#get paid to post ads on facebook

[cowardstiel]

i think it should be mandatory that everyone watch The Social Dilemma at least once every six months

[mostlysignssomeportents]

When Facebook came for your battery, feudal security failed

When George Hayward was working as a Facebook data-scientist, his bosses ordered him to run a “negative test,” updating Facebook Messenger to deliberately drain users’ batteries, in order to determine how power-hungry various parts of the apps were. Hayward refused, and Facebook fired him, and he sued:

https://nypost.com/2023/01/28/facebook-fires-worker-who-refused-to-do-negative-testing-awsuit/

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/05/battery-vampire/#drained

Hayward balked because he knew that among the 1.3 billion people who use Messenger, some would be placed in harm’s way if Facebook deliberately drained their batteries — physically stranded, unable to communicate with loved ones experiencing emergencies, or locked out of their identification, payment method, and all the other functions filled by mobile phones.

As Hayward told Kathianne Boniello at the New York Post, “Any data scientist worth his or her salt will know, ‘Don’t hurt people…’ I refused to do this test. It turns out if you tell your boss, ‘No, that’s illegal,’ it doesn’t go over very well.”

Negative testing is standard practice at Facebook, and Hayward was given a document called “How to run thoughtful negative tests” regarding which he said, “I have never seen a more horrible document in my career.”

We don’t know much else, because Hayward’s employment contract included a non-negotiable binding arbitration waiver, which means that he surrendered his right to seek legal redress from his former employer. Instead, his claim will be heard by an arbitrator — that is, a fake corporate judge who is paid by Facebook to decide if Facebook was wrong. Even if he finds in Hayward’s favor — something that arbitrators do far less frequently than real judges do — the judgment, and all the information that led up to it, will be confidential, meaning we won’t get to find out more:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/12/hot-coffee/#mcgeico

One significant element of this story is that the malicious code was inserted into Facebook’s app. Apps, we’re told, are more secure than real software. Under the “curated computing” model, you forfeit your right to decide what programs run on your devices, and the manufacturer keeps you safe. But in practice, apps are just software, only worse:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/23/peek-a-boo/#attack-helicopter-parenting

Apps are part what Bruce Schneier calls “feudal security.” In this model, we defend ourselves against the bandits who roam the internet by moving into a warlord’s fortress. So long as we do what the warlord tells us to do, his hired mercenaries will keep us safe from the bandits:

https://locusmag.com/2021/01/cory-doctorow-neofeudalism-and-the-digital-manor/

But in practice, the mercenaries aren’t all that good at their jobs. They let all kinds of badware into the fortress, like the “pig butchering” apps that snuck into the two major mobile app stores:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/02/pig-butchering-scam-apps-sneak-into-apples-app-store-and-google-play/

It’s not merely that the app stores’ masters make mistakes — it’s that when they screw up, we have no recourse. You can’t switch to an app store that pays closer attention, or that lets you install low-level software that monitors and overrides the apps you download.

Indeed, Apple’s Developer Agreement bans apps that violate other services’ terms of service, and they’ve blocked apps like OG App that block Facebook’s surveillance and other enshittification measures, siding with Facebook against Apple device owners who assert the right to control how they interact with the company:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

When a company insists that you must be rendered helpless as a condition of protecting you, it sets itself up for ghastly failures. Apple’s decision to prevent every one of its Chinese users from overriding its decisions led inevitably and foreseeably to the Chinese government ordering Apple to spy on those users:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/11/foreseeable-consequences/#airdropped

Apple isn’t shy about thwarting Facebook’s business plans, but Apple uses that power selectively — they blocked Facebook from spying on Iphone users (yay!) and Apple covertly spied on its customers in exactly the same way as Facebook, for exactly the same purpose, and lied about it:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

The ultimately, irresolvable problem of Feudal Security is that the warlord’s mercenaries will protect you against anyone — except the warlord who pays them. When Apple or Google or Facebook decides to attack its users, the company’s security experts will bend their efforts to preventing those users from defending themselves, turning the fortress into a prison:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/20/benevolent-dictators/#felony-contempt-of-business-model

Feudal security leaves us at the mercy of giant corporations — fallible and just as vulnerable to temptation as any of us. Both binding arbitration and feudal security assume that the benevolent dictator will always be benevolent, and never make a mistake. Time and again, these assumptions are proven to be nonsense.

Image: Anthony Quintano (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mark_Zuckerberg_F8_2018_Keynote_%2841118890174%29.jpg

CC BY 2.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[Image ID: A painting depicting the Roman sacking of Jerusalem. The Roman leader's head has been replaced with Mark Zuckerberg's head. The wall has Apple's 'Think Different' wordmark and an Ios 'low battery' icon.]

Next week (Feb 8-17), I'll be in Australia, touring my book *Chokepoint Capitalism* with my co-author, Rebecca Giblin. We'll be in Brisbane on Feb 8, and then we're doing a remote event for NZ on Feb 9. Next is Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra. I hope to see you!

https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

[probablyasocialecologist]

Gyan Abhishek is standing in front of a giant touch screen, like Jim Cramer on Mad Money or an ESPN talking head analyzing a football play. He’s flicking through a Facebook feed of viral, AI-generated images. “The post you are seeing now is of a poor man that is being used to generate revenue,” he says in Hindi, pointing with his pen to an image of a skeletal elderly man hunched over being eaten by hundreds of bugs. “The Indian audience is very emotional. After seeing photos like this, they Like, Comment and share them. So you too should create a page like this, upload photos and make money through Performance bonus.”  He scrolls through the page, titled “Anita Kumari,” which has 112,000 followers and almost exclusively posts images of emaciated, AI-generated people, natural disasters, and starving children. He pauses on another image of a man being eaten by bugs. “They are getting so many likes,” he says. “They got 700 likes within 2-4 hours. They must have earned $100 from just this one photo. Facebook now pays you $100 for 1,000 likes … you must be wondering where you can get these images from. Don’t worry. I’ll show you how to create images with the help of AI.”

[...]

Abhishek has 115,000 YouTube subscribers, dozens of instructional videos, and is part of a community of influencers selling classes and making YouTube content about how to go viral on Facebook with AI-generated images and other types of spam. These influencers act much like financial influencers in the United States, teaching other people how to supposedly spin up a side hustle in order to make money by going viral on Facebook and other platforms. Part of the business model for these influencers is, of course, the fact that they are themselves making money by collecting ad revenue from YouTube and by selling courses and AI prompts on YouTube, WhatsApp and Telegram. Many of these influencers go on each others’ podcasts to discuss strategies, algorithm changes, and loopholes. I have found hundreds of videos about this, many of which have hundreds of thousands or millions of views.   But the videos make clear that Facebook’s AI spam problem is one that is powered and funded primarily by Facebook itself, and that most of the bizarre images we have seen over the last year are coming from Microsoft’s AI Image Creator, which is called “Bing Image Creator” in instructional videos.

[...]

The most popular way to make money spamming Facebook is by being paid directly by Facebook to do so via its Creator Bonus Program, which pays people who post viral content. This means that the viral “shrimp Jesus” AI and many of the bizarre things that have become a hallmark of Zombie Facebook have become popular because Meta is directly incentivizing people to post this content.

6 August 2024

[lizzibennet]

some REAL weird stuff: on april 9, the lizzie bennet diaries facebook page started promoting an app which is meant to basically be a rewatch of the show on the anniversaries of the episodes being released, which coincidentally is the same idea ashley clements, who played lizzie, had and made two years ago on the 10th anniversary. people thought it was shady esp since ashley has said some pretty disparaging stuff about how the creator of the show handled things while it aired and after it was done, so they messaged her and she’s just posted this. apparently, NO one besides bernie su is getting paid - not residuals, nothing from the fact the lbd channel is monetized, nothing from the app. there are producers and actors that worked on the show in the comments saying they weren’t even CONTACTED about it, which is INSANE

since i know some of u follow me for p&p & might see ads for the app, here’s the heads up that you should not download it and probably not interact with the lbd accounts at all. they really have no interest in the wellbeing of the crew that made the entire show possible. it’s very sad :/

[the-soliloquies-of-sadists]

#365

“I just got the notice.  It’s done.  I never thought I would have seen a wire transfer of fifty thousand dollars into my account.  OK shithead, you are for real.  Get naked.  I want to inspect my property.  That’s what you are to me.  You are a cunt.  You are a toilet.  You are a punching bag.  You are whatever the fuck I want to make of you.  Right now, I want you naked…. 

“I don’t give a shit about those two drivers over there.  Leave your clothes right there, but hand me your phone.  Look at the screen.  I saw your post to Facebook.  You were able to follow orders.  The video was short and to the point.  You let your family and friends know that you met a hot daddy that you are moving in with, and that you will be living off the grid and that you won’t be able to respond to anyone for a long time.  You actually told them not to worry, that you trust me.  That last part was a nice added touch.

“What’s your passcode?...  I’m going to change it and then deactivate the facial recognition.  Your phone will be locked away, but I will still need to access it from time to time—you know, for the $5,000 monthly payment to me.  Which reminds me, what is your password for money transfers?...  Ok.  This is your first real test….  Yup that works.  I’m going to change that code later.

“Stand up and turn around.  Let me see what I own for the next year.  Nice tiny pecker.  Don’t like that it feels that it is free to get hard.  I completely understand why it is hard.  I’m that fucking hot.  When I install you inside the cab, I’ll have a cage to put on it.  It won’t come off too often, if ever. 

“Are you naturally smooth, or do you shave your chest?...  Good.  No manly pelt for you, God made sure of it.  Your pubes will come off in a bit too.  Turn around, let me see my new fuck hole….  Nice and hairless.  You douched out like I told you?  Good.  We’ll get you set up for cleaning out while on the road.  How many times in the past week have you been bred?... 

“Interesting.  I don’t get it.  You are quite cute.  You seem to have no problem getting men to fuck you.  You have money, enough to not only pay me over 100K across the next year, but you can take a year off to be tied up, roughed up, fucked up in the back cab of some unknown brutal asshole truck driver.

“I don’t know what you are running from.  And I don’t care.  What I do care about is I don’t want some drama creeping into my cab, during the year you are with me and the time after.

“Get on your knees and look up and into your phone’s camera.  I want you to say the following in your own words.  That you come here of your own choice.  You are paying me $50,000 up front to live in cab with me, and $5,000 each month.  This is non-refundable at any time.  You want to be controlled by me in all aspect of your life.  You know that I am a brutal sadistic man.  Sex with me is not a guarantee and is not part of the money paid.  I want you to beg on camera for me to brutally use you, sexually and otherwise.  That includes using you anyway I see fit.  You consent to all my demands.  You can revoke it at any time and terminate our agreement.  In fact you know either of us can terminate this role.  If I do it, you will be left naked on the side of the road somewhere.  If you do it for any reason, then you would gladly pay me a penalty of additional $50K, transferred from this phone.  You will beg to be bound for most of the day.  You will beg for me to humiliate you and degrade you.  You got all that?

“Good.  Now look at your phone’s camera…. Wait I should also get you on my camera too.  Can’t be too cautious….  Focus your attention on your phone, and… go….

––––

“That’s done.  So now let’s get you locked up properly in the cab.  Come here.  When crawling into my cab and I’m right behind you, pause and lean over my seat.  Stick your pussy out.  Let the world see your ass.  I want to check out my new fuck hole. 

“This is a pretty pussy.  Oh there is some hair back here.  Don’t start yelping now.  I just yanked out a couple.  There’s a lot more to pull out.  What?  You think I’m going to use my clippers on a pussy?  Or your crotch?  Fuck that.  You’ll be fine with a yank or two… or twenty, or whatever it takes. 

“If you are going to have an issue that I’m going to yank out your hair, this is not going to go well for you.  If you can’t handle one minute with me, how the hell are you going to last for a year?  You paid for one year to submit to a sadistic trucker with one the fattest cocks out there.  Do you still want to do this?  Or are you living in a fantasy world?  If you want to bail, now is the time.  I will pull out of here, leaving you naked without your phone.  And I will definitely make sure that the penalty fee is transferred to my account before you can even make it over to one of those two drivers over there.

“What’s it going to be?  Climb down and go over to them, or climb into the bunk on your back and get your legs up high.  You have ten seconds to decide your next year.

“Atta faggot.  When you get up there, you’ll see some ankle and wrist cuffs.  Go ahead and put them on.  I need to secure your shit. 

––––

“Hey shithead.  I talked with one of the other drivers who was watching you present yourself to me.  He wants to fuck you.  I told him that I will only let him if he’s brutal.  He just smiled and said, ‘Ohhhhh I can do that.’  So it looks you got your first fuck customer. 

