parties?

yeah it's embarrassing...or it should be. Predicting what happens in tech is pretty futile, but everything metaverse is so strongly reminiscent of the dot-com bubble to me, it's hard not to assume this is all going to be dead in a year

textbook wishful thinking of course, but yeah it just looks so bathetic and unappealing

Third Life

feels way more divorced from reality than the dot-com bubble

Ha that's a good point. I was reacting more to the wave of corporations rushing to declare their participation in something that has no proven utility yet, but you're right, websites could at least be mundanely informative

That laughably awful video makes me think back to all of those (understandably! justifiably!) concerned articles about pervs taking creep shots with their Google Glass because they were going to be so ubiquitous in mere months!

They've been trying to make AR/VR/etc. happen for almost 30 years now (the first Wired I ever read had a big thing on VR in... 1995? '96?) and it's just a bust over and over. Nobody wants an extra layer of shit on top of buying their morning coffee.

damn this is grim: https://www.politico.com/news/2022/01/28/suicide-hotline-silicon-valley-privacy-debates-00002617

"META" stock down 26% today. Hundreds of billions of dollars in paper value wiped out all because iPhones made it harder for advertisers to follow you around the internet. Fucking wild.

anyone here read Tim Hwang's Subprime Attention Crisis?

snap down 25% during the day (presumably on the basis that they suffer the same problems as meta due to ios 14.5) and now up 55% after hours having reported results. (pinterest down 10%, up 20% a/h on results.) nobody knows anything.

breh

Pinterest is so weird, it only exists for me now as an annoying site that pops up in Google image searches.

there were people who built entire careers on pinterest traffic. a lot of people!

I've never quite understood Pinterest's business model, but I'm told that interior designers use it or something? Pin it!

Anyway, their fierce gatekeeping kept me from ever even looking around the site (without an account), so now I too just find it a mysterious annoyance

I know a guy who got rich off pinterest but he’s one of the main shareholders so idk

They built a brand-new building a few years ago on Brannan Street and now I understand they're giving all or most of it up

apparently it used to be a great place to work, relative to other big tech companies. obviously the product is moribund now, but it's also had a bunch of bias/abuse scandals a la amazon/uber.

I only got pinterest once we had to do home renovations. It's a really good way to keep track of stuff you like and also find ideas. I get why it generates ad revenue, because we would be like "we like this maple colored vanity cabinet" or whatever, and then you could find other similar maple colored vanity cabinets, save them, possibly follow through and purchase one, etc.

Also you have your vanity cabinets, your shower fixtures, your tiles, your mirrors etc all on one "board" and can move them around and put them next to each other to see how they look together. At the same time, it's really *only* useful to me for something like that, like I can't come up with any regular use case for it. I guess someone who is exceptionally into clothes could use it for that.