Rant🗣

Give me an E.V.; spare me the software updates

Wife was asking me the other day, if I would be still willing to buy and drive around in a Tesla, after what Elon has been doing at Twitter. And my answer was simple: I was not willing to buy a Tesla *before* Twitter 2.0 happened (after having considered it seriously and nearly hitting the…

vpalepu

December 1, 2022
Comic book heroes and their dead dads — Part 2

In a previous iteration, I realized how the fathers, or father figures, or parents of most comic book heroes end up dead. And went about listing them. After speaking with my wife about it, I realized that the list did not include some notable instances. So here I am, with a follow up list. Mufasa,…

vpalepu

November 28, 2022
Dads of most comic book heroes end up dead

Dads of most comic book heroes end up dead. This is a pretty grim take, even for me. But once I started making a mental list, it was hard to not pen it down. Consider… Batman’s Dad (and Mom) die. That is his origin story. Superman’s Dad (Jor-El) and adopted Dad (Jonathan Kent) die. That…

vpalepu

November 28, 2022
Go on, tell me how “kids fall ill all the time.”

There is a common quip I have been hearing all too often from friends and family nowadays: “Don’t worry! Kids fall ill all the time!” I have run out of patience for this nonsense, because here’s the thing: kids do fall ill (or sick) all the time, but not all kids at the same time…

vpalepu

November 21, 2022
Twitter needs a paywall

… so that I can stop opening it. 🤣🤣🤣🤣 It also needs that $8 paywall, to die as a business. It is a sure-shot way to drive down engagement on the platform and Elon, the white South African, will realize this soon enough. There are not enough $8/mo social-media users out there to sustain the…

vpalepu

November 20, 2022
As predicted, Elon brings back Trump to boost Twitter’s DAU/engagement

I suppose the writing was on the wall. But I never imagined that it would be this blatant and transparent. I figured he would wait till FIFA getting over. What was I thinking? But this is a net positive move for Twitter, if its infrastructure survives the next month. And that’s not necessarily a big…

vpalepu

November 19, 2022
Prediction: Elon boosts Twitter’s DAU by bringing back Trump

I mean, what else can he do to kick up the numbers here? The advertisers are fleeing. And even if the site’s most active users continue, you need to kick up the usage to stratospheric levels to throw a serious bone to those advertisers… all to get them back. He is already hoping to do…

vpalepu

November 19, 2022
post.news: Pay-for-read, News-centric Social Network

Who knows if this will work. But this is the closest that any platform may have gotten to helping journalistic organizations monetize (written) content on social media – at scale. post.news seems to be on a useful mission. But like all things in social tech, it will come down to how the crowd uses this…

vpalepu

November 19, 2022
Free speech means you host content that you cannot monetize?

Elon continues to prove himself to be an idiot everyday. But this freedom of speech vs reach is just about as stupid an idea that I have ever seen. Let’s assume that you have some magical way to filter out content that is objectionable based on an impartial billionaire’s whimsical definition of “objectionable”. Assuming you…

vpalepu

November 18, 2022
Is federation the future of every (social) tech platform?

I am not sure if humanity should adopt federation of every service on the internet. I am wondering, if humanity will. Consider what would have happened if there was federation from the get-go: we would not need to make different social media accounts on different platforms, because a Facebook account would have been able to…

vpalepu

November 7, 2022