“Damn you look good.  But let’s get you secured.  These wrist restraints get clipped here.  You secure?...  Good.  Now this ankle goes over here.  The hard one is this last ankle.  The fags I secure always find this difficult….  Relax.  Relax this leg.  Fucker, just suffer through the pain.  This is the pose you will be in as we drive across the country; your cunt leading the way.

“Now for this.  See this.  This is not your ordinary chastity cage.  No this one flattens your dick head to just over half an inch.  There is no way for you pull out.  Your balls, as tiny as they are, are pushed in your taint region so that when you sit down, you will crush them.  You won’t be able to get a hard on due to the pain it causes.  This is going to hurt. 

“Scream.  I don’t give a fuck.  This is going on.  There!  Now for the lock….  With that click, this is not coming off. 

“Oh shit!  He’s already here.

“Come on up….  I was about to cunt the fag.  You can watch….  I just need to remove some of his pubes.  Get over there so you can watch.  I don’t use a clipper or anything like that.  I just grab a hold of a tuft and yank it out.  The faggots always scream when I do that.  That’s music to my ears.  Gets me rock hard.

“No, you can leave the curtain open.  I don’t give a shit who sees me take ownership of this fagmeat.  If the other driver wants to join, so be it.  This is the pussy’s first moments submitting to me; he needs to know what’s in store for him for the next year.

“Hey shithead, open your fucking mouth.  Eat your pubic hair.  Chew and swallow.  Everything that gets yanked out goes right into your mouth.

“That’s what you got to do to these fags.  He knew that I am a sadistic bastard when he agreed to live with me for a year.  He knew that’s what he was paying me for….

“Yeah, he paid me fifty thousand to ride with me and ride me….  No shit!  And he’s paying me five thousand every month.  Fuck yeah.  The first transfer went through about ten minutes ago.  A friend of mine told me that I should be charging for my fat cock.  He told me about a site where this type of shit goes on.  I posted that I’m a driver with a seven by eight-inch dick looking for a hole to fuck while on the road for the next year.  I jokingly put a fifty-thousand-dollar price tag, and wouldn’t you know it within a week, this faggot replied.  Once I showed him a pic of my cock and me next to my tractor, he wanted to throw money at me. 

“Open up.  Eat this last tuft.  I will save the rest of your snatch for another time.  It’s time for me to fuck this cunt.  Let me show you the dick that will own your life.  Look at it.  It’s barely rock hard, and it’s already fatter than a beer can.  You got me leaking boy.  There is so much slop under my foreskin.  You will be expected to clean me up every day, after every time I fuck you.

“Hand me some of that lube.

“Hey shithead.  You ready to be cunted?  The lube goes on for my pleasure, not yours….

“Scream fucker scream.  Right to the root.  Resist or accept me, I don’t give a shit.  I’m going to dump my three-day load into you through all your screaming.  You want me to cum faster, keep screaming.  It ain’t going to take me long.  First cuntings never do.  Your pussy walls are like silk on my dick.  Oh fuck.  I’m gonna cum. 

“Look up at me.  You know I own you?  You know this cunt is mine?  Just nod.  Good.  You want this load?  Of course, you do.  It’s what you live for.  It’s gonna cost you though.  Look at my fist.  Here comes your first black eye.

“BOOM!  Fuck yeah.  And I’m gonna cum.  I’m gonna cum!  Ahhhhhh!  Ahhhhhh.  Fuck yeah.

“Whew!  That was fucking good.  You’re up!...  What?  That bother you?  Then don’t fuck him.  I don’t give a shit.  Besides, I love giving black eyes.  My favorite part is making the fagmeat respond ‘I didn’t listen’ to any inquiry as to how it happened.  Damn.  Thinking about that is getting me hard again.  He’s already starting to regain consciousness.

“Hey Shithead!  Rise and shine in the summertime!

“Your dick is still hard.  Go on.  Fuck him…. Yeah, there you go.  Go on give it to him.  You said you would be brutal.  Fuckin’ be brutal….  Yeah yank his nips right off.  He needs to know the year of hell that lies in front of him.”

[sir-yeehaw-paws]

The forced sanitization of the internet has become so annoying. You haven't been able to share news articles on Facebook in Canada since late 2023 (and yes, its FACEBOOK I get it, but a lot of families do still use it as a primary means of communication, and small businesses use it). Some people get around this by taking screenshots of news, and posting the caps, but this whole mindset of everything in sight needing to appeal to advertizers is depressing as fuck.

I don't have a TikTok account, but the whole thing where you have to physically get aroudn 'bad topics' with ridiculous censorship, or sites bending and caving to implementing a stern 'no NSFW' policy that, I'll point out DOESN'T WORK (so what was the point?) so that it can be more viable to running ads, (half of which are bots with explicit porn: becasue it doesn't matter what is actually being advertized, as long as the persons paid for that ad space) proves that these factors aren't about "protecting the innocence" of anyone, but for money.

Which sure duh obviously but it's a little pathetic that people can't do proper research or get information about topics, without having to use god knows how many work arounds, because "this word is considered unsafe, this word is too controversial, this that." And now when you DO try to use Google, your first set of results are going to be sponsored ads, or search terms, and the amount of hits you'll get decreases.

I was taught how to do effective research in University. Methods that are now oudated, because ads rule the internet. Forget artistic freedom, forget human desires, forget anything that used to make the internet even semi-manageable; as long as it caters to ads, it's allowed.

There's some arguments too that people throw "to many hissy fits" about not being allowed NSFW. That it's not needed, that you can "go ten mintues without porn" blah blah blah.

Sure, you can do that. But the fact that there's no real place for minors to go and have their own place online, and that previously "17+ ONLY" sites (which tumblr was, btw) all caved to the pressure of "protect them so we can make money!" is just sad.

And it's not just porn that gets censored, by the by. It's anything deemed "inapporiate" which is also how lots of NEWS gets butchered and censored. Because you see goddamned news articles with "so and so unalived themselves" or whatever the hell it is. And YouTubers have to report on current events with "Mr. Person of this Article *bleeped* himself on the 2nd of March." etc. Because they will get demonitized otherswise. Censorship takes out context and shoves eveything under an umbrella.

So now you're watching a news report, with censored 'bad words' before a three minute ad roll interrupts that video, at some ridiculous mid-sentence moment, to show you an image of some mobile game with naked women shooting ppl in the head. All things that aren't supposed to be allowed but are accepted because it's ads.

But heaven's forbid you post an art piece with visible naked breasts, what would the children think!?

[lanadelray-gurl]

''My heart is, and always will be, yours''

Singer!Austin butler x Bandmate!fem!reader

Warning: Angst,fighting,cussing,hidden love,fluff,soft smut,p n v,fingering,biting,crying,falling in love(really a friends/enemies to lovers kind of thing)

Summary: you and Austin had started a band with a few other friends back in high school.You played bass and he play guitar,you both sang together. But what happens after you start to fall in love with him but his new found fame has gotten to his head?

You had always been interested in music,you grew up with it. Your mom played the piano and your father played the bass which he would go on to pass down to you,you didn’t have a club for music in your high school so you decided to make a post on your facebook(gosh you feel old looking back on this) you made a small post to your 20 friends on Facebook. It read;’Do you like music? Do you like making music? Can you play an instrument but simply can’t find anywhere to play? Well please send me a message if you’re interested in a music club after school at my house!’ You sounded desperate,,which was the case. See you always wanted to start a band,your dad did when he was your age and you decided fuck it why not! That’s when you met him. Him being Austin,at first you thought he was cute,he had nicely styled dirty blond hair,pretty blue eyes and he was tall. And did I mention he could sing AND play guitar. Yeah..he was perfect.

When you first talked or Austin he had messaged you on Facebook,you didn’t even know he went to your school! You barely paid attention to your surroundings in school,either writing stupid songs or drawing little things in your notebook. He told you he was very interested in your ‘club’ and even sent a video of him playing the acoustic guitar and singing an Elvis song! It was a bit old school but you sighed it,he told you he could pretty much play any song you wanted him to. He also added that he had a few friends who also went to your school who’d be interested. One being named Adam;he was your age and played drums. Then you had Johnny; he was a few years older and played rhythm guitar. It was perfect what could go wrong!

Apparently everything could go wrong—

Well not necessarily for the whole group,it seemed to just be you. It’s been a few years now,you and Austin had been posting your music (which was mostly covers of really popular songs) to any platform out there! And it gained a lot of traction,you both really enjoyed it,as time passed you guys went a recording studio,produced your own music,posted it and the next week you were approved by a big record label. You all of course said yes,you could see the vision,your name in lights. Well your bands name;Ecstasy (can you tell I got lazy) Your bands music was mostly sensual and meaningful. That’s how you saw it,but it started to look like all of the bands hard work was just a money grab for the rest of your band.

As the years went on you and Austin grew close,you were completely smitten by him. You tried to make all of his ideas for songs come true..even if they sucked. But he didn’t see you like that,you wrote the songs,play the bass and they get money. Which hurt you once you realized. As things progressed you noticed how at every show and on every tour he was with a girl or at least flirting with the girls in the crowd. If hurt you but you couldn’t say it,you had even thought about leaving the band or even going solo but you didn’t want to be selfish. You stayed quiet,Adam and Johnny took notice to your change in personality. Your once bubbly and excited personality had turned kind of dark and closed off,no one could tell what was wrong because you just kept to yourself if you weren’t making music. Sometimes you’d be pretty happy during rehearsals or before recording but somehow Austin brought your mood down.

He’d constantly bring a girl or two to everything the band went to. Didn’t matter if it was private or if it was just a casual hang out. It was to say the least embarrassing and you let it go on for years now. Why couldn’t you stick up for yourself?! God..it was pathetic. You just ignored it at this point,you were emotionally numbed at least that’s what you thought until your most recent show.

Your band was preparing for a show,you kept quiet the whole time. Austin noticed this,even thought it’s been going on for so long he finally noticed your change in personality. He grabbed your shoulder gently,you were grabbing your bass from its case you looked back at him and gently shrugged him off of your shoulder.

“Hey man what’s going on with you..?” He spoke with a bit of force. You looked back at him,you were wearing an amazing outfit,you were wearing a tight black dress with fishnets and combat boots and he took notice..when did you become so pretty? You had beautiful makeup but he could see your eye bags and just how tired you looked. You spoke,your once soft and sweet voice was now slightly rough and scratchy “nothing..just let’s get ready..” you walked towards the stage everything was ready for the show to start,Austin followed close behind you. Tonight was gonna be stressful..

You were nearing the end of the show,you played your heart out,so did the whole band. It was time for your biggest song. This is where you and Austin got really close and just made it seem like everything was sweet and beautiful but it was farm from it. As the song played you felt tears stinging your eyes.(listen to the song above now!!)

“Without shame..”

His voice was smooth and beautiful god why were you so in love with him? It hurt your very soul.

“Two outfits then to my name..”

It was almost time for you to join in,you didn’t know if you could do it. This song was about love but you knew he didn’t love you..and that was so painful.

“You’d end up in one when you’d stay..”

You felt your heart start to race,you walked towards the microphone,standing right next to him. His hands stringing the guitar skillfully. That both turned you on and made you sick. You wanted those hands around you but every other girl got what you wanted.

“We had no where to go..and every desire for going there..”

You began to sing with him,he glanced at you. Your voice was beautiful to him,and once the fans heard you sing they went crazy they loved your voice and something inside him suddenly felt connected to you. His heart began to race.

“I heard once..it’s the comforts that makes us feel numb” You both continued to sing together for the next few moments,your voice made him shiver and his made you wince from the pain from the heart break. “We’d go out with no way to get home..and we’d sleep on somebody’s floor..wake up feeling like a millionaire..” you both continued to sing your heart out,you both looked up and stared into each others eyes. You felt emotions take over you. Austin and the rest of the band could tell you were bubbling with emotion. About to burst whenever you were tipped over the edge and the intensity of the eye contact was what tipped you over. “Wish I’d known it was just our turn..(we just got by)..Being blamed for a world we had no power in..(but we tried)..” Johnny and Adam joined in for a few parts now,giving the song an angelic sound,but your voice seemed to over power them.

“You and I had nothing to show..(we didn’t know)..But the best of the world in the palm of our hands..(anything,darling)” You felt the tears fall down your cheeks,you were now staring to the floor trying not to let your emotions get the best do you,Austin noticed this. He felt a stinging in his heart why did he suddenly care so much..? “And,darling, I haven’t felt it since then..I don’t how the feeling ended..” Your voices cracked slightly,the crowd roared happily but your band knew it was a sign of you losing yourself to you emotions,Austin almost lost his breath. You had raw talent and hearing you putting your real emotions into this certain song made his chest almost cave.

