State of the Cafe, Year Eight

[Nightflyer]

It was quite a few years ago, six or seven I think?

[RAvery]

@Nightflyer

It was quite a few years ago, six or seven I think?

Oh. Perhaps I forgot about it.

[MerelyGifted]

Now I think about it, his are the ones I most often can’t get thru, and sometimes feel more angry than after watching others’ vids. I’ll unsub.

[LockeCJ]

@DukeTrout

I had to mute BTC. He’s way to clickbaity.

He has a secondary channel which has less sensational headlines. Same content otherwise. For example:

Main Channel:
Nancy Mace LOSES IT with UNHINGED public meltdown

Nancy Mace LOSES IT with UNHINGED public meltdown

Secondary channel:
Nancy Mace records herself verbally accosting constituent

Nancy Mace records herself verbally accosting constituent

[blondie]

[tinoesroho]

@LockeCJ

20k+ pageviews in a single day is still high, even for that. If they were bots, then I would expect those numbers to show under logged in pageviews instead. The logged in counts during those spikes is not out of line with the other days around them, so there’s not a similar increase in traffic, which is part of why those days stand out so much on the graph. That said, I’m not familiar enough with how the games were being run to be able to definitively rule it out either. I would defer to @tinoesroho’s expertise there.

eyyyy! sorry for the belated login. it’s been a very busy year so far.

re: the big traffic spike, this would have been around the time of OpenAI, Facebook, and Perplexity’s Big Fuckin’ Crawl, the very last time they scraped every website indiscriminately when building their large language models. these days, crawls are… more selective. (and who needs crawls when you can just… pirate every single book ever put to archive?)

@ficuswhisperer

I recall that we as a community discussed something like this early on, and I think the idea was eventually abandoned. It wouldn’t be hard from a logistical level to have a #boing like area that has topic restriction limited to a set of writers, but I don’t personally feel that something like that really fits with the site’s ethos and purpose. If someone wants to write long-form stuff, anybody is free to do this and tag it appropriately.

we’re not big but we’re small! everything here’s a bit of a do-ocracy! i haven’t uh been doing much around the place (i still have perms back from when we were moving fast and weaving culture) since 2020, which is when I posted my last syndicated blogs to squinter and [scratches head] the joint blog the kinjaverse created. not this one. no, not that one. not that one, either. yeah, that’s the one. deadsplinter. i think.
what can i say? life happens.

lotta wild stuff a person can do with discourse threads, i think? it’s possible for users to make their own post a wiki, which could act as a homepage if they so wanted? while bumping the old contents of the main post to a reply. i do get the desire for simplicity and for a… curated experience. big-ass internet and sometimes it feels like the board is just as big and fast-moving.

well, here’s a little bit of curation. a curiosity. a wonder:

Posthumous Composition Being Performed By The Composer

would you believe this isn’t the only currently ongoing post-humous art performance by human cells removed from their host?

[OWYAC]

Hello, fellow former kinjateer. I was active on Jez, GroupThink that was (and now is, that you linked to), BalkTalk (also reconstituted on Blogger), i09 and Observation Deck.

[FSogol]

[Nightflyer]

I hung out a lot on Io9, Jezebel, and the AVClub… or I used to, before the Herb wrecked the place. I never got out of the Grays (n00b commenter mode) on Kinja, their commenting system, whuch had to be one of the worst examples of web comment software (??) I’ve ever seen in my decades of surfing the web. Seriously, BBCode was better than Kinja, and Discourse is a huge step above BBCode.

[OWYAC]

Oh yes, all the kinja malfunction gifs;

[kxkvi]

I went to a concert by Alvin Lucier in college. The piece I remember most was a pure sound beating in the room, and him moving a small microphone back and forth to demonstrate the peaks and valleys of interference. To us engineers it was pretty cool.

[Grey_Devil]

I tend to avoid topics that are just going to bum me out. I kept up a little bit with the Elon Musk one and some other ones but the constant stream of unpleasantness does not agree with my mental health.

[MerelyGifted]

There are a coupla threads on whomst I occ post, but must avoid reading for too long.

I tell yt I’m not interested in a lot of the political stuff, and tell it I’d already watched it. I assume “I don’t like it,” would make the channels disappear after a while. I don’t want the good channels to be gone from my reccos, I just want it down to a duller roar, and sure as Heaven don’t wanna miss any good news.

[ficuswhisperer]

@Nightflyer

I never got out of the Grays (n00b commenter mode) on Kinja, their commenting system, whuch had to be one of the worst examples of web comment software (??) I’ve ever seen in my decades of surfing the web

It was seriously bad. It was like a commenting system designed by someone who hates commenting systems. It was like it was meant to stifle engagement rather than encourage it.

[OWYAC]

Still better that TOP after the move to substack, though.

[Grey_Devil]

@OWYAC

Still better that TOP after the move to substack, though.

Things i’d rather not remember for 500 Alex.

[LockeCJ]

@Grey_Devil

Things i’d rather not remember for 500 Alex.

Now I want to know what the other four were.

[DaakSyde]

We also had a GURPS Banestorm game that ran for about a year at the very start. That was a lot of fun.

[Millie_Fink]

I imagine a certain ball that was neither happy nor fun is one of them.

[Nightflyer]

I missed that one, or I forgot it. Thank you!