If 24 Hour Fitness won't let you unsubscribe from marketing spam, big email providers like gmail should automatically mark all of their emails as spam by default until they fix it.

The default experience probably sucks, but I aggressively block anything even mildly annoying on my Facebook newsfeed, and I like what's left:

Mostly Simpsons memes, Seinfeld memes, Pro Wrestling memes, Sopranos memes, and then intersections of those memes (Seinfeld Pro Wrestling, Simpsons Pro Wrestling, etc.). Some nerd shit. Stuff from the handful of friends of mine and local groups I interact with who still post on Facebook. Maybe <1% total garbage like what the article describes but I immediately block any groups or users who post anything even slightly annoying. I almost never watch any video content at all. It's unironically better passive content than anywhere else left on the web, probably because all the people trying to be hip have gone somewhere else lol

However whatever their UI is sluggish as hell and I'm surprised this wasn't discussed. You'll click block user/group and it will respond multiple seconds later (on my symmetric 1Gbps FIOS connection) and UI elements will jump around. FB messenger is slow as shit and occasionally will fail to decrypt/load messages entirely, even though it works fine on my phone (don't have regular FB on my phone so can't make that comparison). There's an anti-performance cargo-cult among web devs. Perhaps their metrics only show what it saves them on server costs. But if I did not already use the site it would be impossible to convince me to start.

A friend of mine says he was convinced by https://xkcd.com/1732/

It's not rose-tinted glasses IMO. Aside from cross-device continuous chats (which weren't really relevant at the time) and maybe being harder to send pics (can't recall), Adium was a far better messaging experience than anything modern.

* You could theme it however you wanted to an obscene amount. I had it display all messages right after each other in a small font without any linebreaks and I've never been able to have anything like that since then.

* The dock icon showed the names of the last few people who sent you unread messages

* It integrated with the OS X phone book app so you could it would display a single "John Smith" regardless of how many chat apps (AIM, MSN, Yahoo, etc.) you had them on

* It was actually smooth and not clunky (unlike Pidgin at the time and maybe half of apps today).

I used Kopete with inline videos and a newspaper-like theme. It was amazing and beautiful. That under 256MB of RAM. Nowadays you would need 2GB to do the same.

That sounds about right. I've never used Kopete myself but the KDE team always puts out good work for OSS UIs

And bear in mind KDE3 was considered the bloated DE, as XFCE (even the GTK2 build) could snappily run with 64 MB of RAM and maybe less with a light GTK engine (yes, choosing the GTK2 engine mattered a lot back in the day).

And, yes, choosing Pidgin and a light window manager such as Fluxbox/Openbox could make run machine run well with 64MB at really fast speeds.

It's even easier to just not do it at all

They hate infinite scrolling because it's addictive. I hate infinite scrolling because it's annoying lol. The worst is when you scroll to the bottom of a news article and it just loads another and your scrollbar and your URL/browser history get fucked up.

Anecdotally, my physical therapist (far more connected to the cultural zeitgeist than I am) brought up the ad yesterday and talked about how creepy it was.

I talk to three people on Discord. If I have to choose between A) giving Discord my ID, B) giving Discord a fraudulent ID, or C) just chatting with them on some other program, I'll just go with C. If I cared about Discord more I guess I'd figure out B. May get started with C ahead of time anyway.

If all you use Discord for is chatting with 3 people, these changes will have zero impact on you and your daily usage. You wont ever see an ID prompt.

It will impact me since I've decided to go with plan C ahead of time. Hard to keep track of everything every company does, but I'd rather not use a service that is unnecessarily aggregating facial scans + IDs of its users.

You don't have to make excuses for corporate decisions that damage user privacy.

What am I missing? According to this, the only difference is you get a warning popup when someone new DMs you, right? And they can't send you images flagged as porn?

How does this impact you in any way?

I'm generally opposed to services unnecessarily wanting IDs, content filtering for direct messages from my contacts, unwanted popups (it's already annoying when my friends send me a link to a site I haven't visited from discord before and it "warns" me and you cannot disable this entirely useless popups), and things generally becoming worse.

A lot of these things are normalized already, but requiring IDs is not and I don't want to see it become normalized.

Ultimately, they are free to do what they like (or perhaps being unnecessarily pressured by various govts) and I am free to leave the service.

They're saying there's a very good chance that, in your use case, you still won't be asked to provide ID.

This is correct. I'm a UK Discord user, so I've been subject to these requirements for ~6 months now. It's basically nothing - I'm in near 50 "servers", of them all I only really can think of one channel in one of them that is flagged "nsfw" and thus blocked to me as I never ID'd myself.

If you don't use Discord as a source of "nsfw" content you can comfortably ignore these requirements. I do realize there are some communities that may fare a lot worse than my gaming / software dev interests, and may be falsely claimed "nsfw" just for their existence. Which yeah, that absolutely sucks.

Whether I have to provide ID myself or not, I prefer to live in a world where when a company even announces that they plan to do facial scanning, they lose most of their customers. Hard to keep track of everything every company is doing of course, but I will try to migrate off of Discord ASAP.

I don't disagree with that, personally.

What if you RAID01 it, so you have four safety deposit boxes, two with the first half of your password, two with the second half of your password? Then no snoop at a particular bank would be able to get your password, but also if one or two go missing, the password won't be lost. And you just check all four boxes once or twice a year to make sure everything is good.

Better do Shamir's Secret Sharing instead, set threshold to 2/4, and regenerate all parts if any part goes missing.

The funny thing is SAAS frequently provides less value because of automatic updates. If your toilet could change its shape at a moment's notice because of some study on a sample of people who are entirely unlike you or even just because some random PM wanted a promotion, and you could not stop it from doing so, it would be incredibly obvious how bad that was. Yet many people in the software field try to convince users that mandatory automatic updates on their devices are a good thing.

... If there were an ever-evolving landscape of awful things crawling up out of my sewer through my toilet, I would very much want to pay for automated toilet updates to prevent the most recent awful crawling horror from appearing in my bathroom.

If the people who produced toilets ACTUALLY cared about stopping the ever-evolving landscape of awful things, they could:

A. Release security updates independently from feature updates

B. Stop adding random features that hook you up to more unwanted landscapes, or landscapes at all (software that could run entirely locally without network access but have network access anyway, updates that force ads, the updater itself, etc.)

but they don't because that's not the actual reason they have automatic updates.