“But I know being reckless and young..Is not how the damage gets done..” You continued to cry as you sang,it was heartbreaking to watch but the fans didn’t care they just wanted to hear you sing with Austin. But now that he kept thinking about you and your new persona he felt a connection of heartbreak with you but why? He maybe thought it was just heartbreaking to see you cry because he was perfectly fine..or at least that’s what he thought. “One time we would want for nothing..(one time we had it all,love).. We knew what our love was worth (when we had nothing)..” you looked up to the sky for a few seconds,your eyes locked with Austin’s once more. He was caught off guard for a moment,you noticed this and felt a since of pride but this.

“..Now we're always missing something (I miss when).. I miss when we did not need much..” Austin backed away from the microphone,he continued to play the guitar. You grabbed the microphone and stared to sing your solo part,you took a deep breath and closed your eyes tight as you put your heart into this part.

“Oh,if the car ran,the car was enough..If the sun shone on us,it’s a plus..and the tank was always filled up! Only enough for our getting there..” Tears streamed down your face as you kept your eyes closed tightly. You opened your eyes finally and looked around and watched as Austin came back to the microphone to end the song and then the show.

Finally once you finished that song you all waved to the fans and you rushed off stage,wiping your tears and sobbing as you put your bass back in its case. You wiped off your messed up makeup,Austin noticed this as he walked past you to get ready to leave on the bus back to the hotel you were all staying. You were all on the bus now,you sat far away from everyone,in the very front you were on your phone mindlessly scrolling socials. You felt eyes on you and you knew it was Austin,that made your heart squeeze itself.

Once you all arrived at the hotel all of you got onto the elevator,Austin was oddly close standing so close your shoulders pressed together. Once the elevator dinged you all went separate ways to your rooms..or at least that’s what you thought. You heard footsteps behind you,you walked towards your room and once you reached for the door you quickly turned around and saw Austin. “Hey..” he spoke breathlessly. You looked annoyed but mostly emotional he couldn’t read your expression. “Can I come in?..” you looked shocked by this,you quickly shook your head and tried to rush into your room “no Austin— No not just no,just fuck no—“ you scoffed and walked into your room and tried to slam the door but he stopped it and barged into your room. You turned to him and had tears streaming down your already redden and wet cheeks. “We’re talking..I don’t care how you feel (Y/N)..” he spoke with a bit of anger. Your eyes widened before you gave your speech,well that’s how would Austin described it.

“No! You don’t get to fucking decide when we talk..you don’t get to tell me how to feel! Now after what you did to me! Did you not see it?! Did you not see how I looked at you and hear how I spoke?! The way I made everything happen just for you?! I even put your shitty song lyrics in our song!” You screamed and continued to let the tears flow,using your hands to speak and put more emotions into it.

“Are you kidding me?! I’m trying to figure out why you’re so emotional and weird all of a sudden! I’m being nice to you! We’ve been friends for years and im showing I care. What are you going on ab—!” You scoffed and threw your hands up in the air before turning away just to look back at him and pointing a finger into his chest.

“I. Loved. You..ever since I met you I loved you. My heart was set on you and your stupid blue eyes and your perfect lips and perfect body..a-and and—“ you put your hands up into your hair and gripped onto it “you..you were just you and I fell in love with yo—“ you let your hands fall to your sides but before you could speak he grabbed the sides of your face and kissed you passionately but with a bit of aggression. It caught you off guard but you kissed back,you held onto his wrist gently as you both walked. You were walking backwards and he basically guided you to your room. He picked you up by the back of your thighs,her laid you down on the bed and continued to passionate kiss.

He pulled away from the kiss and lifted up your dress,pulling it off your beautiful body. Happy to see you were wearing no bra but a pretty pair of black lace panties,you crossed your arms over your breast and shuddered. You turned away from him and whimpered softly,Austin untied your combat boots and pulled them off your tired feet,he pulled off your socks and kiss up from your calves to your thighs. He pulled off his shirt and kicked off his shoes. He fell to his knees and kissed your inner thigh from the right to the left side,gently biting down on your soft skins. You felt your pussy clinch around nothing as the wetness from you core drenched the cotton.

You moaned gently and covered your mouth,you felt him hook his fingers underneath the band of your panties. He tugged them off,you lifted your hips up and bit your bottom lip a little too hard, you pierced the skin making you flinch. He looked up and smirked up at you knowing he made you crazy,he put your thighs over his shoulders. He started licking up your arousal,it was sweet. The best things he’s ever tasted,he sucked your clit and watched as you squirmed and pressed your hips down onto his face the best you could. He pulled away and rubbed two fingers against your wet core,getting them wet with your slick. With the two wet digits he fingered your drenched and aching pussy slowly,pumping his fingers gently while curling them up to hit that spongey spot that made you arch your back.

He went back to licking and sucking your clit,he took you for granted and he was gonna make up for it. Your beautiful body and your sweet pussy was everything he was missing,all the girls meant nothing to him anymore. He realized he needed you,only you that all he could think of now. You started to feel a coil in your stomach tangle and begin to unwind and get close to snapping. Knowing you were about to cum you tried to push him away but he wouldn’t let you,he pressed your hips down and licked and sucked faster but still at a gentle pace. His fingers working and stretching you out. You rocked you hips wildly “Austin,Austin fuckfuckfuckfuck!—“ you moaned loudly and finally came into his fingers,he moaned against your clit. You gasped loudly and whimpered,he finally pulled away and pulled his fingers out slowly.

“I’m gonna make you feel so good honey..I’ve neglected you for so long baby..I’m so so sorry..”

He spoke softly,he stood up and took off his belt and unbuttoned and then unzipped his jeans before pulling them down along with his boxers. His cocked bounced up,your eyes widened. You’ve seen the outline of it before,you knew he was blessed but seeing it hard and up close made you shake. It was long and tick,leaking with pre-cum,you did this to him and you couldn’t believe it. You felt years well up in your eyes and he noticed,he gently kissed near your eyes and over your eyelids. “Don’t cry honey..I’m sorry baby I really am..” you finally cried tears of pure joy and laughed as you wrapped your arms around his neck “nonono don’t worry I-I’m just so happy like..I’ve dreamed about this..” you hiccuped as you felt him pick you up and lay on down long ways in the bed with him towering over you.

He sat up while sitting in his knees,he grabbed your calves and put them on other sides of his hips. He pulled you closer,the shaft of his cock laid against your sensitive clit. It made you moan softly,he stared into your eyes as he slowly rubbed your stomach and smiled happily. It was a genuine smile,something you’ve always wanted to see for so long. “I should’ve found out sooner baby..I could’ve made you feel so so so good sooner..” he whispered,he held the shaft of his cock and slowly pressed the tip into your tight cunt. “Oh fuck aus—“ you let your eyes roll back as you felt him press every inch into you,he filled you up so nicely. His eyes were glued onto his cock sliding into you,his mouth hung open.

He had finally bottomed out,he was pressed into you so nicely you felt him grazing over your cervix. This made you cry out,he leaned down holding your little body close to him,you once again wrapped your arms around him and scratched his tan skin,leaving angry red marks. You heard him groan loudly into your ear,her was fully pressed against your cervix now in this position you couldn’t handle this for long. He slowly pulled out making you whimper before he slowly pushed all the way back it. You let out a loud gasp and you let out a choked moan,he raised up slightly and stared down at you and he observed your fucked our face.

“God your pussy is sucking me I-in I could cum right now..fill you up nice and g-good..”

He whispered softly and started to thrust,it was slow but it had a bit of speed and power but not too much. He didn’t want to hurt you not ever or ever again,he knew he hurt you so many times before and he didn’t want to hurt you in such an intimate moment. You hid your face in his shoulder and bit down leaving a dark red and purple mark,he moaned loudly. Now his thrust gained more speed and strength,he thrusted into you like his life depended on it.

He growled softly into your ear,he kissed up your neck,he left dark marks along your soft neck and up your jaw. He groaned loudly now. You knew he was holding back you wanted all of him. “P-please Aus..please fuck me..pleasepleaseplease..I need your cock deep inside of me..” You moaned into his ear and he gladly took your invitation. He thrusted into you wildly and roughly,she growled and grunted loudly and he looked wild. You stared as his face contorted and twisted as he thrusted in and out of your sopping cunt,you cried out and rocked you hips against him as you felt you second orgasm approaching,you clinched and sloppily grind against his thrust you couldn’t take much more.

“Is my baby gonna cum?Hah..—Hm? My pretty girl wanna cum on my cock?Fuck..—Come on a baby be a good girl..let me feel you cum all over my cock..god you’re so fucking right..” He grunted loudly and stared into your tired half lidded eyes. You nodded you head quickly as you felt your climax getting closer. With one last strong thrust you came all over his cock,squeezing down on his cock making him shutter and he gave you one more thrust before feeling up your warm cunt with his hot cum. He groaned and slammed into you. He stared up at the ceiling before dropping his head and staring down at you.

He slowly pulled out,watching as his cum spilled out of you. He smirked and let out a breathless laugh before plopping next to you and pulling you close. He wrapped the blanket over the both of you,as you both cuddled he lazily dragged his hand down your stomach and to your puffy and sore pussy,he gently pressed his fingers into you. Gently pumping into you,trying to keep his cum inside of you. You whimpered softly and snuggled your face into his shoulder.

“I love you..” he whispered down into your ear as he closed his eyes and spoke sleepily,he was getting close to passing out.

“I love you too..I always will.” You spoke softly and closed your eyes. You both finally fell asleep,you slept in until the late afternoon that next day and it was the best sleep of your life.

Hii! I hope you guys enjoy this little one shot,I finished this before my other stories so I’m posting it! More coming soon..



[thatdisasterauthor]

AI and the Bursting of the Social Media Bubble: How to Survive as a Creative

I've been wanting to put my thoughts on AI and Social Media into a more collected format, so I've written up a longer post on it on my blog on my website, and I'm sharing it here as well.

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Let’s face it, being a creative is becoming a rougher and rougher ride lately, especially if you’re a creative who grew up on the internet. A lot has changed in just the last year. The downfall of Twitter, the rise of AI. For awhile there we had a golden age of social media platforms that could really help us build our audience and careers, only for that all to start evaporating seemingly overnight, leaving a lot of creators stranded and disoriented. Look on any site right now and you’ll find creators terrified of losing everything to AI, creators terrified of losing their audience if their main social media presence gets shut down or banned, creators completely unsure of how to navigate the industry with half their tools taken away.

It sucks.

But, at the same time, as quick as it feels, this has been a long time coming. The social media bubble has been primed to burst for awhile now. What made social media a great tool for creators in the beginning was its authenticity. Social media was social. You found people you liked, you followed them, and you saw what they posted in the order they posted it. There were no games. No tricks. Ads that were present were less intrusive, less targeted, and less frequent. People weren’t as determined to play numbers games with who could get the most followers, the most likes, the most most most. An independent creator or small studio might sell to you, but you knew there were people behind those products. You knew there was a person who cared, who just wanted to show you the neat thing they made, not drive up their metrics or try out all those Cool Tricks they learned in a business psychology class.

Then big companies said “hey, we want a piece of that pie too,” so they started hopping on to social media as well. But it didn’t work for them, not the way it did for independent creators, because it wasn’t authentic. It was marketing. There wasn’t a person who cared behind the screen, it was some kid hired fresh out of school and handed a brand standards packet and told to make it work. They didn’t care about really connecting with people, they cared about sales and sales alone.

The big companies didn’t like that it wasn’t working for them, oh no. People should be giving them attention too!!!1! So the shift began. Ads got more targeted and more frequent. Algorithms grew in size and scope, driving people towards content they never asked for or showed any real interest in, barely showing things that people had actually followed at all. Social media stopped being social. It became marketing media and, as a consequence, small creators got buried in the deluge. Some gave up, some did their best to trundle along doing what they could, and some tried to play the game under its new rules only to have their audience still evaporate because, without a huge marketing budget, the corporate method doesn’t work at all. A few got lucky and went viral, rising to the top without having to play by the rules, but many of those struggled to maintain it and crashed back down soon after.

Then there’s the homogenization. Facebook bought Instagram. TikTok exploded in popularity, so Youtube added Shorts and Instagram added Reels. Twitter added longer and longer content options, despite being a micro blogging site. Patreon took off, so everyone started adding paid content options. Social media sites were so terrified of someone doing better than them that they all became exactly the same. Before, you had an account on every site because they each did something different. They each had their own value. But now they’re all the same, so why bother having multiple accounts if you can accomplish the same thing on each one? These companies have shot themselves in the foot by no longer offering anything unique, then got mad that they were bleeding and blamed their users even though they were the ones holding the gun.

And, of course, Twitter is over there bleeding out on the floor. Plenty of social media sites have risen and fallen over the years—Myspace, DeviantART, to name a couple—but Twitter is the first one to be so maliciously and quickly taken out with a shot to the head. Almost overnight creators have lost a major source of connection to literary agents, art directors, job boards, and just a generally vibrant network of other creators and supporters. A few contenders tried to step into the ring to replace Twitter, but all seem to have fizzled out within a few months.

Amidst the social media meltdown, a new player stomped onto the scene: Artificial Intelligence. It swept in just as quickly as the demise of Twitter and at about the same time. Within just months it went from generating strange blobby horses with too many legs to almost perfectly replicating the styles of well known artists. Which, understandably, made everyone panic. As soon as it was on the scene we saw major publishers using it to create book covers (rather than hire an artist), news sites using it to create graphics (rather than hire an artist), people using it to pump out low quality books to put on Amazon (rather than learning to write themselves), and plenty more. We learned that the data sets these AI were trained on were all stolen art and writing. We watched everyone wave off our concerns and tell us we were overreacting, that this was just the “democratization of art.” Nevermind that a computer doesn’t need to pay rent, or fill the fridge, or pay medical bills.

The AI saga is still ongoing, and likely will be for a long time yet. But this article isn’t about AI in and of itself, so we’ll leave it there.

In the latest development of the social media bubble burst, the RESTRICT act got thrown into the pile. Falsely dubbed the “TikTok Ban,” the RESTRICT act is a vastly overreaching bill that would decimate the internet as we know it. It actually doesn’t mention TikTok at all within the text of the bill, TikTok is just the Trojan horse being used to try and push the bill through. It has, however, garnered vehement disagreement from both sides of the aisle so who knows what will happen there.

That’s where we stand right now. Many social media sites are dying, AI is stealing work, and the government is trying to destroy the internet as we know it. Good times. Good times. So what the hell are us creators supposed to do? Well, there’s a few ways to go about it and a few good ways to protect yourself.

Firstly: remember that you are unique. AI is not actually intelligent, it cannot actually learn, it can just cobble together data with zero actual understanding of what that data means. Only you can come up with your characters, your stories, your designs. Even an AI trained exclusively on your work cannot create the things you will create in the future. An AI can’t know why it’s important to draw seams on clothing to give the shapes more form, it can’t know why it’s important to show not tell in a story, it can’t understand the importance of proper kerning in a logo. Do you think Good Omens (both the book and the show) would have the nuanced characterization it does if there weren’t real people with real experiences behind its creation? Your creations are yours, you learned the things you needed to to bring them to life, you cobbled together dozens of tiny, seemingly inconsequential experiences from your own life to create them, and that is why they will always have value.

Secondly: be authentic. Be excited about your own work. Be a person. Don’t just push your content and shop and sales all the time. Relax. Geek out about a fandom. Share a meme. Get in a lengthy friendly debate about ancient copper merchants. You don’t have to, and shouldn’t, overshare your personal life, but you can and should still be a person. You are not a corporation and trying to act like one, trying to keep pace with what they do, will just hinder you. Being authentic will build trust between you and your audience, and that is key to creating a stable environment. An extension of this: don’t beg. Your audience does not owe you attention. Give them a reason to care and they will, even if it takes awhile.

Thirdly: own your audience. Have your own website, even if it is a simple single page business card website to point people to other places. Make it your hub so that people—fans, art directors, agents, etc.—will be able to find you and reach out to you even if your social media sites go down. Have a newsletter that people can sign up for, and back that data up frequently. Don’t rely on any social media website to hold your following for you, because it can vanish overnight and suddenly you’ll be back at square one. But a CSV of emails backed up onto a couple of hard drives? That’s YOURS. Substack died? Oh well, you backed up the CSV a couple days ago and now you can just upload it to a different newsletter platform and pick up right where you left off.

Fourthly: figure out what kind of creative you want to be. Yeah, some work is going to be lost to AI. Yeah, you’re going to miss out on some jobs because you can’t chat with art directors on Twitter anymore. But there will always be work out there for creatives, even if it is different than you used to imagine. Maybe you won’t be able to get into concept art with a huge gaming company the way you dreamed, but that doesn’t mean you can’t find a great indie studio to work with. Maybe you won’t be able to get a traditional publishing deal because you don’t like their values anymore, but that doesn’t mean you can’t run a great self-publishing campaign on Kickstarter.

Fifthly: support other creators. Share their work. Point art directors their way if you don’t have time for a particular job. Introduce them to your own audience. Boost their commission info posts. Build your network.

Lastly, ask yourself this: are you going to stop consuming content from your favorite creators just because AI exists? Just because Twitter died? Are you going to shelve all your favorite books because AI is out there? Stop looking at art that isn’t made by an AI? No. You’re not. You’re going to keep consuming the things you love, and so will everyone else. Maybe not in the same ways, maybe not in the same amounts, but they will.

One final note: do you know what happened when photography started to become widely available and affordable? Illustrators panicked. If newspapers could just snap a quick photo of the latest news, they wouldn’t need to hire illustrators. If catalogues could photograph their products, they wouldn’t need to hire illustrators. It was a huge shift in the entire industry, and illustrators did lose work. But you know what? A century later, we’re still here. We still have value. We still get work. We still create amazing things that can’t be done any other way. Our ancestors have weathered this storm before, and we will weather it this time, even if we get a little banged up in the process.

If you enjoyed this content, tips are very much appreciated! (But 100% not required!)

[incognita-soul]

hey, i saw in your bio that you work on tall ships and i was wondering if u had any advice.

i’ve been on 2 tall ship sailing trips before (+some dinghy sailing) and got my competent crew recently so i’m pretty inexperienced. on those sailing trips i’ve met young adults who were working on the boats as volunteers. i’d like to be able to volunteer on tall ships one day.

do you have any advice for the best way to gain experience and learn stuff? (if possible on a budget). i’m taking a gap year next year and i’d really like to take the chance to go sailing and get better at it. (i’m in the uk if that’s relevant.)

absolutely no pressure to answer and i’m sorry this is so vague and clueless! anyway, thanks for taking the time to read this. your blog is cool :))

Heya! Thank you, and I'd be happy to give you my two cents! All of my boat experience has been in the US so take my advice with a transatlantic grain of salt, but here goes!

Firstly, two trips and some dinghy sailing and a competent crew cert is actually quite a bit in comparison to your average person starting out in the world of boats, so don't worry about feeling too inexperienced! You're already on a good track. I've been working on tall ships in some capacity for over 10 years and I still don't have any specific certifications (I've got a lot of experience and sea time, I just haven't had time to take any of my courses and exams for actual licensing).

Facebook is (unfortunately) still the best place to network, especially for international opportunities. There are a variety of groups that you can join. I'm personally in Schooner Bums, Tall Ship Opportunities, Women Who Sail, Crew Finder, and a few other private groups specific to the organizations I've worked for. A lot of organizations will post to these groups with job opportunities with specific requirements, so it's fairly easy to get the info you need. I'm sure there are a few groups specific to sailing in the UK. In the US, we have Tall Ships America, which is an organization that provides networking, training, and job opportunities for mostly US based sailors and boats. I'm not sure if the UK has an equivalent organization, but I do recommend even though you are UK based you should peruse their website, especially the Billet Bank, which is where job links are posted:

You're in the UK, so there are a shit ton of boats there but as far as I know most of them are museum boats that don't do a lot of sailing. I will say from personal experience that museum boats with a good volunteer maintenance program are great places to start for establishing a strong set of foundational skills (knots, understanding and maintenance of the rig, carpentry, etc.). You might not get much actual sea time with a museum boat, but you will learn the things that will make you a better sailor. I got into tall ships by working as a historical interpreter and then as part of the sailing/maintenance crew here:

https://www.jyfmuseums.org/visit/jamestown-settlement/living-history/ships#ad-image-0

Most tall ship organizations are based around education, both for the public and for the crew, so it's easy to find a boat with some sort of introductory training program relatively near wherever you live. These range from expensive pay-to-play working vacation type experiences, to paying a fee to participate in a structured comprehensive training curriculum after which you can become long-term crew, to volunteering weekends sanding and oiling blocks in exchange for the opportunity to sail.

Since you said you are taking a gap year, my advice is look for a short-term comprehensive live-aboard program that gets your foot in the door for staying on as regular crew, potentially even paid crew. Idk any specific ones in the UK, but here's the one that the last boat I worked on offers as an example of what i mean:

If you've got time before your gap year starts, try to find something local, like volunteering for a mueseum like I mentioned earlier, so that you get used to the vocabulary and foundational knowledge of boats. That way you can really get the most out of a more immersive program later on and you won't feel too much like an oversaturated sponge trying desperately to sop up more information even though your brain is leaking out of your ears.

I'm not sure if you're wanting to do tall ships longer term or just something one-off for the gap year, but if you're in it for the long haul just be prepared that it's a lot of hard work for not much financial return. I don't mean to discourage you, it's just good to know that upfront. On Lady Washington we have a saying that "we work on an 18th century boat for 18th century wages."

Unfortunately the tall ship industry is kind of hard budget wise. Most training programs cost quite a bit of money, most jobs are either volunteer or don't pay very well (industry standard deckhand pay in the US is about $1000/month), and most higher level positions require various levels of certifications (for which course and exam fees can run pretty high). You can do it on a budget, especially since most long term positions are live aboard so you don't have to pay for rent or groceries, but if you want to make a career out or it, it takes a lot of years of working for less money than you're worth before you start earning real money back.

Despite all that, working on tall ships is still an incredible and fulfilling experience that I recommend to anyone with a love of the sea and learning practical skills!

Sorry I couldn't give you more specific information, as I have yet to work on any UK boats. Good luck, and please tell me when you find a program that works for you!

[foxens-den-of-divination]

Yes, Another Tumblr Oracle Blog!

Hi, yall! I'm Foxen. You may know my main account @the-fox-jawed-cryptid or my witchblr @the-fox-jawed-witch or my Witchblr Writing account @afledglings-guideto-witchcraft.

This is my Paid Divination blog and a place where you can find all of my other magical services.

First, what I offer and the prices.

Paid Divination

This first section is all general ADVICE related spreads. I will not answer yes/no questions, medical questions, time sensitive questions, legal questions, or relationship questions in these spreads.

2 Card Spreads $4

3 Card Spreads $6

4 Card Spreads $8

+$2 any additional card added to a spread.

This next section is all based on relationship spreads. Again, I will not answer yes/no questions, medical, time sensitive, or legal questions. All relationship spreads are for ADVICE.

5 Card General Relationship Advice $10

6 Card How do I find My True Love Advice $12

7 Card Basic Relationship Advice $14

8 Card Manifesting a Soulmate Advice $16

10 Card Potential Future Love Advice $20

+$2 any additional card added to any spread.

Deity and Spirit (deceased or guide) Advice Spreads.

5 Card Deity Contact Advice Spread $10

Spirit Contact Advice Spread $10

Divination Deals

Pay What You Can

Mystery Divination

Other Paid Magical Deals

Spells $5+ (I will NOT cast ANY spells. I will only create them. 100% customized for you and will not be shared with anyone else.)

Sigils $3 hand drawn or computer generated.

Pendulum Questions $2 per question. No medical (should I go to the doctor?), time sensitive (will I pass my exam that's coming up?) No legal questions (should I sue this person?) No relationship/thirdparty questions (should I date this person, does this person like me?).

Four Biggest Fans

Either every week or month (depending on my energy and adhd), four FOLLOWERS will receive a free 4 card reading.

You MUST be following me and interacting with my posts.

Sharing my blog to your friends, Facebook, and other social media also counts.

I will message you, and you will have 2 days to get back to me to accept.

No medical, time sensitive, yes/no, relationship or legal questions.

Rules and Guidelines

Initials/name (deadnames will not work)

Preferred Pronouns (if none are given, they/them will be used).

Choose a reading

Choose a deck (pictured below)

Have payment ready. (The friends and family option MUST be chosen for paypal. *paypal.me/tstormidawn and cashapp is $VyStark*)

Feedback is required. I will give 2 business days to submit feedback. After that, I'll remind you, and if none is given after 1 week, your name will be added to the Divination Grey List. (A list of anyone who has not given feedback to me that I share with other diviners.)

Feedback Format Below

Current Updates:

Paypal and Cashapp are accepted.

All of my readings are for entertainment and advice purposes only.

If you wish to use any of the spreads that can be found on this blog, feel free to do so. I will not interpret ANY readings that you have chosen to do yourself.

Free Readings are open again.

[linkablewritingadvice]

Self Publishing Promotion Advice

Once you’ve self-published a book, it can be frustrating to try and get eyes on it. How do you direct traffic to your book on Amazon or any other platform?

What NOT To Do

Never pay for “book promo” accounts or reviews.

These accounts do not attract followers that want to buy or read books in any specific genre, and they don’t curate the books they post. They do not send meaningful traffic to your book. They are a scam and a waste of money. 

More info:

Questions To Ask Book Promoters on Instagram

Book Promotion Instagram Scams

Never post a link to your book in an online group or forum without EXPLICIT permission.

The vast majority of forums, subreddits, discords, etc. for writers are constantly getting spammed by people promoting their books. Typically, this is against the rules of that community. Posting in a community in a way that violates their rules is not a good way to build recognition for your name and work. Also, you are not likely to find people who want to read your specific book by shotgun blasting your link around the internet. 

Many places do have weekly self-promo threads or other specific opportunities for writers to self-promote. Look for those and be sure to read and follow all their rules. But know that there is still a very small chance that you will find a meaningful number of readers in the population of people who happen to be skimming these self-promo threads, especially ones that are not genre specific. 

Don’t push friends and family to buy and review your book.

If people who don’t frequently read and buy books in a certain genre all visit your book’s listing right when it launches, it can confuse the algorithm and keep your book from being shown to the right people. Any money you make off people buying your book out of personal obligation will never amount to much and is not a good use of people’s time, money, or good will. 

What TO Do

Make sure your book is attractive

Good cover art and a strong tagline and blurb are critical. No amount of ads, links, swaps, etc. will help you if, once you get that visibility, people don’t like what they see. 

Look at the books that are the top sellers in your categories on Amazon. Notice trends and patterns in their covers and blurbs. Do research on what makes a strong blurb. Many online writing communities will give feedback on blurbs (be sure to read and follow their rules before posting!). 

There are a lot of free resources and courses out there on how to write a compelling blurb. Here are a few to get started:

Reedsy article

Fix My Story

Blue Ink Review

You can also hire a professional cover artist or someone with expertise in your genre to help you with your blurb.

Learn Amazon and Facebook/Meta ads

Amazon and Facebook ads are some of the most powerful ways to get your book seen by people who are likely to be interested. Like any powerful tool, there is a learning curve when it comes to making them work for you. But time spent learning this tool will ultimately be MUCH more effective than just about anything else you could try.

There are lots of people out there selling courses and books on how to use Amazon and Meta ads. My recommendation is that you start with freely available resources and then decide whether you have specific questions or want professional advice in specific areas. Some people understand the data and analytics dashboards but need help writing ad copy that drives clicks while others might need help understanding how to target ads or evaluate their success.

You can watch videos about it, like this one from Michael La Ronn or this one from David Gaughran. 

Or you can follow written tutorials, like this one at Kindlepreneur, this one from Jane Friedman, or this one from Written Word Media.

Start reading and searching around and learn as much as you can. When you are confused about something or find a gap in your knowledge, search for videos or articles that address that particular issue. 

When it comes to paid courses, I have personally enjoyed the Ad School course from Bryan Cohen, and I’ve also heard good things about Mark Dawson’s courses. The Self Publishing Titans have pretty great SEO, for what that’s worth. Always check out someone’s free resources and look at reviews of their course on other platforms before dropping big bucks.

Use Author-Specific Platforms To Attract Readers & Get Reviews

There are a number of websites that cater specifically to self published authors trying to connect with readers. Many of them work by letting you offer free review copies to readers who are interested in your genre. They read your book for free, then post a review on Amazon, Goodreads, or wherever else you want them to do so.

These sites do not guarantee readers or purchases just by doing the bare minimum - they are tools to use, and you need to learn how to use them effectively for your purposes. Read their documentation. Join the site as a reader to see what things look like from the other side.

These types of websites often cost money for premium features. Try noodling around with their free version before deciding whether it will be worth it. 

Some websites in this vein to check out:

BookSprout

BookSirens

NetGalley

Reedsy Discovery

Run a BookBub ad or promotion

BookBub is a specific website that lets people browse for books on sale. You can run ads on BookBub or use their platform to promote a sale on your book. More here: BookBub Promotion Tools

Use A Free Reader Magnet To Build A Mailing List

The website BookFunnel lets you upload a free book (or novella, or short story, etc.) that people get to download in exchange for joining your email list. This is called a lead magnet or a reader magnet. If you have a good reader magnet with an attractive cover and blurb, and you join the right swaps and promos, you can very quickly build a mailing list. 

Fun tip: Since having a cool, genre-appropriate cover is key for this, one thing I like to do for a lead magnet is browse through pre-made covers, buy one I like, then write a novella that fits that cover!

Once your lead magnet is up on BookFunnel, you can use their platform to join “swaps” or “group promos,” where your book is promoted by other people or in conjunction with other similar books. You can also post a link to your mailing list signup/book download page on your own social media or wherever else makes sense.

There are other websites that let you do this too - many of the author promo websites linked above have similar features - but I’ve only used BookFunnel, and I find it very easy to use. 

You will also need to use a general newsletter platform like MailChimp to connect to your account, but I find it pretty simple to understand once you’re setting things up. And then, of course, once you’ve built a mailing list, you have to use it effectively!

Resources:

The Ultimate Lead Magnet Guide

How To Use BookFunnel Like A Boss (video)

How To Start & Grow Your Mailing List

Grow An Organic Social Media Presence

This is a tough one, but for some people, can be pretty fun. Figure out which social media platform has the most active readers in your genre - Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok, probably, but different genre readerships tend to congregate on different ones. Look at the social media of successful self published and traditionally published authors in your genre. See what they’re doing and figure out what’s working. Then do that. 

Follow and interact with readers and writers in your genre. Create catchy content that fits the vibe of what is working on your feed. Use analytics tools to improve. 

There are lots of tools and guides out there to using social media, from gaming the algorithm, using the best hashtags and keywords, posting at the ideal times, and creating the most ‘viral’ content. You can use a program like Canva to create images and videos. 

You can go deep down the social media rabbit hole. There are third party services and platforms that let you post different content and compare its performance. The best thing to do is tons of research, then noodle around with the different dashboards and tools available.

How Successful Authors Use Social Media

The Ultimate Social Media Guide for Writers

Social Media Writer Guide

Of course, those links above just scratch the surface of what’s out there. Start working on this, and you’ll soon discover what you need to figure out. Then search for tutorials or guides on that. 

Hire Marketing Help

If you are struggling with marketing your book and want to hire a marketing professional specifically to help with this, there are people out there who will lend their expertise to you in exchange for some money. 

Know exactly what you want to hire for - design and copywriting to create effective content? One-on-one coaching and tutoring for you on understanding the back-end of running Amazon ads? A pre-packaged ad campaign they’ll run for you?

Be careful that you are hiring a professional with credentials in exactly what you are trying to do - run Amazon ads, build an Instagram following, create frequent click-worthy videos, etc. Do not fall for scammy “publishing services.” Check someone out on Writer Beware and/or look for reviews on other websites (not just theirs!) Ask to see work they’ve done for other clients and their data on how well it worked. 

You could look for a social media marketing company like this one or this one  - search for digital marketing or social media marketing -, or an author-specific one like the ones listed here. These are all just examples - I don’t vouch for any of these and have never used any of them. 

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Tiktok's enshittification

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

When a platform starts, it needs users, so it makes itself valuable to users. Think of Amazon: for many years, it operated at a loss, using its access to the capital markets to subsidize everything you bought. It sold goods below cost and shipped them below cost. It operated a clean and useful search. If you searched for a product, Amazon tried its damndest to put it at the top of the search results.

This was a hell of a good deal for Amazon’s customers. Lots of us piled in, and lots of brick-and-mortar retailers withered and died, making it hard to go elsewhere. Amazon sold us ebooks and audiobooks that were permanently locked to its platform with DRM, so that every dollar we spent on media was a dollar we’d have to give up if we deleted Amazon and its apps. And Amazon sold us Prime, getting us to pre-pay for a year’s worth of shipping. Prime customers start their shopping on Amazon, and 90% of the time, they don’t search anywhere else.

That tempted in lots of business customers — Marketplace sellers who turned Amazon into the “everything store” it had promised from the beginning. As these sellers piled in, Amazon shifted to subsidizing suppliers. Kindle and Audible creators got generous packages. Marketplace sellers reached huge audiences and Amazon took low commissions from them.

This strategy meant that it became progressively harder for shoppers to find things anywhere except Amazon, which meant that they only searched on Amazon, which meant that sellers had to sell on Amazon.

That’s when Amazon started to harvest the surplus from its business customers and send it to Amazon’s shareholders. Today, Marketplace sellers are handing 45%+ of the sale price to Amazon in junk fees. The company’s $31b “advertising” program is really a payola scheme that pits sellers against each other, forcing them to bid on the chance to be at the top of your search.

Searching Amazon doesn’t produce a list of the products that most closely match your search, it brings up a list of products whose sellers have paid the most to be at the top of that search. Those fees are built into the cost you pay for the product, and Amazon’s “Most Favored Nation” requirement sellers means that they can’t sell more cheaply elsewhere, so Amazon has driven prices at every retailer.

Search Amazon for “cat beds” and the entire first screen is ads, including ads for products Amazon cloned from its own sellers, putting them out of business (third parties have to pay 45% in junk fees to Amazon, but Amazon doesn’t charge itself these fees). All told, the first five screens of results for “cat bed” are 50% ads.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

This is enshittification: surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they’re locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they’re locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle.

This is why — as Cat Valente wrote in her magesterial pre-Christmas essay — platforms like Prodigy transformed themselves overnight, from a place where you went for social connection to a place where you were expected to “stop talking to each other and start buying things”:

https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start

This shell-game with surpluses is what happened to Facebook. First, Facebook was good to you: it showed you the things the people you loved and cared about had to say. This created a kind of mutual hostage-taking: once a critical mass of people you cared about were on Facebook, it became effectively impossible to leave, because you’d have to convince all of them to leave too, and agree on where to go. You may love your friends, but half the time you can’t agree on what movie to see and where to go for dinner. Forget it.

Then, it started to cram your feed full of posts from accounts you didn’t follow. At first, it was media companies, who Facebook preferentially crammed down its users’ throats so that they would click on articles and send traffic to newspapers, magazines and blogs.

Then, once those publications were dependent on Facebook for their traffic, it dialed down their traffic. First, it choked off traffic to publications that used Facebook to run excerpts with links to their own sites, as a way of driving publications into supplying fulltext feeds inside Facebook’s walled garden.

This made publications truly dependent on Facebook — their readers no longer visited the publications’ websites, they just tuned into them on Facebook. The publications were hostage to those readers, who were hostage to each other. Facebook stopped showing readers the articles publications ran, tuning The Algorithm to suppress posts from publications unless they paid to “boost” their articles to the readers who had explicitly subscribed to them and asked Facebook to put them in their feeds.

Now, Facebook started to cram more ads into the feed, mixing payola from people you wanted to hear from with payola from strangers who wanted to commandeer your eyeballs. It gave those advertisers a great deal, charging a pittance to target their ads based on the dossiers of nonconsensually harvested personal data they’d stolen from you.

Sellers became dependent on Facebook, too, unable to carry on business without access to those targeted pitches. That was Facebook’s cue to jack up ad prices, stop worrying so much about ad fraud, and to collude with Google to rig the ad market through an illegal program called Jedi Blue:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue

Today, Facebook is terminally enshittified, a terrible place to be whether you’re a user, a media company, or an advertiser. It’s a company that deliberately demolished a huge fraction of the publishers it relied on, defrauding them into a “pivot to video” based on false claims of the popularity of video among Facebook users. Companies threw billions into the pivot, but the viewers never materialized, and media outlets folded in droves:

https://slate.com/technology/2018/10/facebook-online-video-pivot-metrics-false.html

But Facebook has a new pitch. It claims to be called Meta, and it has demanded that we live out the rest of our days as legless, sexless, heavily surveilled low-poly cartoon characters.

It has promised companies that make apps for this metaverse that it won’t rug them the way it did the publishers on the old Facebook. It remains to be seen whether they’ll get any takers. As Mark Zuckerberg once candidly confessed to a peer, marvelling at all of his fellow Harvard students who sent their personal information to his new website “TheFacebook”:

> I don’t know why.

> They “trust me”

> Dumb fucks.

https://doctorow.medium.com/metaverse-means-pivot-to-video-adbe09319038

Once you understand the enshittification pattern, a lot of the platform mysteries solve themselves. Think of the SEO market, or the whole energetic world of online creators who spend endless hours engaged in useless platform Kremlinology, hoping to locate the algorithmic tripwires, which, if crossed, doom the creative works they pour their money, time and energy into:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/11/coercion-v-cooperation/#the-machine-is-listening

Working for the platform can be like working for a boss who takes money out of every paycheck for all the rules you broke, but who won’t tell you what those rules are because if he told you that, then you’d figure out how to break those rules without him noticing and docking your pay. Content moderation is the only domain where security through obscurity is considered a best practice:

https://doctorow.medium.com/como-is-infosec-307f87004563

The situation is so dire that organizations like Tracking Exposed have enlisted an human army of volunteers and a robot army of headless browsers to try to unwind the logic behind the arbitrary machine judgments of The Algorithm, both to give users the option to tune the recommendations they receive, and to help creators avoid the wage theft that comes from being shadow banned:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/05/tracking-exposed-demanding-gods-explain-themselves

But what if there is no underlying logic? Or, more to the point, what if the logic shifts based on the platform’s priorities? If you go down to the midway at your county fair, you’ll spot some poor sucker walking around all day with a giant teddy bear that they won by throwing three balls in a peach basket.

The peach-basket is a rigged game. The carny can use a hidden switch to force the balls to bounce out of the basket. No one wins a giant teddy bear unless the carny wants them to win it. Why did the carny let the sucker win the giant teddy bear? So that he’d carry it around all day, convincing other suckers to put down five bucks for their chance to win one:

https://boingboing.net/2006/08/27/rigged-carny-game.html

The carny allocated a giant teddy bear to that poor sucker the way that platforms allocate surpluses to key performers — as a convincer in a “Big Store” con, a way to rope in other suckers who’ll make content for the platform, anchoring themselves and their audiences to it.

Which brings me to Tiktok. Tiktok is many different things, including “a free Adobe Premiere for teenagers that live on their phones.”

https://www.garbageday.email/p/the-fragments-of-media-you-consume

But what made it such a success early on was the power of its recommendation system. From the start, Tiktok was really, really good at recommending things to its users. Eerily good:

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1093882880

By making good-faith recommendations of things it thought its users would like, Tiktok built a mass audience, larger than many thought possible, given the death grip of its competitors, like Youtube and Instagram. Now that Tiktok has the audience, it is consolidating its gains and seeking to lure away the media companies and creators who are still stubbornly attached to Youtube and Insta.

Yesterday, Forbes’s Emily Baker-White broke a fantastic story about how that actually works inside of Bytedance, Tiktok’s parent company, citing multiple internal sources, revealing the existence of a “heating tool” that Tiktok employees use push videos from select accounts into millions of viewers’ feeds:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2023/01/20/tiktoks-secret-heating-button-can-make-anyone-go-viral/

These videos go into Tiktok users’ ForYou feeds, which Tiktok misleadingly describes as being populated by videos “ranked by an algorithm that predicts your interests based on your behavior in the app.” In reality, For You is only sometimes composed of videos that Tiktok thinks will add value to your experience — the rest of the time, it’s full of videos that Tiktok has inserted in order to make creators think that Tiktok is a great place to reach an audience.

“Sources told Forbes that TikTok has often used heating to court influencers and brands, enticing them into partnerships by inflating their videos’ view count. This suggests that heating has potentially benefitted some influencers and brands — those with whom TikTok has sought business relationships — at the expense of others with whom it has not.”

In other words, Tiktok is handing out giant teddy bears.

But Tiktok is not in the business of giving away giant teddy bears. Tiktok, for all that its origins are in the quasi-capitalist Chinese economy, is just another paperclip-maximizing artificial colony organism that treats human beings as inconvenient gut flora. Tiktok is only going to funnel free attention to the people it wants to entrap until they are entrapped, then it will withdraw that attention and begin to monetize it.

“Monetize” is a terrible word that tacitly admits that there is no such thing as an “Attention Economy.” You can’t use attention as a medium of exchange. You can’t use it as a store of value. You can’t use it as a unit of account. Attention is like cryptocurrency: a worthless token that is only valuable to the extent that you can trick or coerce someone into parting with “fiat” currency in exchange for it. You have to “monetize” it — that is, you have to exchange the fake money for real money.

In the case of cryptos, the main monetization strategy was deception-based. Exchanges and “projects” handed out a bunch of giant teddy-bears, creating an army of true-believer Judas goats who convinced their peers to hand the carny their money and try to get some balls into the peach-basket themselves.

But deception only produces so much “liquidity provision.” Eventually, you run out of suckers. To get lots of people to try the ball-toss, you need coercion, not persuasion. Think of how US companies ended the defined benefits pension that guaranteed you a dignified retirement, replacing it with market-based 401(k) pensions that forced you to gamble your savings in a rigged casino, making you the sucker at the table, ripe for the picking:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/25/derechos-humanos/#are-there-no-poorhouses

Early crypto liquidity came from ransomware. The existence of a pool of desperate, panicked companies and individuals whose data had been stolen by criminals created a baseline of crypto liquidity because they could only get their data back by trading real money for fake crypto money.

The next phase of crypto coercion was Web3: converting the web into a series of tollbooths that you could only pass through by trading real money for fake crypto money. The internet is a must-have, not a nice-to-have, a prerequisite for full participation in employment, education, family life, health, politics, civics, even romance. By holding all those things to ransom behind crypto tollbooths, the hodlers hoped to convert their tokens to real money:

https://locusmag.com/2022/09/cory-doctorow-moneylike/

For Tiktok, handing out free teddy-bears by “heating” the videos posted by skeptical performers and media companies is a way to convert them to true believers, getting them to push all their chips into the middle of the table, abandoning their efforts to build audiences on other platforms (it helps that Tiktok’s format is distinctive, making it hard to repurpose videos for Tiktok to circulate on rival platforms).

Once those performers and media companies are hooked, the next phase will begin: Tiktok will withdraw the “heating” that sticks their videos in front of people who never heard of them and haven’t asked to see their videos. Tiktok is performing a delicate dance here: there’s only so much enshittification they can visit upon their users’ feeds, and Tiktok has lots of other performers they want to give giant teddy-bears to.

Tiktok won’t just starve performers of the “free” attention by depreferencing them in the algorithm, it will actively punish them by failing to deliver their videos to the users who subscribed to them. After all, every time Tiktok shows you a video you asked to see, it loses a chance to show you a video it wants you to see, because your attention is a giant teddy-bear it can give away to a performer it is wooing.

This is just what Twitter has done as part of its march to enshittification: thanks to its “monetization” changes, the majority of people who follow you will never see the things you post. I have ~500k followers on Twitter and my threads used to routinely get hundreds of thousands or even millions of reads. Today, it’s hundreds, perhaps thousands.

I just handed Twitter $8 for Twitter Blue, because the company has strongly implied that it will only show the things I post to the people who asked to see them if I pay ransom money. This is the latest battle in one of the internet’s longest-simmering wars: the fight over end-to-end:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

In the beginning, there were Bellheads and Netheads. The Bellheads worked for big telcos, and they believed that all the value of the network rightly belonged to the carrier. If someone invented a new feature — say, Caller ID — it should only be rolled out in a way that allows the carrier to charge you every month for its use. This is Software-As-a-Service, Ma Bell style.

The Netheads, by contrast, believed that value should move to the edges of the network — spread out, pluralized. In theory, Compuserve could have “monetized” its own version of Caller ID by making you pay $2.99 extra to see the “From:” line on email before you opened the message — charging you to know who was speaking before you started listening — but they didn’t.

The Netheads wanted to build diverse networks with lots of offers, lots of competition, and easy, low-cost switching between competitors (thanks to interoperability). Some wanted this because they believed that the net would someday be woven into the world, and they didn’t want to live in a world of rent-seeking landlords. Others were true believers in market competition as a source of innovation. Some believed both things. Either way, they saw the risk of network capture, the drive to monetization through trickery and coercion, and they wanted to head it off.

They conceived of the end-to-end principle: the idea that networks should be designed so that willing speakers’ messages would be delivered to willing listeners’ end-points as quickly and reliably as they could be. That is, irrespective of whether a network operator could make money by sending you the data it wanted to receive, its duty would be to provide you with the data you wanted to see.

The end-to-end principle is dead at the service level today. Useful idiots on the right were tricked into thinking that the risk of Twitter mismanagement was “woke shadowbanning,” whereby the things you said wouldn’t reach the people who asked to hear them because Twitter’s deep state didn’t like your opinions. The real risk, of course, is that the things you say won’t reach the people who asked to hear them because Twitter can make more money by enshittifying their feeds and charging you ransom for the privilege to be included in them.

As I said at the start of this essay, enshittification exerts a nearly irresistible gravity on platform capitalism. It’s just too easy to turn the enshittification dial up to eleven. Twitter was able to fire the majority of its skilled staff and still crank the dial all the way over, even with a skeleton crew of desperate, demoralized H1B workers who are shackled to Twitter’s sinking ship by the threat of deportation.

The temptation to enshittify is magnified by the blocks on interoperability: when Twitter bans interoperable clients, nerfs its APIs, and periodically terrorizes its users by suspending them for including their Mastodon handles in their bios, it makes it harder to leave Twitter, and thus increases the amount of enshittification users can be force-fed without risking their departure.

Twitter is not going to be a “protocol.” I’ll bet you a testicle¹ that projects like Bluesky will find no meaningful purchase on the platform, because if Bluesky were implemented and Twitter users could order their feeds for minimal enshittification and leave the service without sacrificing their social networks, it would kill the majority of Twitter’s “monetization” strategies.

¹Not one of mine.

An enshittification strategy only succeeds if it is pursued in measured amounts. Even the most locked-in user eventually reaches a breaking-point and walks away, or gets pushed. The villagers of Anatevka in Fiddler on the Roof tolerated the cossacks' violent raids and pogroms for years, until they were finally forced to flee to Krakow, New York and Chicago:

https://doctorow.medium.com/how-to-leave-dying-social-media-platforms-9fc550fe5abf

For enshittification-addled companies, that balance is hard to strike. Individual product managers, executives, and activist shareholders all give preference to quick returns at the cost of sustainability, and are in a race to see who can eat their seed-corn first. Enshittification has only lasted for as long as it has because the internet has devolved into “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four”:

https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040

With the market sewn up by a group of cozy monopolists, better alternatives don’t pop up and lure us away, and if they do, the monopolists just buy them out and integrate them into your enshittification strategies, like when Mark Zuckerberg noticed a mass exodus of Facebook users who were switching to Instagram, and so he bought Instagram. As Zuck says, “It is better to buy than to compete.”

This is the hidden dynamic behind the rise and fall of Amazon Smile, the program whereby Amazon gave a small amount of money to charities of your choice when you shopped there, but only if you used Amazon’s own search tool to locate the products you purchased. This provided an incentive for Amazon customers to use its own increasingly enshittified search, which it could cram full of products from sellers who coughed up payola, as well as its own lookalike products. The alternative was to use Google, whose search tool would send you directly to the product you were looking for, and then charge Amazon a commission for sending you to it:

https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/10ft5iv/comment/j4znb8y/

The demise of Amazon Smile coincides with the increasing enshittification of Google Search, the only successful product the company managed to build in-house. All its other successes were bought from other companies: video, docs, cloud, ads, mobile; while its own products are either flops like Google Video, clones (Gmail is a Hotmail clone), or adapted from other companies’ products, like Chrome.

Google Search was based on principles set out in founder Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s landmark 1998 paper, “Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” in which they wrote, “Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers.”

http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/361/

Even with that foundational understanding of enshittification, Google has been unable to resist its siren song. Today’s Google results are an increasingly useless morass of self-preferencing links to its own products, ads for products that aren’t good enough to float to the top of the list on its own, and parasitic SEO junk piggybacking on the former.

Enshittification kills. Google just laid off 12,000 employees, and the company is in a full-blown “panic” over the rise of “AI” chatbots, and is making a full-court press for an AI-driven search tool — that is, a tool that won’t show you what you ask for, but rather, what it thinks you should see:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/20/23563851/google-search-ai-chatbot-demo-chatgpt

Now, it’s possible to imagine that such a tool will produce good recommendations, like Tiktok’s pre-enshittified algorithm did. But it’s hard to see how Google will be able to design a non-enshittified chatbot front-end to search, given the strong incentives for product managers, executives, and shareholders to enshittify results to the precise threshold at which users are nearly pissed off enough to leave, but not quite.

Even if it manages the trick, this-almost-but-not-quite-unusuable equilibrium is fragile. Any exogenous shock — a new competitor like Tiktok that penetrates the anticompetitive “moats and walls” of Big Tech, a privacy scandal, a worker uprising — can send it into wild oscillations:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/08/watch-the-surpluses/#exogenous-shocks

Enshittification truly is how platforms die. That’s fine, actually. We don’t need eternal rulers of the internet. It’s okay for new ideas and new ways of working to emerge. The emphasis of lawmakers and policymakers shouldn’t be preserving the crepuscular senescence of dying platforms. Rather, our policy focus should be on minimizing the cost to users when these firms reach their expiry date: enshrining rights like end-to-end would mean that no matter how autocannibalistic a zombie platform became, willing speakers and willing listeners would still connect with each other:

https://doctorow.medium.com/end-to-end-d6046dca366f

And policymakers should focus on freedom of exit — the right to leave a sinking platform while continuing to stay connected to the communities that you left behind, enjoying the media and apps you bought, and preserving the data you created:

https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook

The Netheads were right: technological self-determination is at odds with the natural imperatives of tech businesses. They make more money when they take away our freedom — our freedom to speak, to leave, to connect.

For many years, even Tiktok’s critics grudgingly admitted that no matter how surveillant and creepy it was, it was really good at guessing what you wanted to see. But Tiktok couldn’t resist the temptation to show you the things it wants you to see, rather than what you want to see. The enshittification has begun, and now it is unlikely to stop.

It's too late to save Tiktok. Now that it has been infected by enshittifcation, the only thing left is to kill it with fire.

[Image ID: Hansel and Gretel in front of the witch's candy house. Hansel and Gretel have been replaced with line-drawings of influencers, taking selfies of themselves with the candy house. In front of the candy house stands a portly man in a business suit; his head is a sack of money with a dollar-sign on it. He wears a crooked witch's hat. The cottage has the Tiktok logo on it.]

[weberina]

paying for tumblr premium is already embarrassing, but then making a blazed post about it? wow, im actually fascinated by people like you

sighs.. i really don't get people like you too. How is this site supposed to support itself if its users do not pay? If you don't pay a fee, then you are giving it data to make the fee. But this is not facebook, this is not the bird site, this is not tiktok. It has its flaws, but I also want it to survive. So yes, I gave it money. I paid for crabs. I paid for one badge. And I paid for premium, but still left the ads on coz it's entertaining.

But I did not pay for blaze coz that came free, so i blazed a post for fun. sheesh. grow up.

[beardedmrbean]

The Washington Post — reeling from a mass exodus of subscribers over its refusal to endorse Kamala Harris — “aggressively ramped up its paid advertising campaign” on social media platforms that boost stories critical of Donald Trump, according to a report.

Owner Jeff Bezos has faced backlash over his decision last week to kill the endorsement for the vice president, which has led to the resignations of several high-level staffers and a loss of more than 250,000 digital subscribers.

On Thursday, the news site Semafor reported that the publication had rolled out an ad blitz at the start of the week on social media sites such as Facebook that boosts its anti-Trump coverage.

The promoted stories centered around the former president’s campaign rhetoric, misstatements, supporters leaving his rallies early and Trump’s controversial comments about migrants in Ohio eating dogs, Semafor reported.

By contrast, the promoted stories about his Democratic challenger were neutral in tone and informative, Semafor found.

Before Monday, the newspaper had run around a dozen ads on Facebook for the month of October, mainly promoting the Washington Post brand and steering clear of any mention of Trump.

The New York Post reached out to the WaPo for comment.

A source close to the situation told the New York Post that the Washington Post’s promoted stories on social media reflect high-performing content.

The content of the advertising posts is directly pulled from the respective reporting, according to the source.

“This isn’t new,” the source insisted.

The Washington Post’s promoted posts span a mix of its content across all of its verticals, including climate, style and other sections, the source added.

The Beltway paper’s increase in paid ads this week could also be a reflection of Facebook parent company Meta’s policy that prohibits new ads during the week of the election, which is set for Tuesday.

A source said the Washington Post was likely getting some new ads up before the tech giant freezes new ad buys.

As of Thursday, at least 250,000 readers — or 10% — canceled their digital subscriptions to the Washington Post in apparent protest of Bezos’ move to end the paper’s decades-long practice of endorsing a presidential candidate, according to National Public Radio.

Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon, published a guest essay Monday saying the decision to forgo endorsements was a matter of “principle” intended to dispel the notion that his newspaper was biased.

But the move elicited howls of protest from readers on social media as well as journalists who are either current or former employees of the Washington Post, such as award-winning Watergate sleuths Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

At least three editorial staffers resigned from the paper.

After Bezos’ decision was announced last Friday, some of the paper’s top editors and columnists met to discuss the controversy.

David Shipley, the newspaper’s opinion editor, listened as his colleagues blasted Bezos for harming the publication’s reputation as an “independent journalistic organization,” according to the Washington Free Beacon, which obtained audio of the meeting.

One staffer reportedly told Shipley that the “one thing that can’t happen in this country is for Trump to get another four years.”

Shipley responded by telling staffers that they were welcome to vent their frustration but that they would then need to either come to terms with Bezos’ decision and move on — or resign.

“Whatever you decide, I’m good with it,” Shipley said.

“What I really do want to impart is that you do not get stuck in the middle. Don’t be here if you don’t want to.”

Shipley told his colleagues that he spent an hour on the phone with Bezos in an effort to get him to change his mind and allow the editorial board to issue its endorsement of Harris — but the mogul refused to budge.

He said that while he agreed with the “principle that you do not have to do presidential endorsements,” he took issue with Bezos’ “timing, and the way in which the timing could be read.”

A similar dynamic has been playing out at the Los Angeles Times, where billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong blocked the editorial board from publishing an endorsement of Harris.

Soon-Shiong said he wanted the editorial board to present a side-by-side comparative analysis of the two candidates and their positions so that readers could decide for themselves whom to support.

At least three LA Times staffers quit in protest and between 10,000 and 18,000 readers canceled their subscriptions to the paper, according to reports.

[smileyerim]

i don’t care what we are it just has to work

“What you love the most will kill you”, the old proverb your mother used to say rings in your ear over and over again as you sit in front of your phone waiting for Chris to answer the FaceTime call. You’ll do anything to keep him close, even if it means destroying yourself.

inspired by: extremely personal events so please be nice :(Title comes from Understand by Hippo Campus

pairing: idol!chan x hannah’s roommate!reader

genre: angsty long distance situationship. some fluff

length: 2.9k

warnings: very very sad I’m sorry!!

net tags: @kflixnet @straykidsland

. . .

You’ve been looking forward to it all week.

Clearly, as you’re sitting on your bathroom counter, legs crossed underneath you as you skillfully twirl your hair around the curling iron in an attempt to look nice for him. It’s almost embarrassing how much effort you put into your calls with him.

“You talk to him more than I do at this point.” Hannah’s voice startles you, causing your finger to slip and make contact with the hot iron. You hiss a swear word and drop your hair and focus in on the red mark on the pad of your middle finger.

“Fuck, would it kill you to knock first to announce your presence?”

“Sorry you’re too busy fantasizing about my big brother to notice me.” She teases and a blush comes up your cheek. She wasn’t supposed to catch you like this, getting ready for your calls with him with too much effort.

“I wasn’t thinking about Chris.” You defend, unplugging the curling iron with a frown, deciding at the last minute that putting your hair in a claw clip is a better move. At least now that Hannah’s caught you primping when she knows that the only plans you have tonight are for a call with her brother. Her brother that you’re “just friends” with.

“Oh, suuure.” She draws out and turns to walk away from the bathroom, “whatever you say!”

You roll your eyes at her after her back is turned, still feeling bothered by your burnt finger.

She was right, though, you were thinking about him. You do that a lot lately. Running through the old memories of his silly pick up lines, fantasizing about telling him how you feel, imagining what your first time meeting him again will be like.

Yeah, you think of him a lot. Probably too much as your heart continues to lurch every time you think about a future that isn’t promised to you of you and him in love.

Still annoyed, you kick your bathroom door closed and lock it quickly before you begin on your makeup. Sure, you had abandoned your curls but you’ll be damned if you don’t put the slightest effort in after not speaking to him for almost 2 weeks.

He’s busy preparing for a tour that is, fortunately, making a stop in LA. Unfortunately, though, there’s not enough free time in his schedule for you to give your relationship the trial run you desperately want. It’s fine, though, you’re still just friends. Just friends who begin each morning with an “I miss you” text and flirt like tomorrow won’t come, but just friends nonetheless.

Your 5:55 PM alarm shocks you out of your daydream and you’re forced to scramble to apply your mascara, nearly smudging it on the bridge of your nose in your scurry but thankfully you avoid it.

It’s 5:58 and you’re emerging from the bathroom to a knowing look etched on Hannah’s face as she stares at you scurry to and from your room in prep for your FaceTime with her brother. She’s not an idiot, she knows what’s going on here. She saw it all happen in front of her two eyes.

She’s seen her brother in love before, high school puppy love that is, but she’s never seen him like this. During their first world tour in the US, Hannah had invited all of her new roommates to join her in the fancy VIP stadium box Chris had organized (and paid for) for the whole group to watch the show. You hadn’t heard of Stray Kids or knew who she was when you posted the empty room ad on your school’s Facebook page, so you were truly surprised to love the show as much as you did. Before the end of the evening, you and Chris were side by side knocking shoulders as you laughed uncontrollably at the inside jokes you two had just created. All Hannah could do was giggle along to the story she knows she’s about to witness.

Still, despite the chemistry, he didn’t ask you out. You assumed it had something to do with his schedule, or the fact that you’re his baby sisters roommate, or that he simply wasn’t interested.

Hannah can hear the excited screams from you both behind your shut and locked door and it makes her smile a sad smile for you as she decides to turn in for the evening.

“You almost gave me a heart attack!” He exclaims through the phone.

“What, why?“ you giggle, finding his swollen face and bed head ridiculously cute. Once a week you take the evening off of work and studies and FaceTime Chris 10 minutes after he wakes up. He’s known to complain that it’s so unfair that you get the time to look so beautiful while he’s just waking up but secretly you prefer it this way.

“You look so stunning it made my heart stop!” He giggles out and you fake gasp, heart beating just a little faster at the flirty comment.

“Oh, shut up, you scared me.” You say, setting your phone down to prop it up on an old Gatorade bottle on your desk.

“Hello, Y/N.” He says finally with a grin on his face.

You giggle again, “Hey, Chris. Missed you.” His eyes shut and he lets out a big sigh.

“I can’t wait to see you again. I think about it a lot, actually.” He says, head leaned back on his pillow as he stares at his ceiling. He doesn’t want to look at you as he admits that.

“Me too,” You admit sheepishly as he looks back towards his phone screen, “I hope it lives up to all my expectations.”

It won’t, though, you won’t walk away with him being yours and you’re unfortunately sure of that.

“What expectations are those, hmm?” He teases and you suddenly feel very shy. Now is not the time to admit your painfully obvious feelings towards him so you chose to play it safe, the same way you have been since you began your “friendship” a year ago.

“Chris, that night that we met was one of the most fun nights of my life.” You look at him as he stares back with a small smile on his focused face.

“Me too.” He admits and that honestly shocks you. You’re a simple girl who leads a simple life. You don’t have many groundbreaking life experiences to your name, but Chris does. He’s the leader of one of the biggest kpop boy bands of all time, he’s collecting major life experiences like they’re Pokémon cards.

“Really?” You say, surprised and he looks at you like you’re stupid, as if you were supposed to just guess that about him.

“I’m so used to feeling like such a celebrity,” you scoff at him at that and he laughs. It’s a common occurrence for you to tease him for his status although it often makes you feel small, “that night where I got to be just Chris and have fun with a pretty girl I had great chemistry with was amazing.”

You full on blush at this point with no words to say. Chris is somewhat of a flirt, that’s no surprise. He’s always shooting off some cheesy compliment or pickup line he stole from his fans but it’s not often he says the compliments with so much sincerity. Says it like it’s just a simple fact, not something he’s seeking to get a response from you on. When he does speak in this way you’re usually left to scramble to try and change the topic to save your heart. You can handle his flirty comments because you can brush them off the same way you do when your girl friends speak to you that way, but comments like that make it difficult to do so.

You hum, looking down at your thumbs as they twiddle, an anxious habit you’ve formed long ago. “You look great right now, by the way.” You decide to tease his bed head. You secretly love it but you know it makes him shy.

“Shut up!” He bellows a full laugh, flattening down his curls with his hand. You laugh with him at how ineffective it was. You can’t complain, you love it.

“I’m sooo sorry that I’m sooo eager to get to talk to you that I forget to get all pretty.” He teases and you giggle again.

“Yeah, you should be. Hurts my eyes a little bit.” You squint and put your hand up to block the screen.

He laughs again, “fine, then, I’ll just hang up if it’s so torturous for you.” He feigns a threat, but it still makes your face flush at the idea.

“Wait! No!” You lean in and pout to the screen, “please don’t leave you look sooo handsome your hair is sooo perfect.” You match his tone from earlier.

He rolls his eyes at you at that, “well I know that but thank you for clarifying.” He smiles satisfied at your defeated face.

“How’s tour prep going? Any changes?” He knows exactly what you’re asking, but he chooses to ignore it. He, just like you, wishes desperately for more than 2 successive nights. He wants his days in LA to be spent with you too, but the reality is much bleaker than that. He has a total of 4 waking hours to give, half of that he’s determined to give to his sister as well.

“We added another song to the encore. So now the show is a total of three fucking hours long.” He doesn’t swear in front of you often so it takes you off guard, but you understand. It communicates exactly what it needed to.

“I’m sorry, I can’t imagine. That’s so much work in such a short period of time I don’t know how you do it.” You whisper, all you have to offer is empathy.

He smiles at your dejected appearance in fondness, “It’s okay, my favorite pretty girl coming makes it worth it. I’m glad to put on a long show for her to enjoy.” He smiles wider at your expression.

“Oh please, I’m not even paying to go, don’t you care about your fans and the hundreds of thousands of dollars they’re paying to make the three hour show possible?” You reject his compliment.

He was just kidding with you, of course he cares about his fans but he was attempting another flirt. He knows he shouldn’t do it so often, he worries a lot about leading you on. Until his contract in Korea is completed, he can’t have you, simple as that. Three more years until he has the freedom to decide for himself who he wants to love.

He doesn’t like to think about the fact that once those three years are complete, he will probably choose to stay in Seoul to continue the career he’s built. Far, far away from you still then.

“I’m sorry, I’ll stop.” He gives you a smile. Yeah, he really feels guilty for leading you on in such a way.

“Any other changes?” You look at him with a sparkle in your eyes.

“I have one hour per evening two hours after the post concert interviews.” He says, same spiel he’s given you since the tour was announced. He watches as your shoulders drop in sadness.

After a beat and a sigh, you look up at the screen “I’ll take what I can get!”

He smiles sadly at you, the image of his face getting frozen for a moment. Damn your spotty Wi-Fi.

“Here’s an idea for you then. What if I upgrade my hotel room to get 2 beds and you stay over with me?” You perk up at his idea.

“Really?”

He laughs softly and his eyes sparkle in affection for you, “Yes, really. I can’t stay up too late since I’ll have early schedules the following day but we can spend some short time together getting ready for bed.”

You smile big and wide at that but your ears finally catch on to what he said. He proposed to share a hotel room with you that has two beds. You get whiplash every time you speak to him, simply unable to read his signs. Does he like you or not? You feel silly every time you presume that he does, but you feel even dumber thinking that he doesn’t. The mixed signals hurt your head.

“Two beds?” You say in boldness, catching even yourself off guard. You weren’t planning on speaking your mind, but the words slipped from your lips faster than you could stop them.

He sighs sadly at that, “Y/N…”

Deciding to ditch the boldness after it’s escaped you, “Two beds are fine.” Is all you say with a fake smile. There are many times that the topic of your budding relationship comes up in little ways, but you’d rather avoid it. Again choosing to save yourself from the potential pain of opening a wound that doesn’t need to be.

No matter what you end up heartbroken. Either because he doesn’t want you, or because you’re far from him.

“Look, beautiful, I have to go,” You frown, but the butterflies erupt in your belly at his cute nickname.

“I’ll talk to my manager about the room switch.”

You smile sadly at the screen, yet still very excited to get to spend the time with him.

“Oh, and, I’m sorry about this but you know that tour starts next week.” He pauses to gauge the look on your face.

“I won’t be able to talk like this until I see you in person, okay?” He says and that nearly makes you want to cry. You haven’t gone longer than 2 weeks without your FaceTime calls since you met him a year ago. With LA being the last stop on their your, this means four weeks without speaking to him.

“I understand, Chris.” You smile at him again and his heart nearly leaps out of his chest. He’ll never understand what he did to deserve your compassion and understanding towards him. Where your doubt comes in the way of having the same security, he doesn’t share those insecurities. He knows exactly how you feel for him and what you want.

“Thank you for understanding.” He says softly.

“Thank you for trying.” You whisper back before he’s saying his goodbyes and the call ends.

It’s not long after you hear the hang up chime that the flood gates open and the tears fall. You’re supposed to feel elated after speaking with him, not discouraged and drained.

It dawns on you in this moment as you curl on the foot of your bed, freshly applied mascara stained tears cascading down your face, that you love him.

This is no longer a simple crush to write off as if it’s nothing, this is full on love. The greatest love of your life so far and you suspect probably ever.

As you think on the love you have for him, the tears fall harder and your sobs grow louder.

It’s in this moment as well that you realize with a heartbroken smile that you don’t care what happens at the end, as long as he’s in your life you’re content, or, at the very least, you will have to try to be.

You don’t want to live without him, you never want to go longer than 2 weeks without your calls again.

Unbeknownst to you, Hannah’s standing on the other side of your bedroom door listening in with tears in her own eyes listening to your sobs. Her heart is broken for you both.

As she lies her head against your door, she feels overwhelmed with guilt having been the person to initially introduce you both. Yet, at the same time, she doesn’t feel that way entirely. She knows that at the end of this long road is happiness for you both. There’s no way that the universe would set you two up in this way to end in disappointment, she can’t imagine it. So all she has to do is sit, and listen, and feel your heartbreak through the wall.

On the other side of the world six thousand miles away Chris lies in his bed, phone loosely gripped in his hand as he lies back, eyes shut tightly.

The guilt he feels for leading you on and allowing your relationship to progress in this direction is real to him, realer than it ever has been.

He’s seen you sad, disappointed, longing even, but he’s never seen you heartbroken. Today, though, in front of his own two eyes he witnessed the moment he broke your heart when he told you that you’d go so long without speaking again.

That alone nearly broke him. He’s not sure exactly what to do with these feelings but he knows he can’t keep doing this to you without action. Either telling you exactly how he feels or letting you move on and have the college experience he wishes for his little sister too.

At the thought of you moving on, though, Chris’ eyes begin to threaten to release their own tears. He loves you so much. He wants you to have all the happiness and love in the world. He’s known that for months, but the idea of you moving on to a man that isn’t him hurts his head and his heart. If that’s what it takes though, he will try to accept.

Four weeks. There’s four more weeks until you two are reunited.

Fuck, where do you all go from here?

part 2: where we end is somewhere far, something hard to understand

[cindylouwho-2]

RECENT SEO & MARKETING NEWS FOR ECOMMERCE, JULY 2024

If you are new to my Tumblr, I usually do these summaries of SEO and marketing news once a month, picking out the pieces that are most likely to be useful to small and micro-businesses.

You can get notified of these updates plus my website blog posts via email: http://bit.ly/CindyLouWho2Blog or get all of the most timely updates plus exclusive content by supporting my Patreon: patreon.com/CindyLouWho2

TOP NEWS & ARTICLES 

There is a relatively new way to file copyright claims against US residents, called The Copyright Claims Board (CCB). I wrote more here [post by me on Patreon]

After a few years of handwringing and false starts, Google is abandoning plans to block third-party cookies in Chrome. Both Safari and Firefox already block them. 

When composing titles and text where other keywords are found, it can be useful to have a short checklist of the types of keywords you need, as this screenshot demonstrates. While that title is too long for most platforms and search engines, it covers really critical points that should get mentioned in the product description and keyword fields/tags as well:

The core keywords that describe the item

What the customer is looking to do - solve a problem? Find a gift? Feel better? 

What makes the product stand out in its field - why buy this instead of something else? Differentiating your items is something that should come before you get to the listing stage, so the keywords should already be in your head. 

Relevant keywords that will be used in long tail searches are always great add-ons.

What if anything about your item is trendy now? E.g., sustainability? Particular colours, styles or materials/ingredients are always important.  

SEO: GOOGLE & OTHER SEARCH ENGINES 

Google’s June spam update has finished rolling out. And here is the full list of Google news from June. 

Expect a new Google core update “in the coming weeks” (as if we needed more Google excitement).

Google’s AI overviews continue to dwindle at the top of search results, now only appearing in 7% of searches.

Despite Google trying to target AI spam, many poorly-copied articles still outrank the originals in Google search results. 

Internal links are important for Google SEO. While this article covers blogging in particular, most of the tips apply to any standalone website. Google also recently did a video [YouTube] on the same topic. 

Google had a really excellent second quarter, mostly due to the cloud and AI. 

Not Google

OpenAI is testing SearchGPT with a small number of subscribers. Alphabet shares dropped 3% after the announcement. 

SOCIAL MEDIA - All Aspects, By Site

General

New social media alert: noplace is a new app billed as MySpace for Gen Z that also has some similarities with Twitter (e.g., text-based chats, with no photos or videos at this time). iOS only at the moment; no Android app or web page. 

Thinking of trying out Bluesky? Here are some tips to get the most out of it. 

Facebook (includes relevant general news from Meta)

Meta’s attempt at circumventing EU privacy regulations through paid subscriptions is illegal under the Digital Markets Act, according to the European Commission. “if the company cannot reach an agreement with regulators before March 2025, the Commission has the power to levy fines of up to 10 percent of the company’s global turnover.”

If you post Reels from a business page, you may be able to let Meta use AI to do A/B testing on the captions and other portions shown. I personally would not do this unless I could see what options they were choosing, since AI is often not as good as it thinks it is. 

Apple’s 30% fee on in-app ad purchases for Facebook and Instagram has kicked in worldwide as of July 1. 

Facebook is testing ads in the Notifications list on the app. 

Meta is encouraging advertisers to connect their Google Analytics accounts to Meta Ads, claiming “integration could improve campaign performance, citing a 22% conversion increase.”

Instagram

The head of Instagram is still emphasizing that the number of DM shares per post is a huge ranking factor. 

LinkedIn

Another article on the basics of setting up LinkedIn and getting found through it. 

You can now advertise your LinkedIn newsletters on the platform. 

Pinterest

Pinterest is slowly testing an AI program that edits the background of product photography without changing the product. 

Is Pinterest dying? An investment research firm thinks so. 

Reddit

If you want to see results from Reddit in your search engine results, Google is the only place that can happen now. 

More than ever, Reddit is being touted as a way to be found (especially in Google search), but you do have to understand how the site works to be successful at it. 

Snapchat

Snapchat+ now has 9 million paying users, and they are getting quite a few new personalization updates, and Snaps that last 50 seconds or less. 

Threads

Threads has hit 175 million active users each month, up from 130 million in February. 

TikTok

TikTok has made it easier to reuse your videos outside of the site without a watermark. 

TikTok users can now select a custom thumbnail image for videos, either a frame from the clip itself, or a still image from elsewhere.  

Twitter

You can opt out of Twitter using your posts as data for its AI, Grok. 

YouTube

YouTube has new tools for Shorts, including one that makes your longer videos into Shorts. 

Community Spaces are the latest YouTube test to try to get more fan involvement, while moving users away from video comments.

(CONTENT) MARKETING (includes blogging, emails, and strategies) 

Start your content marketing plans for August now, including back-to-school themes and Alfred Hitchcock’s birthday on August 13. 

ONLINE ADVERTISING (EXCEPT INDIVIDUAL SOCIAL MEDIA AND ECOMMERCE SITES) 

Google Ads now have several new updates, including blocking misspellings. 

Google’s new Merchant Center Next will soon be available for all users, if they haven’t already been invited. Supplemental feeds are now (or soon will be) allowed there. 

STATS, DATA, TRACKING 

Google Search Console users can now add their shipping and return info to Google search through the Console itself. This is useful for sites that do not pay for Google Ads or use Google’s free shopping ads. 

BUSINESS & CONSUMER TRENDS, STATS & REPORTS; SOCIOLOGY & PSYCHOLOGY, CUSTOMER SERVICE 

The second part of this Whiteboard Friday [video with transcript] discusses how consumer behaviour is changing during tight economic times. “People are still spending. They just want the most for their money. Also, the consideration phase is much more complex and longer.” The remainder of the piece discusses how to approach your target market during these times. 

Prime Day was supposedly the best ever for Amazon, but they didn’t release any numbers. Adobe Analytics tracked US ecommerce sales on those days and provides some insight. “Buy-now, pay-later accounted for 7.6% of all orders, a 16.4% year-over-year increase.”

MISCELLANEOUS

You know how I always tell small business owners to have multiple revenue streams? Tech needs to have multiple providers and backups as well, as the recent CrowdStrike and Microsoft issues demonstrate. 

If you used Google’s old URL shortener anywhere, those links will no longer redirect as of August 25 2024.